Hereditary ho-hum: I can’t grow a beard to save my life
They say heredity can be a credit as well as a curse. I believe it. For example, I inherited a large amount of my father’s famous luck, which has been getting me out of financial scrapes and sports injuries ever since I was born.
But I’m also cursed. I have been trying, off and on, to grow a beard for the last two years, with a pathetic lack of success.
It’s not that I’ve forgotten to stop shaving. Usually it’s the other way around.
It isn’t that I have a problem growing hair in general, because, as everyone who knows me can vouch for, I have a unibrow.
No, the trouble is that my genes are getting in the way.
None of the men in the Post family can grow beards. My grandfather, Edward Post, never a beard and never attempted to grow one, because it was futile.
My father, Timothy Post, at my mother’s urging, once attempted to grow a beard. It reached about three-eighths of an inch and stopped short. Dad looked like a homeless person who’d just come off of a two-day drinking binge. He shaved the paltry thing off soon after.
And now it’s my turn. I can’t even get as far as Dad did. Those darn little hairs get to be about an eighth of an inch long and then just quit. It’s like they can’t be bothered to push themselves any farther out of my face. What a pack of loafers.
The hairs on my upper lip are even worse. They seem to abhor the sight of my nostrils, so they refuse to grow beneath them. If I stop shaving, I get two patches of hair on either side of my upper lip and not a single strand in the middle. It’s maddening.
As an added insult, my facial hair doesn’t even cover my whole face. Nowhere on my cheeks will you find hair growing, except for that mole. It stubbornly sticks to my chin, lower jaw and neck.
Not only does this make shaving a risky business, given my walnut-shaped Adam’s apple, but it makes me look even more ridiculous.
The final humiliation is that my facial hair takes ages to grow. I can go without shaving for three weeks and I’ll still look like a normal guy who hasn’t shaved in a day or two.
Other guys in my classes rub the stubble racing in on their cheeks and mutter sullenly, “I gotta shave again tonight.” In an attempt to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, I point to my pathetic pseudo-beard and say “Haven’t shaved since before Christmas break! How about them apples?”
I’m getting sick of my facial hairs’ lack of ambition. I keep telling them to make something of themselves, to get it together and grow like they mean it, like my scalp or my armpits.
But they just won’t listen. This means that I’ll never be able to get the Charles Manson look I’ve been trying for ever since I got to college, and that frustrates me still further.
I guess I’ll just have to settle for what I have. You’ve got to take the bad as well as the good with heredity. I just wish I’d inherited a little more Neanderthal.
Andrew is a senior studying mass communication.
Columnists' opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of The Spectrum