at 41 facial hair has become more than a reality. It is a daily battle. at 6 every morning I am taking the new razor my wife bought for me (five blades on this bad boy) and removing the growth from the past 24 hours, which these days is substantial. But that is not it. About once a week I have to do what I thought unthinkable a mere decade or so ago. I take my index finger of my left hand, place it on the tip of my nose, and push upward. Thus exposing the increasingly thick undergrowth so that it can be dealt with. I sometimes use tweezers (which brings tears to the eyes) or a specially designed head for my electric razor which does a good job of… roto-rooting. That doesn’t complete things though. The ears are about once a month (very similar treatment as the nose) and the eyebrows are about twice a week (they need trimmed in length and thinned out with tweezers- also painful). Why am I telling you all of this? Because, friends and neighbors, I got nuttin on the people I have seen this past week, and two out of three of them were female! A woman came to the office the other day and I kid you not, she had a beard. She didn’t have a few unsightly facial hairs, this chick had a BEARD! we are talking hair over an inch long and thick enough that any high school or college freshman boy would be totally geeked to sport it. It was very strange. Next I went to the bank and the teller, a woman in her late 40’s I presume, had nose hairs cropping out that seemed like a horse brush in each nostril (geesh lady, use your husbands trimmer already). But the cake was officially taken by a retired guy who works part time at our office. He came to me with a suggestion and, I am not making this up, he had eyebrow hairs growing out of his lower eyelids. Not the cheek beneith the eyelid, they eyelids themselves. Apparently his barber trims them because they were clearly cut at a uniform length but perhaps his eyes are not good enough to see them and get on the attack with a pair of tweezers. Or perhaps when you reach that age you just go “eh, who cares, let’s gross out the younger people.”