Elbrecht

To shave… or not to shave.

Posted on December 1, 2012 by Elbrecht

To shave… or not to shave… That is the question.

[originally posted on December 1, 2012… re-posted in honor of Movember 2014]

When I was fourteen, I started sprouting facial hair. Not a ton, but enough that I would have looked like a haggard vagabond or garage band scrub if I hadn’t started shaving.

In the absence of someone else to provide instruction, my mother took me aside one day and attempted to provide instruction based on what she’d watched my grandfather do. {And what I experienced.}

1) Splash some water on your face… {splash!}

2) Lather up some shaving cream…

3) Apply generously {I look like Santa!}

4) Press the razor gently to your face

5) Glide it down the side {Nick!}

6) Puff out your cheek; press out your lip {I look like a squirrel}

7) Glide the razor against the grain {oh, that’s much better}

8) Repeat until you look good again

I have used these basic and quick rules for the past 18 years, most of which I have been clean shaven. When I started shaving my head 8 years ago to counteract my increased testosterone, I applied these rules again. That is also when I should have started buying stock in Gillette.

Despite the necessity to shave my head for vanity (and genetics) and shaving my face for posterity, there have been numerous times in the past 18 years when I’ve grown a beard, goatee, fu man chu, or other facial hair styles.

This month has been a first for me though, as I’ve been keeping my tightly cropped beard and allowed my mustache to grow, unchecked, for the first time. The results have been comical.

I’d be lying if I said this was the first facial hair disaster of my life. Usually, when I let it grow unchecked, it’s been as a inner psychological ploy. My thinking goes that if I let it grow, and start looking terrible, I can shave it off and get a nice ego boost when I look in the mirror and see my handsome self again.

Or I’ll let it grow when I’m preparing for a big exam and immediately afterwards, come home, lather up and glide that Gillette down my face in a hot shower. When I step out of the shower I look and feel like a new man.

A recent experience came 15 months ago when I didn’t shave for six weeks straight. {I did trim my neck, so I didn’t become one of those weird neck-beard guys, but I let the core of my beard grow unchecked.} That was, and still is, the longest I’ve gone without trimming or shaving.

I was in the midst of finishing the last semester of my second year of medical school and preparing for our comprehensive exam. My desire to keep the beard growing was three-fold:

1) The inner psychological ploy I already mentioned

2) The lack of time I wanted to put forth to anything other than crushing my exams

3) The desire to scare the living bejesus out of anyone who dared cross my path

After four weeks, I had finished the semester and was now preparing for the comprehensive exam. I decided to study in the classroom at the hospital I would be training at for the final two weeks. By this point, the picture on my student ID bore no resemblance to the vagabond I’d become. In it, I was clean shaven and without glasses. Now I was four weeks into a “get away from me” beard and wearing thick rimmed glasses.

Within five minutes of me showing up that first day, the security guard strolled over to me and said, “Excuse me sir, but this classroom is a restricted area. Only medical students are allowed to be here.”

She was holding a photocopied sheet and I could see that it had the students’ names and pictures on it. I pulled out my student ID and pointed at the sheet,

“That’s me. I’m on there. I’m Ean.”

She looked down at the sheet and then intently at the ID I held in my hand. A perplexed look came across her face.

“Sir, wait here for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

I watched her walk across the room and then saw my friend Clarie, who was sitting on the other side of the room, stop the security guard.

The guard motioned at me and then pointed at the sheet. Claire laughed and then appeared to plead my case for non-mistaken identity.

Over the next week, several more classmates would come to study in the classroom and echo the security guard’s exasperations. The beard was now spiraling out of control. But if they were concerned about my grooming habits or were worried that studying was stretching the limits of my sanity, they didn’t say.

I definitely splashed some water on my face, applied a copious amount of shaving cream, busted out a brand new razor, and made gentle, but vigorous strokes after that exam.

In college, I dabbled in some less mainstream facial styles, including a two week old handle-bar mustache. When I showed up to a research meeting with my Primary Investigator, she gasped.

“Oh my. What are you doing?”

“Um, what?” I replied.

“You don’t have a girlfriend do you?” Her insinuation was obvious.

“Have you been going to see the 3^rd graders (our research participants) looking like that?”

I winced.

“You have to shave for Monday. Stop scaring the kids, please.”

In the past few years, I have also used my facial hair as a barometer for a woman’s openness/tolerance of my eccentricities. If she can deal with one week’s worth of neatly cropped facial hair, then she is likely to enjoy a freshly shaven face too. The opposite is not necessarily true.

One evening this summer, I happened to be in the company of a lovely woman whom I had met with my now usual one week’s worth of growth.

In the moment, she pulled back for an instant and said, “Would you mind shaving?”

“No,” I instinctively replied.

“Good. Cause your beard is a little rough. I’m sure someone has told you that before, right?”

The next time I saw this woman I had shaved my one week’s worth down to two days growth. It was hardly noticeable.

“That’s what you consider shaving?” She intoned when I stepped off the train.

The next girl I dated after her didn’t bring it up once.

For the past year, my typical facial hair growth is closely cropped and shaved down to three or four day’s worth. The addition of the mustache, growing unchecked for three weeks, is definitely one of the worst styles I’ve had. It is quickly entering the upper echelon of awkwardness combined with panic-inducing fear when I talk to strangers.

No one at the hospital has dared comment on it.

I sent a picture of my mustache to some friends a week ago. Juice immediately made it the photo ID for me on his phone, replacing a picture of me wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, while adorning a top hat and dancing with a cane. Yeah, it’s that awkward.

I haven’t tried the clean-shaven approach on a daily basis for over a year. Perhaps when I get rid of this ghastly ‘stache, I’ll start that up again. Maybe that will prevent mid-make-out shaving requests?

To shave… or not to shave.

It’s No Bromance

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Elbrecht

[Originally published on February 7, 2009.]

—–

Two weeks ago I made the 45 minute trip to Logan Airport after work. I don’t usually make a habit of heading over to Logan on a Thursday, but on this night I was picking up my new roommate.

While I waited for his plane to land, I hung out at the baggage claim with the security guards and watched inane YouTube videos on my cell phone. When the baggage started rumbling out onto the conveyor belt, I knew it would be only a few moments before my new roommate would stumble out into the unsecured baggage area. Upon seeing him, I was immediately second guessing my willingness to bring him into my home.

—–

Clad in black cowboy boots, a pair of Wrangler jeans, a crisp white t-shirt, and a Penrose drain collecting pus in a bag attached to his right hip, I shrugged my shoulders at his appearance. If I didn’t share a significant part of my DNA with this walking contradiction, I would have slowly backed my way out of the baggage area, hailed a cab, and hoped that he had forgotten the address to my house.

[Note: He’s been to my house for dinner and to do laundry on occasion, so the likelihood that he wouldn’t have been able to find the place is somewhere between slim and none.]

Instead of turning around and looking for the nearest exit, I jumped from my seat, and proceeded to meet him at the baggage conveyor. I quickly made a smart-ass comment about the bag of pus protruding from underneath his white t-shirt, to which he mumbled something about punching me in the gut. Ah, brotherly love.

In case you haven’t figured it out, my new roommate is my younger brother, Will.

—–

Dumb people think he’s older than me because he’s taller, but that actually flies in the face of our modern understanding of genetics and human evolution. Obviously, most people didn’t bother to pay attention to those subtle points in high school biology.

After returning from schooling in the Far East and some recuperation in Kansas from a fistulated colon, my brother decided to fill the vacancy in my rented two-bedroom duplex. So rather than playing house with a beautiful woman, I was staring at my younger brother’s Penrose drain and wondering what sort of “bromance” I’d gotten myself in to.

My brother and I collected his two bags, weighing over 100 pounds combined, and headed out of Logan to catch the shuttle back to the T. Carrying a bag weighing over 50 pounds was unexpectedly more strenuous than I had imagined, so I suggested grabbing a cab instead. Will flashed a wad of crisp bills and agreed to pay for the cab fare back to Cambridge.

—–

After dropping off his bags at the house, we walked over to the nearby pub and grabbed some dinner. Once seated, we were serenaded by some horrific karaoke and proffered alcohol by some scantily clad drink girls. When offered a free shot, my brother replied, “My parole officer says I shouldn’t drink.” With a look of intense fear, she turned her head in my direction. I offered to take his and mine both. She quickly placed them on the table and back peddled towards the bar. His comment made me begin to re-think my mindset about this bromance.

When we returned home, we were met with the box spring mattress I’d left in the living room, a donation from some friends’ recent move. So Will and I’s task was to reunite it with the mattress upstairs, despite my previous attempts having determined that to be an impossibility.

Unfortunately, we could not manage to cajole it through the already existing crevice in the narrow stairway, so my brother had to settle that evening for the jumbo-size, double-thick, air mattress that I had inflated in his room.

[Note: The air mattress is his; he left it with me when he traveled to Beijing, so he was really sleeping on his own bed.]

—–

Being that school didn’t begin for my brother until the following Monday, I returned home from work on Friday evening to find him hanging out in front of the TV. In my seat. Having lived by myself for the previous 2.5 months, I found this intrusion into my space alarming.

[Note: The TV is his; so he was probably just having flash backs to his old apartment.]

I promptly seated myself to his left and laid down the law: when the captain is home, he sits in the captain’s chair. My brother raised an eyebrow, my charming analogy completely going over his head. Or being completely ignored. I decided not to push him out of my seat, as he would have likely landed on his drain and I didn’t want to be responsible for performing emergency surgery. Or possibly surgically removing his fist from my face.

—–

My brother and I last lived together seven years ago, the summer before my senior year of college. He had just finished his freshman year at Miami University and didn’t want to go home for the summer. The stories of debauchery I had shared from my previous summer in Oxford had obviously seduced him. And the prospect of heading back to Lexington, KY or Wichita, KS paled in comparison. In an act of what can only be described as self-sacrifice, I offered to forgo my personal space for the summer.

I lofted my bed so that he could use my futon as his bed. I cleared a corner of my room so that he could set up a desk for his computer. And then, he took full advantage.

—–

While I was working two jobs that summer, he worked 20 hours a week. When I left in the morning, he was there sleeping. When I came home from my first job in the middle of the afternoon, he was there computing. When I came home from my second job in the late evening, he was there eating/sleeping/computing or some combination thereof. My personal space was eliminated, my sanity challenged, and brotherly love was transformed into pure hatred.

—–

With Will sitting in “my chair” that Friday night, I began to consider the possibility that I had made the same mistake all over again. Only this time, I imagined I would wake up in the morning wanting to take a shower, but he’d have already used all the hot water. Or I’d come home from work and he’d be half-way through the movie I wanted to watch that night. Or I would be awoken early on a Saturday morning because he was vacuuming the stairs. I wasn’t excited by any of these scenarios, but I decided I could avoid them… by not pushing him out of the chair and instead pointing out to him that the “co-pilot” seat had just as good of a view of the TV.

With disaster narrowly averted in the first 24 hours of our bromance, the past two weeks have been relatively positive. Despite my flashbacks to that summer in Oxford we have managed to co-exist in a near stress-free environment. Of course, I’ve had to take on the big brother role a few times by letting him learn from his own mistakes rather than pointing them out beforehand. I thought it was the least I could do.

—–

The best example was our first trip to the grocery store. [Note: the grocery store is 2 miles on foot, so without a car for the last 2.5 months, I have gone through my own trial and error efforts in successfully transporting one week’s worth of food back to my house (2 hands = 2 fully loaded bags).]

I figured he should go through his own trial and error period, so when he offered to bring his fashionable grocery cart that is all the rage in the big city, I let him know I wouldn’t need it. He took that to mean he wouldn’t need it either. So he decided to buy two gallons of milk along with the rest of his groceries, brought one big bag rather than two, and therefore had to stop every 100 feet to readjust his grocery-carrying pose on the trip home. I only stopped at the intersections to make sure I wasn’t flattened by oblivious drivers. Lesson learned? We’ll see.

—–

On the whole though, it’s been a fairly fulfilling experience, and not just because he’s gone to Target twice to buy things I hadn’t bothered to replace when my ex moved out (toaster, dish-drying rack, silverware, paper towels, baking sheets, etc). It hadn’t taken him long to notice that the only room that was fully furnished in the house was my bedroom. So he offered up this gem: “Besides your room, it looks like someone is squatting in a vacant apartment.”

While our bromance might be a little unconventional, our genetic propensity to laugh at the same stupid people and lame jokes, our interest in cooking as a means of sustenance, and general approval of women dancing in night clubs, I think this could turn out to be the best roommate situation I’ve ever had…

—–

Unless you consider living with guys named Juice, Rusty, and Wacky Matt to be better than living as an adult with your own brother. Despite two years of college hi-jinks as a solid comparison, the current living situation is beginning to grow on me. However, that could change depending on the number of cold showers I take in the upcoming months, the number of times we go shopping together, or the first time he decides to do his laundry the night when I have run out of underwear and have somewhere to be.

Let the Good Times Roll

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Elbrecht

When Wade and Lindz tied the knot three years ago, The Black Eyed Peas “I gotta feeling” ended up being the theme song and inspiration for An Ode to Cincinnati. I wrote that story in honor of my friends in attendance and how my opinion of the Queen City, always adversarial in nature, had turned 180 degrees. The idea of living in Cincinnati had never appealed to me, despite so many close friends living there, but when I witnessed their joy as group that evening, living the lives they had imagined for themselves, I couldn’t help but have a change of heart.

Two weekends ago I found myself in Boston at another wedding and the theme from three years ago, “I gotta feeling”, was the second song of the evening. I was transported back to that night at Wade & Lindz’s wedding and remembered the joy of seeing so many friends in one place. When I returned from my momentary experiment with time travel, I realized I was among the second group of friends that had been incubated because of a lone friendship.

Gib, one of my freshman year roommates, had grown up in Cincinnati, only a stone’s throw from Oxford, Ohio where we learned the joys of life. Besides being a good buffer between our third roommate, Gib provided me the opportunity to meet his already existent group of friends from Cincy who had also found themselves in Oxford. Several of them had attended high school together or knew each other from the ‘burbs, but were quick to allow outsiders like me join their Band of Brothers. Fat, Wade, J-Dawg, Hoj, Cole, Zelch, and Hern were all there that evening three years ago, and I’d found myself among them because of Gib, a lynchpin of a man among men.

On this evening, I found myself in Boston because of the other lynchpin in my life, Juice. Over the course of my four years in college, I had progressively spread my wings and made random friendships, but Gib and Juice were the two branches that had provided me the most opportunities to meet new people. Juice was like Gib, another tall, lanky Ohio kid, but he hailed from Medina, in the upper eastern recess of Ohio.

And like Gib, he had a group of close friends, who while they didn’t join him in Oxford, were likely to visit at a moment’s notice. Juice was also accepting of me into his home on multiple occasions over the years, as Gib had been, where I quickly became a part of the Medina boys’ lives.

While that evening was a celebration of Beeker’s wedding, I was reunited with this second Band of Brothers from Medina: Riegans, Slaby, BillyJ, and Riiitz [Jinx, Daryl and my brother Will had also managed to finagle their way into this troupe by way of Juice]. Two groups of friends, tied together for me by two different lynchpins that I’d somehow been fortunate enough to cross paths with.

As “I gotta feeling” faded into “Gagnam style”, the parallels between these two groups slowly came to the forefront of my mind. While I may have been the lone common link between these two nights, I can’t help but see myself as an observer, rather than as an integral part of their stories. I’ve effortlessly floated amongst these two Bands, consisting of lawyers, physicians, engineers, accountants, chemists, and businessmen.

While each of us has managed to carve out our own lives, this night was in celebration of Beeker and Beekerette’s union, as Wade and Lindz’s night had been three years before. And each wedding brought together two distinct, yet somehow alike, groups of men.

Two Bands of Brothers, each celebrating one member’s nuptials, and like the days of our youth, letting the good times roll.

Beeker out in Boston

Posted on November 4, 2012 by Elbrecht

In honor of Beeker’s wedding yesterday, I’m re-posting this story, which was originally published on 11.16.2008. I’ve made a few improvements, but the content, and the spirit of Beeker, is intact. Enjoy. And congrats to Beeker and Beekerette.

A complete recap of last night’s debauchery is unnecessary to understand how the “Human Hurricane”, aka Beeker, came to leave me a text at 4:17PM today. It simply read, “I assume you made it home ok.”

While it’s not out of the ordinary for friends to be checking up on me after a night out, Beeker’s message struck me as the “pot calling the kettle black” after last night’s escapades. I’m guessing he roused himself from a restful slumber around 3:30 this afternoon and felt compelled to find out what the hell had happened.

Thankfully, I did make it home ok… arriving at 10:30 this morning after laying uncomfortably, in a state of fitful rest, on Beeker’s couch last night. Obviously, Beeker hadn’t remembered that he had ordered me to sleep there: “Bigs! Bigs! Go to sleep on the couch! Go to sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!”

It’s true, I have certainly had my fair share of black-out drunk evenings, a combination of dance-induced fatigue and too many Jack and Cokes. But I’m typically pretty mellow even in those cases. Beeker is not.

At around 1:45AM, Beeker, myself, three of Beeker’s doctor friends, and some guy who had a car, left Felt in Boston. The guy with the car, “Jimmy”, appeared to be sober enough to drive, as I peered at him through my J&C-colored glasses. And considering the prospect hailing a cab on a Friday night at 1:45A in Boston, I was confident in his ability to get us all back to Beeker’s in one piece.

Prior to Jimmy getting his vehicle out of the garage, Beeker had decided that he needed to urinate, badly… While the rest of the group was waiting outside the parking attendant’s shack, Beeker haphazardly ran across the street and disappeared down a dark alley.

When he hadn’t returned in two minutes, one of his colleagues asked me, “Do you think we should go look for him?”

I assured her that I’d seen him disappear down darker alleys in more dangerous places without a scratch on his head.

When Beeker returned, the six of us piled into Jimmy’s BMW. He slowly backed out of the parking space. Then he straightened the car towards the exit and pushed the accelerator to the floor. The car jolted forward, projecting my head into the back of the passenger’s seat, and we burned rubber through the parking garage, wheels screeching and stomachs churning. I quickly amended my confidence in Jimmy getting us home safely.

Jimmy slammed on the breaks with enough time to skid towards the parking gate and not burst through it, preventing the inevitable high speed chase where Jimmy would have abandoned his BMW on Storrow Drive and left four physicians and myself still clinging for dear life as the BPD raised their assault rifles and unleashed the attack dogs.

Thankfully, the only issue we had at the parking gate was that Jimmy had somehow managed to lose the ticket, but the woman working the gate was nice enough to let us leave without paying another $30. My confidence in Jimmy was now completely shot. But the idea of finding another way home didn’t enter my mind. I looked over at Beeker and he was none the wiser. His eyes were rolled into the back of his head and he nodded off, despite his female doctor friend, Suzie, beginning to moan about how she might throw up.

Somehow, I still felt that “Jimmy” was doing us a major favor by getting us home, despite my trepidation at him trying to drag race with other vehicles along the way.

Unfortunately, my fears were confirmed. “Jimmy” burned rubber around Boston Common and down Boylston Street, as if we were shooting a scene for Tokyo Drift. I frantically tried to find the seat belt, but with four of us jammed into the back seat, it was a hopeless endeavor. As I stared ahead, hoping to not see two headlights coming straight for us, it didn’t seem to me that we were even going in the right direction.

Jimmy whipped around a corner, saw the sign for the Kenmore T stop, jammed on the breaks, and wished us well. I was more than happy to have come to a stop and flung the door open like a POW fleeing a Vietnamese prison camp.

The T stops running in Boston at 12:30, but having survived the past three minutes, I was simply glad to have not become a quadriplegic. Beeker, having woken from his slumber, decided he would simply hail a cab, which, at 2AM, is as likely as finding a wad of $20 bills in your coat pocket.

But rather than standing on the sidewalk in front of Kenmore like any sane person, Beeker wandered into traffic and began screaming at cabs. Meanwhile, Suzie and her boyfriend discretely walked around the corner of the building so she could boot all over the pavement. As cab after cab whizzed by us with backseats full of drunken Bostonians, I was convinced we’d get back to Beeker’s around 4:30AM, only after begging some lost out-of-towner to give us a ride; or someone in a conversion van who insisted on having us call him Uncle Bob.

With Suzie still puking, and her boyfriend pleading, “why do you always have to drink so much when we go out?”, Beeker spotted a potentially vacant cab…

He unleashed a cry of the banshee, “Bigs, get over here… get over here now! Bigs, there is a cab! Get over here NOW!”

I glanced at Suzie and her boyfriend and jogged over to the cab. Beeker screeched, “Get in! Get in NOW!… close the door!” I reluctantly climbed in and shut the door. Beeker barked his address to the cabbie and I asked, “Why did we leave Suzie and her boyfriend… I thought she lives right by you?”

Beeker’s eyes widened. He slurred, “What are you talking about?” I informed him that they had been right around the corner waiting with us. He pathetically informed me that he hadn’t realized they were still there. It was painfully obvious that screaming at cabs had been his lone focus at the Kenmore T stop.

As we approached his house, I reached into my wallet and found it bone dry. I told Beeker that I had no cash to pay for the taxi, but he assured me that he was bankrolling our trip home: “Bigs, Bigs…I got it. Bigs. I got it. Bigs.”

When the cabbie dropped us off a block from Beeker’s house, I slid out the right back door and he the left. Beeker began to walk around the front of the cab. I looked at him and asked, “Did you pay the guy?”

He looked at me curiously at the same instant the cabbie rolled down his window and demanded money in a thick Eastern European accent.

After forking over a couple of 20’s, Beeker took off in a dead sprint towards his house. I slowly followed, owing to my completely full bladder. When I reached the the house, I could hear Beeker banging around in the kitchen, only to emerge with a bag of chips. His housemates were probably sitting up in bed hoping that whoever had just broke into the house only took the flat screen TV in the living room and didn’t come bursting through their doors. He added to the indiscretion by plopping down on the couch and blasting some movie at 125db.

He looked at me and screeched, “Bigs! Bigs! Go to sleep on the couch! Go to sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!”

So I stumbled out of the bathroom and took his advice, curling up on the couch with the movie blaring so loud as to penetrate my inner soul… but I ended up falling asleep anyways… and he ended up passed out in his room at some point in time later.

To say that the “Human Hurricane” had been in rare form would be a mischaracterization of my friend Beeker. But to my benefit, the safest part of a hurricane is the eye, and that’s exactly where I found myself last night.

Elbrecht's Corpuscle

My life… and words

Author: Elbrecht

To shave… or not to shave.

It’s No Bromance

Let the Good Times Roll

Beeker out in Boston