From a newsgroup post dated February 17, 2011:<\/i><\/p>\n
I have a beard, as anyone who’s met me or seen my picture probably knows. I’ve had it a long, long time.<\/p>\n
I started out with just a mustache — and when I say “started out,” I mean I have literally never shaved my upper lip (though it was once, and only once, shaved for me), so by the time I graduated from high school I had a mustache.<\/p>\n
That was 1972.<\/p>\n
I got kicked out of Princeton in February, 1974, and that was when I grew a beard — a Van Dyke.<\/p>\n
Then when I dropped out in 1977, I stopped shaving entirely and grew a full beard. I eventually started shaving again when my neck got excessively fuzzy, but I still have a full beard, and except for two brief interruptions I’ve had it since 1977.<\/p>\n
I used to have long hair. I started growing it out in 1969. It got cut back somewhat a couple of times, but basically stayed long until 1984, when I cut it for my youngest sister’s wedding, and so Kyrith, who was then a baby, would stop grabbing and pulling it.<\/p>\n
I kept it short for a few years, and honestly, I don’t remember exactly when I grew it back out, but it was long (below my shoulders) through most of the 1990s and well into the 21st century. In 2008, though — I think it was 2008, might have been a year or two earlier — I saw a picture of the back of my head and realized I had a bald spot, and that, combined with the long hair, had me looking uncomfortably like Riff Raff from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” So that October I cut it short, and it’s been fairly short ever since.<\/p>\n
There were other variations along the way, such as color, but we won’t go into that right now — the basics, long hair and full beard, were pretty much as described above.<\/p>\n
And here’s the weird thing: People don’t see this.<\/p>\n
The first time I encountered this was when I was readmitted to Princeton in the fall of 1975. People who hadn’t seen me since February of ’74 got to see me with my new beard.<\/p>\n
Some people didn’t notice. Some saw that there was something different about me, but couldn’t place it exactly. The strangest was the girl who exclaimed, “You cut your hair!”<\/p>\n
I pointed out that no, I hadn’t, my hair was still halfway down my back, but I’d grown a beard. She stared and said, “Didn’t you always<\/i> have a beard?”<\/p>\n
I never did convince her that I hadn’t.<\/p>\n
Then at my sister’s wedding in 1984, nobody noticed that I had cut my hair, that it was at least<\/i> eight inches shorter than before. I mean, nobody<\/i> noticed. No one. When I finally mentioned it to someone, he asked, “Didn’t you cut it back in 1972?”<\/p>\n
He’d seen me several times between 1972 and 1984. It was long every time.<\/p>\n
I mentioned two interruptions in my beard. One of them was when I sold my beard to Gillette, for research, and there aren’t any odd stories about that, but the other one, well, one morning I just decided to experiment, and shaved half of it off, trimming it back down to the old Van Dyke.<\/p>\n
No one noticed. It was like the wedding, except that this time even my own kids<\/i> didn’t notice anything. So I grew the full beard back, because why bother maintaining the trim if nobody notices?<\/p>\n
And I bring this all up now because at Capricon this past weekend, someone I hadn’t seen for a few years saw me and exclaimed, “You grew a beard!”<\/p>\n
She had never, ever seen me without<\/i> a full beard. The actual difference was that I’d cut my hair since she last saw me. Well, that, and I’ve gone mostly gray.<\/p>\n
But she saw a difference, and somehow that became I’d grown a beard.<\/p>\n
I find this phenomenon baffling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From a newsgroup post dated February 17, 2011: I have a beard, as anyone who’s met me or seen my picture probably knows. I’ve had it a long, long time. I started out with just a mustache — and when I say “started out,” I mean I have literally never shaved my upper lip (though… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generalities-rants","category-strange-days"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1058"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1059,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions\/1059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}