28. Moustache!

28-1: The State of Things, From the Ear Down

I have a moustache.

I don’t know if I should be proud or ashamed, but let’s just say that if I were a bunch of doctors, it might have been said that ‘a bunch of doctors thought that it was impossible for me to grow a moustache’, so I’m actually sort of attached to the thing.

All this means, really, is that I spend a fair amount of time trying to decide what the best angle is for it to follow down from the cleft in my lip and what the proper distance should be between the bottom edge and the top of my lip. Though it is at all times a work in progress, the current state of assessment and reassessment has resulted in a thin—perhaps even tapering—affair, as if a caricature of something French, though it is either too thin, or to lightly colored, to look very dramatic or pointy.

Add to this my new rash of aggressive haircuts, and you have the reason why I'm not actively exposing anything too far above the ear in pictures.

At this point, I think that it’s necessary to point out that this is actually the sort of look that I was going for when I set out growing this moustache nearly two months ago. When Jecca and I were trying to give a name to this style while it was still in the stages of infancy back in Calcutta, she diagnosed it as a School Pictures look. At that time, though, the moustache was more wispy, and the look largely consisted of a children’s sweater vest featuring a fluffy gray dog leaning on a pink book worn over every shirt that I own, in addition to a denim hat with a too-short brim, which for some reason, had a label sewn onto it that read Reebok-INDIA-Nike, and I thought was hilarious.

In some ways, the current state of things might actually be considered a success: while it's now too hot to wear sweater vests, and the hat looks a little too Village People with a full moustache, it is true that I currently look a lot like I walked right out of my 9th Grade school picture.

Mostly, I suppose that I'm doing this because I can, as it ultimately really doesn't make much of a difference what I look like while travelling here—everyone is going to stare, one way or another. The philosophy behind the School Pictures look has more to do with trying to make people laugh whilst they stare, as long as they’re bothering to stare—a sort of ‘See, I'm in on the joke, too’ approach to things.

Yesterday, on the bus, someone told Louis that I looked like Leonardo Dicaprio, and though I know that this isn’t really true, it sort of makes it harder to shave it off—keeping in mind that I usually only garner comparisons to Robin Williams—though if I don't cut it now, I'm going to come home with a funniest tan line that anyone has ever seen.