My mother hates goatees. She also hates it when people whistle or wear their shoes in the house, but neither of those are as inherently cool as being able to grow a goatee. There is something very manly, and magical, about being able to make hair spring from your face, only to tame this hedge of testosterone into societally acceptable shapes.

My father explained once that she thinks goatees make people look satanic, and that's why he was never allowed to wear one, which, in some ways is true when you think about it. Take assholes for instance. Not literal assholes, but people who are dicks. Eighty percent of assholes have goatees but not all people who wear goatees are assholes. It's like a ven diagram where "goatee wearers" is a large circle and "assholes (not literal assholes but people who are dicks)" is a much smaller, but still substantial, circle nestled in the larger one. By this same train of logic I think it is safe to assume that a large number of assholes end up in hell, so that if we drew another ven diagram there would be a large circle that we would call "people in hell," and an almost equally large circle within it called "people with goatees." Those who comprise the first circle and avoided the second one would fall into a third camp we could label "George Bush's Whitehouse."

Rob and I recently agreed that we would both go into work after a long weekend wearing Elizabethan goatees as a tribute to Shakespeare and the body of work that we are trying to revitalize. It was kind of like a suicide pact, but instead of having to physically kill ourselves after listening to an evening of emo rock music, we would just die from a mutually shared humiliation. He backed out. When I woke up this morning he was standing there, clean shaven, shiny and smooth. I was the asshole left standing there like the first one in a relationship to say "I love you."

"You shaved!"

"Yeah."

"You weren't supposed to shave, you were supposed to grow a goatee!"

"Yeah, well, I didn't want people commenting on how yours looked great and how my face just looked dirty."

To set the record straight, despite being Asian, he grows a better goatee than I ever could. My hair grows in all the wrong places, and there are dual bald patches on either side of the corners of my mouth where even rogue hairs refuse to grow. It's a no man's land of hair follicles. Whereas Rob can not only grow an awesome fu-manchu, but some killer burns to boot (beards tend to be his white unicorn of facial hair). So, as you can see, he was completely unfounded in his claims. The bottom line is that he backed out. He let me pull the trigger, and then he hesitated just long enough to realize life was worth living and turned the other (hairless) cheek.

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