hair and nails . potential detritus removal

Something in me has been changing lately.

The other night for the first time I felt as though my beard didn’t belong.

And tonight my long fingernails seem strange to me for the first time.

Sure, they’ve seemed this way to other people for a long time, and I’ve heard a lot of crap about them both, not to mention my head hair, which has been bothering me in another way for a long time, but this is the first time they’ve ever seemed not right for me.

I don’t know what I’ll do about these feelings.

On one hand, it would be an easy matter to cut them off.

Fingernails, hair, these things grow and grow and grow, and most people just keep them cut off regularly, on a schedule or meeting a maximum length.

I have … not been doing this. I just let them grow and grow and I ignore them mostly. Two years, two months, and two weeks ago I had a shaved head and face, as I had had for a year before that. Then I just stopped shaving. Two months and two weeks ago I clipped all my nails off – that was the last time I cut the nails off my smallest fingers. About a month for the thumbs, and probably two or three weeks for the ring fingers, with just a week or 10 days for the index and middle fingers. I’ve only been cutting them off as they break and/or their symmetrical match breaks. (I’m a little neurotic in that while I don’t mind different fingernails on the same hand to be different lengths, I can’t stand the same fingernails on different hands to be different lengths.) And my beard and my head hair just haven’t been cut.

Now, due to frustrations with having a mustache, I have been shaving my lips just about every day for several months. Perhaps as long as since April of 2004. It’s hard for me to say, for sure. But I do shave a bit every day.

And I’ve been thinking of going back to shaving again. Or something.

But then … I’ve got two years “work” into this beard, this hair already. In another two or three years, my beard will begin to be “Dumbledore” or “Gandalf” length for the first time, assuming it doesn’t reach a maximum length before that. And that was sortof the only pseudo-goal I ever had with it. When I first stopped shaving and people asked me how long I was going to let it get I replied or thought “wizard length”. Except … I don’t think I’m really a “beard person” – I just happen to have one right now. And I don’t know about the head hair, except that I’m going bald up front anyway, and am daily reminded that I don’t like the look of the hair on that part of my head.

At the very least I may just begin to shave that oh-so-thinning part of my head hair at the front which causes me such frustration.

Or maybe I’ll spend the $ and get a “head blade” and go back to the Lex Luthor look. or …

what?

I don’t know.

On one hand I want to ask for your feedback, and on the other hand I’ve always wanted to decide for myself. It wasn’t a question before, I just didn’t care whether I had a beard or hair at all. Now I’m sortof used to them and sortof feeling like they don’t belong on me anymore. What do you think? Obviously strangers and people who know me well will be taken more into consideration than internet strangers, but tell me whether you know me or not.

What do you think I ought to do?