Tag: November

To Shave or Not To Shave

To Shave or Not To Shave

I’ve been bumbling around most of the day trying to figure out what I should write my daily post about. Unfortunately, a steady diet of homework and chores doesn’t make for a particularly exciting topic of discussion.

So I’m just going to take the route of a thought experiment, debating something I’ve been considering over the past few days over text. Maybe that could help me decide on what to do — or maybe I’ll get some helpful input from my wonderful audience.

That’s a shot in the dark I know, but it’s a shot I’m willing to take.

Ever since I shaved at the beginning of the semester, I’ve had considerations running back-and-forth in my subconscious mind on whether I should grow my beard back or not.

If I keep shaving, I keep a more youthful, exuberant look. As exuberant as I can look, at least.

Clean-shaven baby face Jason is an easier look to manage to an extent, as letting my beard grow out too far always left it looking scraggy and unkempt. Plus my beard came in patchy the first time around and that never went away.

I honestly prefer the more even appearance to a patchy beard, where a lot of emphasis was drawn to my much less hairy double chin. To be fair I’ve been working on that, and I’d hope the exercise is doing its magic… But personally I only see slow progress at best.

However, growing out a beard comes with its own advantages. For instance it looks a bit more mature.

I assume.

Not sure if my beard made me look more mature, but in general I’ll just go with that. There’s some internal debate as to whether I prefer the youthful look to the mature look, so I’m not confident on which side of the fence that argument lies.

I am somewhat more confident that I feel a little more confident with the beard, however. Ever since I started shaving, contrary to what was my belief, I seem to be breaking out more and more. One nasty little pimple repeatedly replaced by another, with smaller patches of acne throughout…

It’s kind of frustrating considering how much work I try to put in to clear it all up. I don’t know that having a beard would solve the issue necessarily, but it may very well cover it up better.

Would I have better chance with the currently undiscussed, mysterious girl who I have my eyes on right now if I had a covered face? Who knows.

I certainly don’t. But I’m terrible with girls, so I’m not sure I can take my own internal dialogue there seriously.

A beard is also somewhat easier to maintain than being clean-shaven, just in different respects. Rather than having to take a razor to my face every other day in the hopes of holding back the tide of stubble that threatens to become more visible with each passing hour, all I’d need to really worry about is edging the beard and keeping it from growing unruly.

Plus it’s low key very relaxing to sit around and run a comb through your beard. Don’t know how many of you have experience with that, but it’s true.

So that’s about where I am right now. Do I keep clean-shaven, wasting more time every other day and risking more visible cuts/acne? Or do I let my beard grow out again, try to appear more my age and have something kinda fun to play with/maintain?

The only reason I’m coming to this debate in any significant capacity is because November fast approaches. When I first grew my beard out it was for a No Shave November competition at the Daily Titan, and I’m not sure whether I want to once again make that the catalyst for a bushy beard beginning.

I guess if you have an opinion, let me know somewhere on the ol’ Internet here.

But if not, I’ll just be here stewing in a pot of my own contradictory thoughts and insecurities. While writing essays and such.

My favorite place to be.

My current hiatus and updated article archive

From the state of this blog currently, I imagine some of you think that I totally dropped off the grid and lost my way in the world of Pokémon, never to return to this mortal realm.

That’s not totally inaccurate, honestly.

However, Ultra Moon isn’t the only thing that’s been taking up my time. Yeah, I have been spending extra time carefully combing through it than usual, absorbing everything that’s different from the original games (something I’m sure I’ll talk about eventually), but my Thanksgiving Break had a good amount more to it.

  • I cleaned my room for the first time since the summer, which was a great personal accomplishment. It seriously needed it.
  • I got ahead on a bunch of assignment for school, including a video project I had to come to campus to work on despite it being a week off.
  • I had a lovely Thanksgiving feast at my Aunt’s house, along with a few of their family friends (including a particularly interesting Egyptian man who had to escape as a refugee during the Arab Spring crisis, super cool guy).

There were also a few things I’m sure, but honestly those were the major highlights I can think of, since the rest was relaxing and catching up on some much needed sleep.

One thing I didn’t do that I had wanted to was write a few personal or more fun things here on my blog. I’ve been sitting on an idea for a Duel Links topic that’s been mulling over in my head for a few months, there’s some stuff for Gladeo and my work with Boom I’ve wanted to update for a long time and I figure it might be fun to do a ‘what I want for the holidays’ list given that Hannukah starts on Dec. 12 this year.

But I just never got around to it. Unfortunately, I might not have that much time to get to it in the near future either, since these last two weeks of the semester are going to be rather hectic with projects and exams. So, I at least wanted to put out something quick now to mention that things are probably going to be quiet for a bit.

… Unless I publish a story, of course. Or wind up having a 3 a.m. Fire Emblem Heroes binge again, which may end up happening soon with some big things on the horizon there.

Speaking of publishing stories, I actually wound up writing three articles just before Thanksgiving Break began. I meant to write something talking about it earlier, but like I said… Being lazy and forgetful came along with my relaxation.

Figured at the very least I should give the articles a little lightning round now in case anyone is curious:

  1. My friends at Project Rebound invited me to a luncheon celebrating a new donor and bringing in the holiday spirit after I started working on my multimedia class final profile on the program director, Romarilyn. It was a nice little event that I wound up writing about because we needed the space filled. You can check that article out here.
  2. On the same night that I wrote about Project Rebound, there was a four-car collision outside of the College Park building. I was the only news desk representative in the room, so I was sent out to cover it. It didn’t wind up being a super weighty story, but we got comments from the police so it was something. At the very least, it was an interesting experience doing two deadline stories in one night. You can check that article out here.
  3. The day after writing the last two articles, we got an email from Chief Communications Officer Jeffrey Cook letting us know that the school had tallied up how much Milo Yiannopoulos’ visit cost them through things like security. I talked with him and University Police Captain Scot Willey to find out exactly how it all broke down and wrote up a nice, meaty little story about it that night. However, I wasn’t done yet, as I still wanted to get comments from the Vice President of Administration and Finance Danny Kim (since he was the guy every other source pointed me to). I managed to get in touch with him, so we updated that article the Friday before break with more detail. I even got my hands on his personal number for future use and found out that his office really liked the original article I wrote. Felt really good, honestly. You can check out that article here.

As usual, if you want to see my full archive of work for the Titan, you can look over on the right.

For now, I’m going to go back to work, since we’re on our first post-break deadline. Like I said, I just wanted to basically let the world know that I might not be all too active for the next couple weeks.

If anything, you can maybe check out my Twitter for a little more activity. I’ve been trying to do more there, and recently that’s included doing some Pokémon posts as I make my way through the game. So, you can see such gems as:

And:

Maybe that sort of thing strikes your fancy, but if not I swear I’ll be back on a more active post schedule come Winter Break with some hopefully interesting content. Probably.