Source: The Guardian
It never occurred to me until recently that No-Shave November isn’t just something fun that people can choose to do, like Talk Like A Pirate Day, but an actual organization that people can join and that raises money to treat and fight cancer. I always assumed it was a voluntary activity and I discovered how serious it really is when I went to check and see if it was still something people did. Now I feel guilty for never participating, although, for me, participating would have to mean donating some money to the cause. I have never been blessed with abundant, or even reasonable facial hair. Even if I did quit shaving for thirty days my face would be punctuated with dangly patches.
I don’t mind being baby-faced, though. I had a roommate in college who could walk twenty feet to the dorm bathroom, shave his cheeks and chin completely smooth, and have a five o’clock shadow by the time he got back to the room. I guess the only reason he even bothered to shave is in two days he would have turned into Alan Moore, but that’s another story.
What set me off on this line of thought was the discovery of the world’s oldest known sentence on a comb. The inscription says, “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard,” and from the louse and egg remnants still clinging to it after almost four-thousand years apparently it worked. And we also now know that cooties weren’t just invented on the playground but have been around a really long time.
Various historians have speculated about what, exactly, allowed our first ancestors to start building civilizations. Some think it was fire, others think it was the transition from a nomadic, hunter-gatherer way of life to an agricultural one. Some have even suggested underarm deodorant.
I think tools had something to do with it. Tools require instruction, not just for their making but for their use. Imagine looking at something as mundane as a comb and having no idea what it was for. And while grooming seems like it’s partly a matter of comfort it’s still important–it’s not something I’d call entirely voluntary.
Up here we have Movember where people can take pledges and grow moustaches to raise money for prostate cancer research. Ken usually participates and grows a “Lenny”, and it’s pretty hilarious. I’ll have to get him one of those combs!
Wait, does he grow a “Lenny” or a “Lemmy”? I hope it’s the latter.
Lemmy. Stupid autocorrect.
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I think people like you have helped build civilizations, Chris.
I think people like you helped build civilizations too, Ann, because you always emphasize working together, and what is civilization if not a collective?