Mid-life Vanities

As my brother Doug neared his fortieth birthday, he got a bit vain about his appearance. Maybe it was a mid-life crisis or something, but he suddenly exhibited this unnatural behavior, aimed at making himself look younger and cooler. He began laying out in the sun every day to achieve a sort of tan, or at least a coloring of his skin, and before he went outside he doused his hair and beard with Sun-In, which gradually turned his brown hair blonder and blonder throughout the summer. Blonde hair, a blonde beard, and golden skin – that seemed to be the intended result of his uncharacteristic behavior. My family and I thought he was just nuts.

I’m thirty-eight now, and can feel forty fast approaching. I’m now getting vain about my appearance too, and from the outside, my attempts to look younger probably seem more than a little weird. I guess it started about a year ago, when I began shaving my head. I was already nearly bald, but by completely shaving my head, I changed overnight from a geeky bald guy to a semi-cool shaved-head guy. Shaved heads were sort of “in” then, and still are. In my imagination, I was on my way to becoming stylish and hip.

More recently, my vain attempts to look cool (I’ve been telling people my goal is to look “young and edgy”) have been cranked up a few notches. For one thing, I’ve explained to my wife, Molly, that I seriously want an earring in my left ear. I've thought about piercing my ear in the past, but now I finally feel that the time is right – I think I can pull off the "earring look" without coming across as a geek trying to look cool. Now, I figure, I’ll just be cool.

We really can’t afford the luxury of buying an ear piercing and new earring right now, so I’ll have to wait until Father’s Day for my earring fantasy to come true - you know, receive it as a gift. (I’ll keep you posted as that time nears.) In the meantime, there are other things I can do to look younger and cooler: for starters, I can maintain that “shaved head look” as best I can. A co-worker recently explained to me that he shaves his head every other day, and while I’m unwilling to shave that much, I can at least do it more often than I presently do. If your aim is to look like a young shaved-head guy (and not an older bald guy trying to look young), it doesn’t help to have five o’clock shadow around the back of your head.

And perhaps I should wear my glasses less and my contacts more; glasses make everyone look geeky.

Here’s where my mid-life vanity gets cranked still further: When I last shaved – on Thursday night, in preparation for a friend’s wedding – I chose to do something funky with my facial hair. (See pictures below.) I shaved the moustache portion of my old goatee, but left the hair on my chin untouched. I’ve seen this look successfully pulled-off by a number of younger guys, most recently and famously by Chris Daughtry, the edgy Alt Rocker on this season’s “American Idol.” Molly at first thought my new facial hair thing was too weird, and even labeled it “Abraham Lincoln,” but now she reports that she’s gotten used to it. I would've thought Molly of all people would like my hipper look; in the past, she’d always encouraged me to become more fashionable, by buying stylish clothes for me that I myself would never have chosen. So far, though, I don’t think she fully appreciates my newfound “coolness.”

My physical vanity continues. On Saturday afternoon, it was time to get ready for that wedding I mentioned. I showered, got dressed in a well-ironed white shirt and colorful tie, trimmed my nose hairs, trimmed the long hairs coming out of my ears (more on that later), removed my glasses, and put my contacts in. My current “cool” look was nearly perfect - save for the earring I won’t have until Father’s Day - but still something else was bothering me… my eyelashes. I was aware of the problem before, but it came into sharp focus when I took those pictures of myself below. I have exceptionally long eyelashes, particularly the bottom ones. (I think the lashes are made longer still by the prescription eye drops I take for glaucoma.) My long lashes make me look feminine, or like Malcolm McDowell in “A Clockwork Orange.” So I grabbed a pair of small scissors intended for cutting toenails, and made my lashes shorter. Yes, I cut my eyelashes… how vain is that!

“I’m losing hair where there’s supposed to be hair, and I’m growing hair where I don’t want it,” Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal) says in “City Slickers,” a great film about mid-life crises. You could blame most of my physical problems - the hair-related ones, anyway - on that male hormone, testosterone. Excessive amounts of testosterone have caused me to go gradually bald since I was nineteen; to have a hairy chest (a source of pride for me, but usually not appealing to the opposite sex); to grow nose hair; to grow long hairs from my ears, a problem only well rectified by electric nose hair trimmers; and – despite the ostensibly he-man traits of excessive testosterone and excessive hair – to grow womanly eyelashes. Except for my proud mane of chest hair, I’m working on all these problems, testosterone be damned.

Now if only I could get laser eye surgery to eliminate my need for glasses! Unfortunately, I think my glaucoma - a disease usually only beset upon the elderly - precludes eye surgery. Besides, it costs a lot.

All my vain attempts to look “cooler” may just be the early portents of a forthcoming mid-life crisis; as I get older, it’s becoming increasingly important to me to look younger and edgier. For now, I'll keep up the charade - I'll keep shaving my head, trimming my nose and ear hair, clipping my long bottom lashes, and keep that funky facial hair thing going. And on Father’s Day, I’ll get that earring.

“Have you ever had the feeling,” Mitch Robbins asks a co-worker, “That this is the best I’m ever gonna do, this is the best I’m ever gonna look, this is the best I’m ever gonna feel… and it ain’t that great?”

"Happy birthday," the co-worker replies - his only words of encouragement to mid-life crisis sufferer Mitch, who'd just turned thirty-nine.