Everything Old Is Young Again

Mostly, my strange and terrifying face. I got a haircut early last week and then got bored on Thursday night and decided to shave. Never give a bored man a razor. I had no idea that trimming the fro and shaving the beard off (for the first time in ages) would take roughly ten years off my face. But nevertheless here we are. Granted, this picture even takes a couple days' stubble into account. I assure you, the baby-faced visage sported by yours truly on Friday was like I had gone back in time to high school and yet somehow remained a teacher. My students were unsure what to make of it.

When you make a big change in appearance, everyone notices. The roomies commented on my recent "expansion of face." My co-workers joked that I would be stopped for not wearing the school uniform. My girlfriend felt like she was somehow cheating on me. And after all of this, I have to say: I'm a little scared of my face. Since I've been able to grow facial hair, I've had something, whether it was the crap moustache from the Chapin days or the full beard I've been sporting recently. The only real exceptions have been when I was the youthful Sylvius in As You Like It four years ago and last Christmas when I shaved once and promptly decided that my face was scary and needed to be covered up again. I don't know why I didn't learn my lesson then, but I certainly have now. I need some serious facial hair and fast.

I also need the pain that is Regents Week to cease and desist as soon as humanly possible. I spent most of today running around like a madman while trying to prepare the lab component of the Earth Science Regents, which conspicuously lacked an answer sheet for the students to fill in. I had naïvely assumed that the answer sheet would be delivered with the test itself, but I was wrong. So after a two and a half hour delay during which time I was utilizing every resource I could think of and making as many other people stressed out as possible, I finally said, "Fuck 'em," and gave the test to the students with a blank piece of paper for them to fill in their answers.

Halfway through said test (of course) the answer sheets arrived by fax. The students who remained got to copy their answers down onto the official Regents Answer Sheet, while the rest of them will just have to wait. All this after I had ran around all morning setting up the bleeding lab in the first place. My room is a mess because the janitors are "cleaning," which seems to mean that all my shit has to be thrown all over the place so that they can get to the windows. I have grades due this week, but that's hardly going to get done at this rate, and on top of it all I'm still trying to buy a flipping apartment.

It's a good thing I'm so young now, because I'm going to need a lot of energy.