Movember: The End

1. Fair warning, socialites: the ankle weights are coming off. Movember is over and soon the 'stache will be, too.

I've spent a month going into every social interaction with the other person already believing I was a creep. I've been spotting my conversation partners seven points in a game to ten. I've gotten pretty good at digging myself out of a mustache-dug hole.

It's been a good training exercise. In a way it's liberating to be able to go into a conversation without wondering what the other person thinks of you. I know what they think of me: they think I'm a child-molesting pervert. All of I've got to change their mind is my wits and the moral high ground of doing it all for charity. I'll miss that moral high ground, but it doesn't come close to trumping the advantage of looking decent.

There is, however, the danger of a phantom mustache. A residue of paranoia, defensive behavior, and nervous tics that perpetuate all the disadvantages of the mustache proper.

I don't think that's happened though. It feels good to always be growing on people. Usually I have to wait much longer for that experience. [See below, graph of Nate's standard social progress.]



Maybe I'll treat myself to a haircut too and really knock their socks off.

2. The one thing I'll miss is the possibility for a really exceptional experience. Whenever you let your weirdness hang out you increase the chance of something really strange, which is to say great, happening to you.

Something like that did happen. I was driving home from the bar on the Friday before Thanksgiving. As I stopped at a campus intersection a college girl flagged me down. She asked if I would give her and her friends a ride to an intersection a few blocks away. I started to say no, but she said her friend would pay me $40. I said okay. She was pretty good looking.

She had two friends, a boy and a girl. She and the boy piled into the front seat together. I wanted to tell them that one would have to sit in back, there were a lot of cops out, but somehow the ball had already started rolling and I couldn't stop it. The girl got into the back seat behind me.

If they had looked around the car they would have seen three boxes of chess sets, a cowboy hat, assorted wrappers and depleted Dum Dum sticks, and a guy with a mustache.

"Don't rape us, okay?" said the girl from the back seat.

"Don't rape me," I said.

As we drove I told them about Movember. The boy was pretty excited about it. He said his brother was doing it too. The girl in the back seat was lobbying me to go to a party with them.

When we got to the intersection, a drive of just a few minutes, the boy started pressing $20 bills into my hand. Five of them, a hundred dollars.

"How can you..." I started to say, but even asking seemed to break the mood and I stopped.

"Give half of it to Movember," he said, and before I knew it he was out of the car and walking away. Maybe I shouldn't have accepted the money.

"Be safe," I said as they walked away. I didn't really mean be safe. I mean, if it was up to me I would hope they wouldn't OD, but what I really meant was, I'm going to be a grownup now.

Maybe I should have gone to the party. That's what I thought about on the drive home. For a short time I had entered a magical place where the normal rules of the world didn't apply. I must have been crazy to pass up a chance to inhabit that place for even a second longer.

Then again, I've never had fun at a party where I didn't know anybody. It would probably have been loud, awkward, and boring. It might even have ruined my memory of the first part of the night. I think I made the right choice by not going.

So why the regret? I think it was a holdover from other, similar experiences where I should have gone farther, tried more. If I had gone it would have been as a rebuke to those lingering failures: See, I'll try anything!

When I woke up the next morning I dragged my hand along the floor for my jeans and felt in the pocket. The money was there. It was real.