I was off work for a few days and I didn’t shave during that time. So last night I figured I’d take a nice hot bath to really soften up my beard for the razor. As I laid there in the tub, I rubbed my hand over the pre-beard and found an old friend. The Big Hair.
The Big Hair is the result of an over-achieving follicle on the right side of my chin. It’s way thicker than normal facial hair and could possibly qualify as a horn. Since I shave regularly, it usually goes unnoticed other than by the notch it puts in the razor blade and the thump it makes when it hits the surface of the sink. But having let it grow out gave me an opportunity to remove it for a little longer than normal.
I grabbed the mirror hanging from the shower nozzle and checked it out. Since I wasn’t wearing my glasses I used the magnifying side of the mirror. In the mirror, The Big Hair loomed up at me like a keratinous Devils Tower, issuing it’s challenge. “Wow” I think, “This’ll be more fun than poppin’ a big ol’ white head!”
Out comes my cold metalllic friend the tweezer to remove the louisville slugger growing out of my face. But it takes some doing to get a grip on a wet piece of beard stubble, whatever it’s size. In fact, the first three attempts only get me pain and the wrong hair in the tweezer. After a while every other hair in the area is gone, leaving nothing but my target and a great deal of frustration. Finally I get a grip on the offending hair a give a yank. The Big Hair is so massive that it actually pulls the skin into a little mound before finally slipping out.
And suddenly, it’s over. I’m left with a half-centimeter long piece of stubble and a sense of satisfaction usually reserved for the completion of a DIY project.
Even to myopic eyes The Big Hair is impressive. I was glad to see that I got a lot of the follicle and base, so it will be a while before it starts interfering with my shaving again.
Mandane and Pointless, but you read it anyway.
So does anybody else get these solitary monster hairs?
I have a rebellious hair that comes out of the tip of my nose. It will lay dormant for months, than jump out as I slumber, attempting to get past my groggy morning vision and escaping to the light of day. Only there, in the light of day, in full public view, can the rebel hair achieve it’s life goal of eliciting looks of horror and disgust.
The Big Hair lives behind my left shoulder blade. It’s actually a binary hair, but it grows as one. My wife gets it with tweezers for me and always shows it to me, and sure enough, the submerged portion is always WAY bigger than the exposed portion. She does a long, slow pull to make sure she gets the root, and I always have the pleasure of seeing it balanced on my fingertip, laid bare under the bright halogen lamp, a weird coil of sticky white fibrous root dangling off one end.
Good news: each time we pluck it, it shrinks a little. One of the plucks caused it to bifurcate, and each of the half-hairs is pretty significant, but overall I’m winning the war.
Interspersed with my regular issue eyebrow hairs I get maybe a dozen superduper thick curly hairs with deep roots. (My wife calls them quills). They will very occasionally curl down and poke me in the eye, which HURTS.
Nowadays I yank them out to keep awake in meetings.
LOL, back when mrAru actualy still had hair, we referred to those type of hairs as Politbureau hairs…we noticed that every photographed member of the politbureau had these impressive eyebrows of shaggy doom…
I have a couple of those, all on the right side of my chin. I refer to them as “insect hairs”, because they remind me of the stiff hairs that grew out of Jeff Goldblum’s back in The Fly.
My friend had an uber-hair once. We were sitting around her house watching TV and chatting and I said “You have a hair on your face”. Just a stray hair, about 3 inches long. When she went to brush it off her face, we were shocked to discover that it was actually GROWING from her face. Like, right on her cheek. There was no way a hair that long could have gone unnoticed if it grew at a normal rate. It would have been plucked long ago. We concluded that it must have popped up overnight. Strange but true.
I went out with a girl in college once that had hairs like that on her nipples. They were like a cat’s whiskers, shooting out in different directions I guess so that the nipple wouldn’t let itself get caught in some tigh, confined area. My roommate had told me about them first and so I asked her out to see for myself and, yep, whisker nipples.
I will occasionally get freaky white hairs pop up on my arms. One day, nothing, then the next day four inches of wiry, overachieving white/clear hair. They sprout up overnight, it’s quite strange.
I have a hair wannabe, filament thingy, that grows out of my back every now and then. It’s so thin and wispy, you can’t even see it. I won’t know it’s there until it get about 1" long, and I feel it floating behind me in the bathtub.
I have one Big Hair on my left forearm that grows out of a freckle. It is of a bigger gauge than and it is noticably longer than any of the other surrounding hairs. Am I supposed to yank it? I have been using it to help keep my watch from sliding around my arm now that I’ve lost some weight.