uh oh, beards are stylish.

Apparently beards are stylish:

"It's a sign of the times," Mr. Martin said. "People are into beards right now."

At hipster hangouts and within fashion circles, the bearded revolution that began with raffishly trimmed whiskers a year or more ago has evolved into full-fledged Benjamin Harrisons. At New York Fashion Week last month at least a half-dozen designers turned up with furry faces...

"This is some sort of reaction to men who look scrubbed, shaved, plucked and waxed," said the designer Bryan Bradley, who stepped onto the runway after his Tuleh presentation looking like a renegade from the John Bartlett show, at which more than half the models wore beards: untidy ones that scaled a spectrum from wiry to ratty to shabby to fully bushy...

On city streets, too, trends in scruff have reached new levels of unruliness, a backlash, some beard enthusiasts say, against the heightened grooming expectations that were unleashed with the rise of metrosexuality as a cultural trend. Men both straight and gay, it appears, want to feel rough and manly...

"It's a nice masculine aesthetic," said Robert Tagliapietra, who with his similarly bearded partner, Jeffrey Costello, designs a collection of pretty silk jersey dresses under the Costello Tagliapietra label. "We both like that aesthetic of New England cabins with antlers on the wall, plaid shirts and a beard."...

i don't know quite how to respond to this.
after letting my sideburns grown quite long in 10th grade, i sported an awkward-not-quite conencting beard in 11th grade, i let it grow to an unruly length my senior year of HS. in the 7 odd years since i have had long-beards, trimmed beards, goatees with mustaches, goatees without mustaches, and have occasionally even gone clean shaven. well that's not quite fair, i can't find the inspiration to shave daily, so if i am "clean shaven" it probably means i have a couple days of scruff.
all this to say that i am a beard guy. the news that beards are now fashionable upsets me a bit.
i will still sport one i think, but not feel as good about it.

it is almost time for passover. which means it is time for the counting of the omer. This ancient process evokes the feelings of moving from slavery in egypt to the revelation upon recieving the torah. this process happened in a deep wilderness. part of the way i connect with that is through not shaving. in fact i have often taken the oath of the nazir . my bar mitzvah portion, Naso, covered this ancient set of vows. they include avoiding grape products, corpses, and hair cutting among some other subleties. i figured i'd only understand it if i tried, so when i was 12 i took the oath for the first time. since then, i have often set aside the omer as a time to revisit the experience of nazirut (nazarism if you will). so i will have a quite bushy beard by shavuot. my worry is that it might be cool. to be honest, i am not that worried.