2005-07-22 - 3:30 p.m.
Upon the prompting of another PCV in my region, three of us have grown moustaches for the students camp we are currently running. Nothing too fancy--just a plain, old-fashioned moustache. We contemplated the whole "Riverboat-Carnie" look that Bob Dylan is sporting, but we decided to keep it low-level. While we starting grow them for the sheer gross humor of having one and running our wet fingertips over it, it was also a challenge to ourselves--none of us had been particular successful at growing facial hair before. This was our Tour de Stache, our chance to have a shiny, glittering molestache.
However amusing it is for me (a typically clean-shaven, 12 year old looking person) to sport my gorgeous moustache, there are some side effects of having one that I never realized. It has come to take on a life of its own, a breathing parasite sleeping on my lip.
1) My moustache saps all of the moisture off of my lip, not only chapping my top lip but also making me rub it all the time. This requires a lot of water and chapstick to alleviate.
2) My moustache is always calling me to touch it. The top ends of it brush my lips and beg to be pushed aside, swept inwards, bristled back outwards, and then cajoled with a wet finger into a curved line above my mouth. I can't stop touching it.
3) When I purse my lips into a strange puckered position I learned from my friend Missy Susie, I can see the dark ends of it at the bottom of my vision. It is really scary. Trust me.
4) Moving my mouth around in circles makes it feel like a caterpillar crawling around on my face. For this reason, I try not to move my face a lot.
Luckily I haven't gotten food caught in it so far. But I can't stop looking at it. When I'm walking around the school where we're having camp, I'm constantly looking in mirrors to touch it and see if it's really there. It's so unreal that I actually have a moustache--a weird dream/nightmare come true--that I can't stop looking at it. In one right, it's hilarious that I have it because it's so terrible looking. In that whole high school humor kind of way, it's great. On the other hand, it's just gross. It's really hard to tread that line between funny and terrible but I think I come really close with my moustache, which I just realized would be cooler if I named it.
One of the stranger things is that right now we're taking lots of video footage and pictures of students camps, all of which will feature three of us with ridiculously awful moustaches in it. For us, it's a brief, humorous month where we have facial hair for the first time in our lives. But for the students and other people who look at the pictures, the only image they will ever see of me is my 12 year old boy body and face with a dark patch of lip hair set in the middle.
