Mustaches, Imprint, and Movember

Day 7 of Mustachio

I didn’t shave for the first week of November as I was lamenting the loss of the NBA. I hoped that my wife wouldn’t notice but after 5 days, she started complaining that I’ve turned into a scruffy Asian Jake Gyllenhaal. While I was contemplating whether that was a good omen of signs for me, I realized it wasn’t because my wife refused to kiss me with my scruff. What woman would say no to a scruffy Asian Jake Gyllenhaal?! Then I came to another conclusion, that he’s no Ryan Gosling and that I needed to shave.

I wanted to play a joke on her so I went and shaved everything except a traditional 70′s mustache that you would find on a man who was in a low budget film involving two individuals. I said “Suprise”, she looked confused and then replied, “Guys at my work are doing this Movember thing too and it’s to raise awareness for prostate cancer.” This wasn’t the reply I was looking for, I had hoped that she would scream in horror or reply that I looked like an individual who works in low budget films that involve two people from the 1970′s.

I was flabbergasted for a few reasons; 1, my wife hates it when I have hair on my face. When I was dating her I would shave my face every day to impress her in how hairless my face is. 2, my wife was supporting me in participating in Movember. She said it’s for the promotion of men’s health and that it was a good way to raise awareness for prostate cancer. 3, she told me that I should make a super-hero nickname for my mustache and we decided on “Mustachio”.

Her one condition of me keeping my mustache was that I needed to wash my face every night and put on a face cream with her once a week. She said that it would help keep my face clean even with an oily mustache on my face. I don’t think that this is true but that she’s living out her Korean-Drama fantasy with me. In all Korean-Dramas, the male actor somehow always puts on some kind of face cream with their female counterpart.

After realizing that I was going to become the new “Jun-Pyo”, my wife started giggling and took a picture of me with a hairband on, circa Sasha Vujcic 2010, with white cream face mask. The hairband reminded me of the Dark Days with the Lakers when Kobe at the prime of his career was surrounded by Smush “I don’t care if you’re Kobe, I’m not passing you the ball” Parker, Luke “Can’t Shoot” Walton, and Kwame “Stone Hands” Brown. With that “talent” around Kobe, he still willed them to a playoff birth and almost single-handily destroyed the Phoenix Suns. He NEVER and I mean NEVER gets enough credit for this dark 2 year period. How was Steve Nash the MVP of the league TWICE? He didn’t do anything exceptionally well besides passing the ball and hitting an open 3 pointer.

Now that we’re at the twilight of Kobe’s career, we are now stuck with a blasphemous labor negotiations where we might lose another year of Kobe’s greatness because Derek Fisher and David Stern can’t shake hands and make a deal. It’s the start of the 2nd week of November and I’m stuck with the LA Galaxy and the LA Kings.

With no basketball websites to look at, I decided to google Movember and saw that it’s a real society of men who don’t shave in the month of November. My wife wasn’t trying to trick me and men participate in it to raise awareness about prostate cancer. Prostate cancer has been a “popular” research topic in the digi-world lately because of the passing of Steve Jobs last month. RIP Steve Jobs. He was a visionary and a brilliant “do’er” of ideas that he had. Unfortunately, he passed because of prostate cancer, along with other medical complications.

Steve Jobs, while highly influential in my life as far as gadgets go, didn’t mean much to me in a humanistic sense. I never met him, spoke to him, or knew much about him besides that he liked wearing black turtle necks and gave killer Apple keynotes. While I don’t know him, that doesn’t mean his legacy is short. He’ll be remembered far longer than I and his work far more appreciated than anything I could ever write or speak about.

That’s how legacy is remembered these days. It’s not so much about your personal interactions with someone, but how your work has influenced someone in a positive way. To me that’s both positive and negative. We live in a society that loves to immortalize people and to give them traits/talents that they might not have had. We imagine things and hope for things that are more or less, not true. It’s because we want to believe in the best of people. This isn’t wrong or a critique of culture, it’s an observation.

We’ve become people who like to be disciplined/mentored/influenced by people who don’t know us, by people who can’t see the bones in our closet, by people who can’t speak truth to the darkness that is in our souls. We love the joys of being “mentored” by afar, where the voice only speaks into the wants of our greed. The economy of self does not, can not, will not, allow somebody to mentor us who does not speak about only the goodness of us.

I was like this too before a man I met at a church I went to in high school started speaking to me about the truths of life. That my “name” is only as good as my word and that true belief is seen through actions, not words. He taught me by showing me how he lived, how he laughed, and how he loved. A ravaging prostate cancer took him away from me to early. The cancer took him away from his family to early, from his children to early. While his legacy might not be remembered by many, his life left a positive male imprint on mine.

I write this because I don’t want to participate in Movember because it’s a fun thing to do. I want my participation in Movember to mean more than a mustache. It has to be in remembrance of that man who spoke light into my darkness. On my profile page of the Movember website, I posted this as my reason for growing a mustache.

Doing this in honor of the man who taught me lessons about what it means to be human.

He showed me the steps that I needed to take in becoming human. The idea that we’re all broken and splintered, the idea that we need a God who can comfort and love us. In honor of that legacy, I want to ask you in joining me to give to Movember.

Receiving and Giving is a hard concept to live by. We’re by nature great receivers, by nature we’re also un-willing givers. It’s un-natural for me to say that instead of a gift or warm wishes on my birthday, that you would instead give a little to Movember. Ask my wife and she will tell you how foreign this is to come out of my lips. I love gifts, I love the idea of receiving gifts, I love how gifts make me feel loved. However, I realize that if we had the technology and medicine to “cure” prostate cancer, that I would still have the gift of a mentor that was taken away from me. A gift that I can never have back, a gift that I can’t buy, a gift that made me understand what love is.

So join me in giving so that we can keep receiving the gifts of love from healthy men. From men who have battled with prostate cancer and have “won.”

I’m going to do my best with my mustache and my super-hero nickname, Mustachio.

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Filed under: Uncategorized, Movember, prostate cancer