Thursday, July 03, 2008
Sunny Boy
For those of you that haven't seen Tim recently, he's grown a bit of facial hair. It started after the wedding, just doing weekly trims instead of clean shaving. I like the scruffy look, so this worked. Then, after our last trip to Austin, he was inspired by all the impressive and credibility-delivering beards, and the weekly trimming stopped. For 2 months, he let it go. Now, Tim has many strengths, but sadly growing a full-on beard is not one of them. The 2-month project could have been completed by any Mediterranean man within hours. But when compared to the growing efforts of the Chinese, it was a decent showing. I'm not going to say I loved it, but it was different. And I do love the long shaggy hair on his head. Big improvement over my haircuts.
One night we were taking the subway out after work, and Tim's facial hair came up as a conversation topic. It is so rare in China, and such a change for him, that this was often a conversation topic. A fellow expat started relating a story:
"I was talking to recently, and she asked, 'Do you know what is wrong with Tim?'. 'What do you mean?' I replied. 'Well, he used to be such a sunny boy. Now that he has the beard, he looks more like Robinson Caruso'."
Upon hearing this story, I just about peed my pants. Turns out there were several similar stories out there, and Tim had been getting strange looks. Facial here is not considered "cool", at least not in the way wearing a bike helmet is, it is more associated with "bad people". Not Sunny Boys, for sure.
Several weeks later, we went to Taiwan for Tim to present in a conference. He did a little trimming for the occasion. What do we call this look? Partly Cloudy.
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Partly cloudy.... funny. If this is the one way that Tim gets to exude some bad boy/ dangerous man juju, then I guess it's alright. Passersby may make way for this dark figure as he walks by, but the moment he hops on his bicycle and puts his helmet on (which surely isn't something a man living on the edge would do), they will be reassured that he is indeed, still just a sunny boy from Boulder, CO. :)
Oh jesus, you have to hold on to that picture forever! Hahaha. Tim with handlebars. I love it. I am extremely interested to see how you guys adapt to Austin again after 3 years of foreign influence. I hope some facial hair comes out of it! Not for you Laurel.... :-) Pumped to see you soon!
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