mustache summer

After going to visit my father at the lakehouse, I’m back in Southern College Town reading day and night for my thesis.  The terrible heat of summer has arrived after a much cooler spring than usual, so keeping indoors to read is preferable to sweating to the point of exhaustion by stepping outside.  

This past Friday night W., C. and I met at W.’s new apartment to stage a friendly, and silly, protest.  Many of our male friends have recently begun sporting awful mustaches, and, what’s worse, declaring this “Mustache Summer” and claiming the sleazy facial hair is worn in all seriousness, and not ironically.  Us girls hold that no educated male twenty-something in 2008 can wear a mustache that is not ironic.  We hate the mustaches, passionately.  Our male friends are by and large rather attractive men, and the little fuzzy caterpillar above the lip spoils their beauty.  As an act of protest, we assembled on W.’s front porch, drank gimlets and gin and tonics, and drew satirical mustaches on each other with eyeliner pencils.  For W. I drew a curly pirate mustache, and for C. the thick seventies mustache with the soul patch beneath the lower lip.  W. drew for me a pencil ’stache.  Once sufficiently drunk, we ventured out to The Bar We Always Go To and took the protest public.  After an initial period of glee at the amount of support we garnered even from strangers, we got rather tired of explaining the mustaches.  C. almost immediately removed hers, and we went from being a statement–a movement even–to just me and W. looking like nutjobs.  We two remained staunch, however, and kept our ’staches till the end of the night.  The next morning, hungover and running on a few hours of sleep, I drove to the lake.

Dad and I sat out on the pier or up on the porch and talked  most of the time.  We ate his fantastic barbecue with the secret family recipe barbecue sauce and went to a bar where he, much to my surprise, sang karaoke.  Also singing karaoke at the bar full of forty-somethings was an eleven-year-old girl, who serenaded us with a rendition of “Oops I Did It Again”–horrifying.  Unfortunately I got ill at the end of the night and stayed that way till I drove home the next afternoon.  I fear I didn’t do a very good job of entertaining my depressed father.

Now I must return to reading at once.  I finished one book this morning and hope to finish another this afternoon.  At some point long after the sun has gone down I will venture out in order to remind myself that the world does in fact still exist outside my cozy but occasionally lonely apartment.  Grad school makes such things necessary.

Yours in revolution and reading,

A.