No Shave November in Ten Pictures

In order to properly document No Shave November, I've taken a picture every couple days to show the slow transition into The Land of the Beard.  Also (to avoid the comments I'll inevitably receive) you simply cannot smile when taking beard pictures.

November 1st:

November 4th:

November 8th:

November 12th:

November 15th:

November 17th:

November 19th:

November 22nd:

November 25th:

November 30th (the comparison):

Final Thoughts of a Dying Man

Spending day after day learning about medical conditions, diseases, infections, and the like it's extremely easy to become a hypochondriac.  I have a particularly bad case.  Several nights ago I had convinced myself that I was on the verge of a catastrophic cerebrovascular accident (stroke).  Sharp pain was shooting down my entire left side.  Normally, I can talk myself out of it.  I've become a seasoned pro at fighting my mind's natural urge to blast into full on freak out mode.  Rarely, I'm too convinced.  Unable to quell my worries with simple facts, the immune system of my psyche produced a hypersensitivity reaction of acute anxiety.  I laid down in bed, sure that it was my last night.

Laughable, I know.  For all of you "normal" people out there reading this, many others struggle self diagnosis like this.  (Practical advice for any other freaks like me: Google is not your friend...  Maybe I'll create a post on this later).  Either way, I was hooked.  I knew my blood pressure was through the roof.  I kept getting up to go to the bathroom, justified my choice with "I need more water" and checked for facial drooping, etc.  Eventually, I laid down for good.  "Maybe I'll just go in my sleep?"  I thought.  No one's going to be there to rush me to the emergency room when it happens.  I'm not going to be cognizant enough to wake Cody up.  (I hope that there's at least one out of ten people reading this are thinking "Hey, it's cool.  I do that too!" while the other nine laugh!)

So now I need you to put yourself in my shoes.  However ridiculous you find the circumstance.  I'm actually dying.

I gave it some serious thought.  Tonight would be my last night alive.  What do you even do?  I grabbed my phone and began typing a note.  What would I want my last words to be?  How would I want to be remembered?  I started by telling all the people I loved them that I did... and then I stopped.  Why do people do that?  You see it in movies all the time...  "Tell my family I love them."  You shouldn't have to do that.  You should tell them every day.  People that you truly love should already know that you do.  My brisk typing came to a sudden halt.  I stared at the screen.  "Are you sure you want to delete this note?"  Boom.  It was already gone.

What would I write?  Who would it be for?  What would everyone say.  Again the brisk typing commenced...  Frivolously fighting to pen the final footnote of my life.  And then I stopped again.  And like the first, it was gone.  Tomorrow I wouldn't reread this.  Tomorrow I wouldn't hear what everyone thought about it.  Tomorrow didn't exist.

People tend to venerate a person's last words.  Almost as if they had more meaning than everything else they said.  Forgetting the bad and remembering only the good, these people are held up as immovable and unblemished monuments pointing us toward ideals.  It inevitability happens.  It happens to everyone.  I wanted mine to be my last thoughts.  Flawed but, real.  I began to write my last thoughts.  They were for me.  No one else.  I put my phone down and the night blurred into darkness as I slipped off into sleep.

Sun beamed into my window.  I opened one eye and squinted into the glistening sunshine.  Tomorrow had come.  Grabbed my phone to see what time it was... and the words hit me right between the eyes:

I wish I invested more time on things that mattered.  Time is fleeting.  You can never get back.  It is invaluable but it but everyone spends it.  From some it slips away.  For others it craws. You can't catch it and it stops for no man.  Moments of clarity must be met with years of consistency to yield the fruit of success.  Don't waste your moments.  Don't waste your years.  No one knows how few they have until they're gone.

"It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will take it to heart." - Ecclesiastes 7:2