Combining my penchant for bucking tradition, and my closet full of excellent, rarely worn suits (a vestige of my finance days), I’ve officially decided to implement ‘anti-casual Friday’, in which I’ll be donning suit and tie weekly, for no reason other than that I can.
Though, also, because it looks damn good.
Dear fellow men:
In case you have not already realized it, women are checking out your ass. And, frankly, if your wallet is so overstuffed as to appear that you’ve developed a large, cancerous ass-cheek growth, you’re probably not helping your cause.
So, if you’re looking for love, or simply looking to not be labeled ‘ass-cheek growth guy’ by the group of cute girls at the end of the bar, it might be time to slim down your billfold.
Thus convinced, start the process by examining the wallet itself. If it is made from cordura (or, really, anything other than leather), you will not have even the vaguest of chances of sleeping with any woman who sees you remove it from your pocket. (In fact, this applies even if the woman in question is a member of PETA; I am fairly certain there’s a special exemption to their animal cruelty platform that allows the purchase of leather wallets to keep guys from looking like complete doofuses.)
Also, if you have a crappy five-dollar wallet, every single woman who sees it will instantly know it’s a crappy five-dollar wallet. Women spend huge percentages of their adult lives idly searching for the perfect purse and handbag, across thousands upon thousands of stores. They have examined more leather goods in a single afternoon than you have in your entire life. They know the difference. Your five-dollar wallet isn’t fooling anyone but yourself.
Additionally, if your wallet is tri-fold, multi-fold, or in any way resembles an origami project, trade it in for a plain old fashioned one that simply folds in half once. Obviously, the more you fold something, the thicker it becomes, and some wallets are a good inch and a half deep even before you start filling them up. If you’re still at a loss, just buy this, which I’ve owned for the last eight years. Thanks to, as you’re about to learn, not overstuffing, it still looks new.
Onto what goes into the wallet. To gauge where you stand, remove everything from you wallet, and make four piles: one for money, one for credit cards / id / etc., one for receipts, and one for anything else. These piles are likely rather unwieldy, which is exactly the problem. The goal here is to put as little of what’s in those piles back into the wallet.
Start with the money. That’s the one thing that incontrovertibly belongs in your wallet. Everything else should be subjected to close scrutiny.
Next work your way through the card pile. From it, place in your wallet: your drivers license, your atm card, one or two credit cards, your metrocard (if you are a New Yorker), four of your business cards, and your health insurance card. That’s it. Put everything else in your desk drawer. Seriously.
You simply cannot afford to stuff you wallet full of things you don’t truly need. You don’t, for instance, need to carry twelve different credit cards all at the same time. At most, you need one for personal expenses and one for business expenses. If you’re worried about maxing out your limit (which, frankly, you probably shouldn’t be doing in the first place) you can swap the nearly maxed card for another unused one from your desk drawer as necessary.
You also don’t need things like your Blockbuster card or your museum membership cards; if they can find you in their computer system given your ID, you shouldn’t be schlepping their plastic around. Even if your grocery store doesn’t allow you to key in your phone number for rewards club savings, say, you still likely don’t need to take your grocery rewards card with you everywhere. If you’re just ‘stopping by’ the grocery store, you’re unlikely to buy much; when you head out for a big shopping run, you take the card out of your desk. The rest of the time, you leave the card, and most others, at home.
Now the receipts. Take all of them, put them in a file somewhere, and never, ever again put a receipt into your wallet. Put new ones in your front pocket, then add them to the file when you get home. Receipts are the single largest cause for outlandishly overstuffed wallets. And there is absolutely, positively no reason for carrying those receipts around. Most guys have returned perhaps two items in the past five years. When return number three rolls around, you can damn well pull the relevant slip from the file. The rest of the time, the receipts add bulk, look stupid, fall out everywhere, and generally detract from good wallet housekeeping.
Now the miscellaneous pile. If it doesn’t already include it, take a single check, a $20 bill and a $100 bill, and fold them together. Place this in one of the inside pockets of the wallet. This is ’emergency’ money, or, more to the point, ‘cover dinner after your credit card is declined so that you and your date don’t end up in the kitchen washing dishes’ money. Not much else from the miscellaneous pile should be added back into your wallet either. If you want to carry pictures, limit yourself to one of your significant other, and one each of any children you have (and know about). Nobody wants to see even the first photo, so please don’t torture them with a stack.
That’s it. Keeping your wallet organized is easy: aside from cash, and replenishing your stack of business cards, do not put anything new into your wallet. Try it for a few weeks. Then head back to the bar where the cute girls secretly taunted you for your unwieldy buttock-bulge, observe the newfound respect your svelte wallet and resulting slim line engenders, and ask the cutest for her phone number.
And, even then, place the phone in your pocket. Not in your wallet.
Yesterday evening, with my brother in town for one final night, I signed us both up last-minute for a wine tasting class at the Institute of Culinary Education. Getting ready to head out the door to the class, I grabbed my trusty beard trimmer from the bathroom cabinet for a bi-weekly touch up. Passing the trimmer over my chin, I seemed to be shearing off more than usual. “Odd,” I thought. “Perhaps my beard grows faster in the spring.” Looking at the trimmer more closely, however, I realized the longer cuttings weren’t a result of speedy growth; instead, the trimmer was apparently set at the very closest setting.
“Oh,” said my brother from the other room at the sound of the trimmer. “I was playing with that this morning. You might want to adjust it back to the normal setting before you use it.” A little late for that. I now had a mangy looking beardless patch below the left side of my mouth.
“It probably isn’t even noticeable,” my brother said from down the hallway, before turning into the bathroom, getting a closer look, and dissolving into hysterical laughter on the floor. Apparently 95% of a beard doesn’t quite cut it. So, already slightly late to leave for the wine tasting, I quickly checked the trimmer was still on setting one (a.k.a. ‘fragrance model perpetual five-o’clock shadow’), and sheared away.
As a result, I’m back to beardless. Or, at least, nearly so. And while I’m almost certainly growing it back, I can’t say I entirely minded the chance to compare, in close succession, the bearded versus unbearded versions of my face. Change can be good. Albeit, occasionally, rather unexpected.
While up at the Toronto Film Festival, due to popular demand, I decided to regrow my beard. And, for the first week or two, it looked great. Then, increasingly, people began to mistake me for a member of a lost polar expedition. It was at that point I remembered exactly why I had previously purchased a beard trimmer.
So, diving through the depths of my medicine cabinet, I brought forth the trusty Remington Precision MB-30. Clicking the dial to #5 (the setting I had always used), I shore away.
Sure, it looked immensely better than it had moments before. But the next morning, while brushing my teeth in front of the mirror, it occurred to me that I could perhaps even trim down more closely, for a scruffily indie hip sort of look. Whipping out the Remington again, I clicked to setting four and buzzed.
The results were an immense improvement, and, emboldened by that success, I began to contemplate going all the way to setting three.
Of course, beard trimming is a dicey business. Just one perilous step too far and you take on the perpetually five o’clock shadowed look so favored by fragrance and hair product models. So it was with great trepidation that I clicked that one further setting, and took a first trimming pass.
I am exceedingly relieved to say that setting three turned out to be at least as good as setting four, and possibly even better. The resulting look says, without a doubt, “I am an effortlessly cool indie hipster.” Or, more accurately “I am as much of an effortlessly cool indie hipster as I can be, considering I don’t live in Williamsburg, don’t own a trucker hat, and am actually still pretty much just a neurotic little quasi-yuppie Ivy League tech dork.”
Still, I’ll take what I can get.
While I’ve immensely enjoyed it thus far, the ongoing facial hair experiment is quickly hurtling towards a serious decision point. Specifically, in about three weeks, I head off to Hawaii for a brief vacation (life is hard, I know), and unless I de-beard preemptively, I’m likely to return to New York with an inverted beard tan. I’d then be forced to skip shaving until the darkest depths of winter, by which time the entirety of my face would presumably return to the faintly fluorescent pale green skin tone that all trapped-indoors-by-office-work New Yorkers seem to possess.
So, there it is: whip out the Gillette today, or stay bearded for the next six months? I’m at such a complete loss that I’m bucking self-aggrandizement tradition and giving you, fair reader, a chance to comment away with your invaluable guidance. Help, help, help!
Dear vast number of guys who always seem to have razor burn on their necks-
As you surely have already noted, shaving with the grain prevents razor burn – hence shaving down rather than up while shaving your face. But run your finger along your neck and you’ll notice the direction of hair growth changes part way down. That’s right, it changes direction. Your beard hair grows pointing down only above the top of your Adam’s apple; below that, the hair grows upward. Which is why you always have razor burn at that point or lower – all these years, you’ve been shaving your neck against the grain.
So, basically, stop doing that, because those little red bumps make you look like a jackass.
Yours in the Internet,
joshua
In response to reader emails: yes, I still have the beard. It’s filled in rather surprisingly well, and has thus far drawn nearly universal praise. “I normally don’t like beards,” people say “but I think, in your case, it actually kind of works.”
That’s where the consensus ends, however, as nearly every person I speak with also has a different idea of how it makes me look, including: French, Irish, Russian, English, outdoorsy, older, hipper, squarer, more serious, less serious, scruffier, preppy-er. The list goes on and on and on, and I rarely hear the same one twice. If I can get my digital camera working, I’ll post a picture and let readers decide for themselves.
Purchase velvet smoking jacket. Wear regularly.
Judging by the competence of those employed, “Jean Louis David” appears to be French for “Supercuts”.
In the past three days, I’ve twice been asked out by girls I’d just met. Perhaps I’ll stick with the beard after all.