Letter Never Sent

If you shave your face on a regular basis you know how difficult it is to find good shaving cream. It’s become a hobby of mine to find the best shaving cream. I’ve tried several different varieties from the cheap store-brand shaving creams to that mentholated green gel stuff that foams up when you use it. I’ve also tried less foamy things like Zirh Shave Gel and Neutrogena Skin Clearing Shave Cream, which irritated my face probably due to the salicylic acid. Some of the best stuff I’ve found is Aveeno Shave Gel with Natural Colloidal Oatmeal. It has a great oatmeal smell and makes your skin feel great. The only problem is that I wanted something I could apply with a brush since wet shaving with hot water seems to do a good job of softening a tough beard, which helps minimize irritation.

Here are a few things I’ve tried and what I liked or disliked:

1. Aveeno Shave Gel with Natural Colloidal Oatmeal – Great natural oatmeal fragrance. Aveeno does a good job of moisturizing the skin and feels nice. A little on the expensive side for canned shaving cream, but you can buy it almost anywhere. $4.49 for 7 oz. I would recommend this for your travel kit since it’s difficult to take a brush on the road.
2. Zirh Shave Gel – I got a tube of this as part of a gift pack two Christmases ago. It has a nice cool fragrance and the gel feels pleasantly cold going on. Since it’s a clear gel you can still see your skin while you’re shaving, the razor leaving a path devoid of whiskers. This is novel since normally you just see the contrast between soapy foam and skin. One problem with the shaving gels is that since they do not foam up they don’t seem to last as long in terms of how many shaves you get out of them. You will have to use enough to cover your face whereas with most shaving creams you squeeze out a little and lather it up. I like the Zirh gel a lot, it’s just a little more expensive and harder to find. $14.00 for 4 oz.
3. Palmolive Brushless Shaving Cream – “The Shave Cream with Olive Oil!” This is something your grandpa probably used. It promoted itself as a brushless shaving cream at a time when most men used a shaving brush, although that’s just the way I used it because I didn’t like lathering it on with my hands. It has a nice pearly green color to it and has great old-school toothpaste tube packaging. It’s also super-cheap. $2.60 for 4.4 oz.
4. Truefitt & Hill Lavender Shaving Cream – Established in London in 1805, Truefitt & Hill has been making shaving cream and grooming products for two hundred years. This is fancy stuff, but it’s also the best smelling, best lathering shaving cream I’ve ever used. The bubbles in the lather are microscopic giving it a very creamy consistency like peaked egg whites. A little bit of it goes a long way. You just push the brush into the jar and wipe up a dab of the cream before lathering it up. Used with hot water this is a very pleasant experience. I find myself covering a lot more of my face due to the abundance of cream and just because it feels wondeful. My only quarrels are with the price and the fact that my face feels a little dry when I’m done. To be fair, the price issue is mitigated by the fact that you will get hundreds of shaves out of the amount you buy. Also, if I used a moisturizer the dry, slightly soapy feeling would probably vanish. $22.00 for 5 oz.

Theodore Roosevelt High School’s class of 1995, my class, is having its ten year reunion this weekend in San Antonio. I was all gung-ho to go until I found out it was going to cost about $200-300 to attend. It breaks down like this: $89 per person for not registering early, and an additional $10 fee for buying tickets within the last seven days prior to the event. Then I have to drive down there and all the way back up to Dallas and Oklahoma the very next day. Insane. At that expense you really have to ask yourself, “Do I want to pay $300 to see people I never bothered keeping in touch with on my own?” No offense intended and none taken, since none of these people bothered to keep up with me either. I’m still planning on going, but only because I told a couple people I would be there. I also want to see the sheer spectacle of it all. The competition to see who makes the most money, has the smartest kids, or the most sincere and good-looking spouse. Why am I going? Do I have something to prove like that? Maybe that my life is “on track”, but then why should I care what anyone else thinks about that? I certainly don’t give thought to what anyone else has done with their life.

Going down the list of attendees there are about 4-5 people I would really like to see. I’m disappointed at all the people who decided not to go. Many of those are the people I was closest to in high school, the perpetually uncomfortable or maybe just the worst at hiding our discomfort. But again, we could have all stayed in touch on our own if that’s what we wanted. When I think about high school, all I see are experiences good and bad, much like the rest of life. Experiences shared with my fellow travellers on this extended road trip called life. There has been a lot of looking backwards this year. Ten years gone and spent. Ten years past a period of much signficance and discovery, when everything seemed new; possible and impossible all at once.

While writing this I have decided not to go after all. I am impulsive, unreliable, and, most importantly, cheap. My apologies to any of my former classmates who expected me there. I will gladly treat any of you to dinner one on one, just drop a line of some sort. One more request, please burn me a copy of the “memory CD”. Whatever the hell that is.