You have that luxury

Dear David,

I don't know your history, so I can't be sure what has led you to pen this sick, twisted post, clearly written in order to further marginalize those of us who can't grow the thick beautiful facial hair that you apparently take for granted. Your complaints about not finding women fall on deaf ears and hairless upper lips. I constantly see jerks like you prancing around with women they can trust, buying each other beers, watching sports together, and slowly stroking that thick, lustrous mustache you can apparently "produce very easily."

Hey David, I got some news for you. Some of us CAN'T easily produce a beautiful mustache on our beautiful Wisconsin faces in front of our big brain full of expertise in both civil AND environmental engineering. Some of us have mustaches that make us look like rat people. Some of us only had one major and don't really understand Apocalypse Now. Some of us have been waiting for a product like the BeerStache our entire lives, and thank God that Facebook brought it to our attention.

So thanks David C. Miller. Thanks for reminding me what a reject I am for trying to spend the few seconds that I bring my beer bottle up to my lips in the world of a guy who's got it all. The guy who has it all, and apparently think it's still necessary to prove their place in the social hierarchy by kicking the mustacheless guy when he's down.

I hope you're proud of yourself.

--Anonymous

Dear Anonymous, if that really is your name,

How dare you.

How dare you tarnish the reputation of our nation's oppressed mustachio'd class with your rank historical revisionism.

Have you forgotten the place of the mustache in Western Civilization? Have you forgotten who invented shaving? It was the Romans, who believed that shaving marked them as being more civilized than the surrounding hirsute barbarians, who they then went on to pillage, destroy, and attack with their Praetorians and, later, their knights, (or perhaps their horsemen if they failed to research Guilds quickly). People with mustaches were fed to the lions in the Coliseum.

Skip ahead two thousand years to learn of the only history that really matters: the History of America. America was founded on the principle that all men are created equal. And to defend that principle, over 600,000 Americans (most of them with mustaches) gave their lives in the Civil War.

But America again turned her back on those who built her. Between 1860 and 1913, every single American President had a mustache or beard except for Andrew Johnson who was impeached for not having one, and William McKinley, who was assassinated before he could grow his. There have been no mustaches since. There have been two World Wars.

Meanwhile, there again grew an association between those civilized men without facial hair and those uncivilized barbarians with it. Does Tony Hayward, the CEO of British Petroleum, wear a mustache? Did Frank Zappa? Which of the two is more accepted in Corporate America?

We live in a world where all the expressions of individualism, of uniqueness, of non-conformity, are to be subordinated to the sanitized Will of the Almighty Dollar. And since it is easier for those with mustaches to shave them off than for those without them to grow them, that is the image we all must be made in.

For you to come in against that backdrop and accuse me of looking down my nose at you for not being able to grow a mustache is to ignore the great struggles people with mustaches face even today. For example, the average nominal price of a mustache ride remains at just five cents, even as inflation has eroded its purchasing power to almost nothing. This has occurred even as some grow richer and richer, leading to what economists call The Great Stagnation.

And now you say you want to have a novelty beer bottle mustache. Oh no. Don't, don't, don't tell me about my world. Don't tell me about my world! I mean you just wanna have your fling with like the mustache from the other side of town. Then you're going to put the bottle down, you're going to marry some rich prick who your parents will approve of and just sit around with the other trust fund babies and talk about how you went slumming too, once.

You are a fraud. You want all the sympathy and attention that a mustache can generate, but you don't want to go through the sacrifice it truly takes to deserve it. You can put that bottle down, and off goes that mustache with it. No pain. No blood. If you want a mustache again, it is just a beer away; you needn't wait a few weeks. Frosting never gets caught in your mustache. Your mustache never itches. You are a genetic prince playing at being a pauper, secure in the knowledge that if you ever really get in trouble, you can always retreat to your hairless castle.

But a beer bottle mustache is not a real mustache. Just as cohabitation is a cheap imitation and perversion of marriage, a beer bottle mustache is a cheap imitation and perversion of a real mustache. Your covetousness will not be placated by a piece of plastic. Your envy will not end even if you do end up purchasing a BeerStache. You'll look at something else someone has (a goatee, sideburns, a full beard) and covet that next. Your envy will grow even if your hair follicles will not. And no matter how many times you try and attach the object of your desire to the side of a beer bottle, you'll know in your heart that it isn't real. It's a chasing after the wind.

Cuz Saving Our Planet is the Thing to Do

When people at parties tell you about the Internet and how it's changed the way we work and live, leading to huge gains in productivity and the freedom of information and overthrow of dictators, I want you to think of the above picture. Facebook is a billion-dollar company that makes money by...uhhh...targeted advertising? Maybe? Does anyone really know? I know you can pay facebook and they'll send your friends a happy birthday cake or whatever, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly the targeted advertising. Maybe people who make the apps have to pay a fee to get facebook to post them? I don't know.

But I do know that there are very few places that annoy me as much with their advertising as Facebook. Sure, there's that mother of 2 who lost 50lbs. of belly fat by taking a pill. That's annoying. But this is at a whole other level.

I've never met the woman with the eye-black and sports jersey who wants to buy me drinks. It's possible that she's really nice, likes sports, and honestly, truly, wants me to have a drink for free because she is charitable and wants me to be happy. But I'm also really sure that thetaoofbadass.com is not my kind of place. It's openly manipulative, slightly misogynistic, and just generally juvenile in its view of human interaction. And I know this within 10 seconds of reading the ad that that's exactly what thetaoofbadass is all about.

I don't want to learn a technique to get girls to buy me drinks. I want to meet a woman I like and trust that sometimes buys me drinks, and who I sometimes buy drinks for, but we mostly just buy ourselves drinks when we want them. And if she likes sports and doesn't care who knows, then ok, and if she doesn't like sports, no big deal.

There's a similar advertising failing with the BeerStache. It's not that something you clip onto the side of a beer bottle that looks like a mustache isn't cool. I can produce my own mustache very easily, thankyouverymuch. It's that Facebook is a place for defining your identity: what you look like, who your friends are, what you like and dislike, your causes, concerns, jokes, videos, and games. And defining myself as 'the kind of person who clips a fake mustache on a beer bottle' is just entirely foreign to my (carefully cultivated) Facebook self-image. Again, I've never met the two young ladies with mustaches drinking beer at what appears to be a rocking party. Perhaps they have many virtues. But I'm pretty sure that we would not get very far in a conversation. (This is what a psychologist would call 'projection' of my personal hangups and distastes onto the blank beer-swilling slates of these two women as an explanation of how they must behave)

And as much as I like ROCKER girls, the dyed hair, Johnny-Depp-in-Pirates-of-the-Caribbean eye shadow, look-I'm-not-smiling-in-my-picture-because-I'm-quirky-and-countercultural expession, and complete lack of a front of a shirt are all signals to me that there is no place in my identity for a complementary part like this, like her. Not that there seems to be a place in my identity for a complementary part like anyone, but you get the point.

As for the MBA in Sustainability, I'd consider myself lucky to one day get a job where my immediate supervisor will have an MBA in Sustainability and will constantly talk about 'best practices' and 'lean processes' and the 'triple bottom line' while I roll my eyes and dream of a world without MBAs.