If the journey of a thousand steps starts with just one, then the voyage of a mustache starts with just a lonely whisker. And it ends with a team of men who briefly tasted the awesome, if not hyperbolic, majesty of the mustache.

(Watch to the end for a cameo by Baby Bien explaining victory is his.)

Hundreds of whiskers and thousands of dollars later, Movember is finished. Our team raised $4,100 to fight ass cancer, with friends, family, and ever strangers chipping in $1,403 to my individual effort. Considering I was hoping to raise $200 and our initial team goal was $1,000 TOTAL, these fundraising amounts far exceeded our expectations. What does this prove? That you guys are ass cancer-kicking rock stars. And we thank you.

Our participation in Movember began as the brainchild of team captain and evil mastermind Foxymoron, who convinced five men to flout social norms and fulfill their genetic imperative to grow facial hair. Driven by my desire to not die of prostate cancer and to save my future erections, I agreed to do it.

And in the past 30 days, I learned a lot about my friends, facial hair, society, and myself — not bad for letting an obnoxious soup strainer grow above your upper lip.

Among these lessons:

1. Everyone should have a mustache idol.

My ’stache idol is my dad, who had the very first mustache I ever saw. As a child, I used to draw pictures of him with crayons and alway started on a blank sheet of paper with one feature: his mustache. I would give him these drawings and always beamed when he told me how proud he was of me.

Zorro is also a pretty cool idol. He fought against oppression, for the love of hot Mexican women, and the right to carve zees on the sides of tree trunks.

2. A mustache makes you a rebel.

The truth is, the mustache fell out of favor in the modern U.S. shortly after the cancellation of Magnum P.I. Since then, growing one has been considered taboo in social situations unless you do porn or consider yourself a gunslinger. It took guts for us to do this all month, risking standing at work, being shunned by our lovers, and facing those hard stares every day on the Metro.

The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece about men taking this risk. And a private school across even came under fire for threatening to bar a student who was participating in Movember of he didn’t shave off what they called his “bum fluff”.

3. Mustachioed people bond.

As my pushbroom grew everyday, I noticed more often men with their own mustaches and felt an instant kinship. Sure, they weren’t always doing it for charity, such as the guy who looked like Rollie Fingers who I saw at Atomic Billiards and asked if he was “doing Movember”, but we still were brothers in a way. I went from being a mustache apologist to embracing the very thing I thought I would never see on my face.

Also, my teammates — Foxymoron, , Nickels, INPY, Rory, and Fraim — all met up at least once a week to celebrate our ’staches over some beers. We ridiculed each other for our common plight, drank lots of cheap beers, and even won a trivia night at Madhatters together. My Mo Bros will always be my bros.

4. A mustache is your passport to an awesome party.

The Alcohol and Razors party was held on Friday, the last day of Movember. Though we couldn’t attend the official Movember Gala in NYC despite the fact that each one of us qualified (minimum $200 in fundraising), we hosted the official Mo Town party for DC at INPY’s house and Wonderland. So many friends and donors came to enjoy the open bar of kegs and liquor, laugh at the ceremonial shaving, and watch that outstanding Movember DVD put together by Rory and which you can see at the top of this post or by clicking .

Of course, what blog post of mine is complete without some photos from the party? Enjoy:

MJ, HC, Baby Bien and Brewies Chewies loved touching my mustache:

Brewies Chewies takes one last, long, aching, passionate look at my bigotes:

The Princess reacts to Shiftless Badger’s face manipulation:

Nickels and Foxymoron ponder the end of the Mo road:

INPY, J-Vo, and Rory:

Using my Redskins mug to hide face from public view:

MJ, Cagey, and The Princess before the pillow fight started:

Tits McGee and J-Vo loved the idea of having a mustache without having to, you know, grow one:

Hanna Montana and I compare biceps after I whooped her in arm wrestling. The only thing we proved is that I’m the whitest man alive:

The Princess was not a fan of the mustache, which made her role in shaving mine off all the more poignant:

She needs to practice lathering shaving cream on my face, though:

The shaving begins:

“You look weird,” she said:

Check out Shiftless Badger’s look of abject horror as I haphazardly wave the razor across his neck:

His fear gave way to calm as he realized how gentle I would be:

INPY started the night filming a Got Milk? commercial:

Starting Today goes to town on INPY’s face:

Mel makes her husband Fraim pay for participating in Movember:

Then Foxymoron shows her how it’s done:

Satan took over Rory’s body shortly before being shaved:

It didn’t stop Cagey, though, from shearing that thing off his face:

Cagey feels up Rory’s post-shave upper lip:

To read more about our month-long Movember journey, click HERE. I leave you with this exchange between The Princess and myself a few days ago:

AJT: “I think I’m going to move right along into Beardember and grow a beard in December.”

The Princess: “Why can’t you be normal?”

It is our Thanksgiving tradition, to leave the city every year. we went to Playa del Carmen, Mexico, for a friend’s wedding. The year before that, we went to New York City.

This year, The Princess and I decided to repeat Turkey 2005 and headed back to the City, the only City, to celebrate an apocryphal story that helps our children every year resupply the nation’s dwindling “turkey hand” epidemic.

I woke up sick as fuck on Wednesday morning. “Sick as fuck” has a particular meaning to me that might vary, to a certain degree, from what it would mean to you. To me, “sick as fuck” means a head cold that has melted my brain to the point that I act like a helpless, unwanted newborn.

The Princess, a middle school teacher whose Job-like patience might explain why she hasn’t systematically killed every one of her students yet, doted on me. Her doting, though, consisted of telling me to “suck it up”, “be a man”, and “sleep on the couch”. (While reading this excerpt, the Princess told me: “You’re a wimp when you’re sick.”)

I did sleep on the couch. And Thursday morning, despite hallucinations that Nicole Kidman and a polar bear were after my Golden Compass, I woke up at 7am to leave DC. A nearly five-hour trip can be pretty taxing when you can’t focus your eyes on the traffic on I-95. It can be even worse when your head cold makes you forget entire stretches of time. Luckily, The Princess’ Honda Accord gave us a moment of unmitigated glee when its odometer surpassed the 190,000-mile mark. With this kind of excitement to entertain us, we just knew it was going to be a fun weekend.

Day One (Thanksgiving Day)

Lincoln Tunnel is traffic-free…the streets of New York are dirty after the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade…thanks to my friends Blue and BK Broiler, for letting us crash at your awesome pad in Union Square…damn it, Strand Bookstore is closed…hot chocolate from Max Brenner and an unseasonably warm afternoon of walking around…dinner in Chinatown…General Tso’s Chicken and eggplant with broccoli at Wo Hop…some old man sits down at our booth across from me while The Princess is in the bathroom…and he doesn’t say a word.

Day Two (Friday)

Brunch at Le Pain Quotidien…finally, two hours shopping at the Strand…not enough time, only buy five books…Black Friday on Broadway Ave. is not a pretty sight…late lunch at Katz’s Deli, where they filmed Meg Ryan faking an orgasm…we sit one table over from it and hear one “I’ll have what she’s having” joke too many…best matzo ball soup I have ever had…

…karaoke that night at Sing Sing…The Princess sings like a gifted lark…with my nasally head cold scraping my vocal chords, I sound like a wounded seagull…still manage to sing my song, “God Bless the U.S.A.” by Lee Greenwood (click to watch YouTube video of my awful singing and The Princess laughing maniacally at me)…Udon noodles for late dinner…mine is served with a raw egg.

Day Three (Saturday)

The Princess goes shopping down Broadway while I sleep in…she buys me bagel with lox and cream cheese for breakfast…we walk to Union Square Park and Greenwich Village…visit Porto Rico Importing Company (the best smelling coffee since I was in Costa Rica)…buy way too much cheese, sausage, and olive oil at Murray’s Cheese…The Princess tries to sneak into a guided tour of how they make cheese…share some Pinkberry frozen yogurt…watch Hogan Knows Best and eat amazing meal…call an audible and decided to beat Sunday’s traffic by leaving NYC that night…get home at 12:20am, great call.

Day Four (Sunday)

While thousands of people jam the tunnels out of NYC, the New Jersey Turnpike, and I-95, The Princess and I sleep in…spend the day relaxing, reading, watching DVDs, laughing, wrestling…go to sleep early…Nyquil knocks me out.

This trip, we decided, was not so much a vacation to New York, but more of a vacation from our lives in DC that just happened to be in NYC. We didn’t do anything too “touristy” like visit the State of Liberty or even walk through Central Park. We just enjoyed being together in a city we both love.

After writing yesterday about holding Alexander the Great without having him vomit or shit on me, I found this disturbing video. It is safe for work, but if you ever had wonderful memories of playing with toys, prepare to say goodbye to them. Why am I showcasing this video if it’s so disturbing? Because if I had to suffer through it, then you do, too:

Late during last Friday night’s blogger happy hour, INPY drunkenly punched me in the face. I told him to take off his glasses and I slugged him right back, square in the jaw. We then hugged it out like men.

The next day, I got this text from him:

“You punch like a girl”

The truth is, I have never been in a fistfight. I have never taken part in this essential rite-of-passage, which for most men is right up there with “unhooking your first bra” and “entering a stupid tequila shot contest”.

This is NOT, however, due to a lack of trying.

Being an angry, hormonal, “woe’s me” kind of teenager, I constantly looked for fights whenever the opportunity arose. My condensed list of people I wanted to fight includes:

• A 7-11 cashier who falsely accused me of shoplifting.
• Some guy who sneaked into the swimming pool of my apartment complex and threw a chair into the pool.
• The Little League pitcher who knocked me down after throwing me some chin music.
• My bully.
• The party crasher who called me a kike.

But no matter how often I tried to instigate or escalate the potential fistfight, my would-be opponents backed down. Always.

As recently as last week, some guy at a bar on Capitol Hill, upset that I was joking with his kickball friends and threatened by my ability to make them laugh, called me a “scumbag” as I walked away. I turned around and marched aggressively back up to him and said, “What? What did you call me?” only to have him back down and apologize.

Why is this? I am not, physically speaking, a large man. I am, what you might generously call, “soccer player-sized”. So it can’t be my tangible presence that intimidates my adversaries.

I’ve developed a theory -– the reason my rivals acquiesce is that at the very moment a fistfight becomes a very real possibility, when the moment of truth intensifies, they must be thinking, “Holy shit, if this little guy wants to fight he must be able to beat me up.”

In retrospect, I’m ambivalent about never having been in a fistfight. On the one hand, I missed out on a masculine event that every man should go through, like climbing a mountain or not caving when his girlfriend starts to cry.

But on the other hand, I’ve never had to experience this pain:

Thanks for the link, Wonkette.

Arjewtino.com, which first began as a small, personal online diary experiment over at , is now one-year-old.

I launched my blog on July 31, 2006, with about me yelling at a deaf guy during a softball game. In my defense, the guy was British.

My very first blog entry. Click for better view.

Over the ensuing 12 months, I wrote some pretty awful crap that entertained you guys, attended well-documented blogger happy hours, made some new friends who I would now consider inviting to my wedding, met some bloupies who sometimes scared the be-Jeebus out of me, and uploaded dozens of photos of myself to make all of you swoon.

More one-year blogiversary trivia:

Number of posts: 175 (109 on arjewtino.blogspot.com; 66 on arjewtino.com).
Number of visits: 56,119
Number of pages viewed: 98,173
My favorite blog post to write (tie): Opening Day and How to Eat for Free in DC
Most read blog post (thanks to Wonkette): The Virginia DMV is anti-Semitic
Most commented-upon blog post: Suck it, Brazil! Er, I Mean, Mexico…! (72 comments)
First DC blog I ever read:
My favorite uploaded photos: and Special Ed
My favorite video uploaded to my blog:

My strongest blog influences: , , and Blogger happy hours I was too chicken to go to:
Blogger happy hours I attended: 11
Blogger happy hours I co-hosted: 5
My biggest fan: The Princess
My most consistent reader: Baby Bien
Funniest commenter I’ve never met: Platypus
Angriest commenter: GoPats
Friendships nearly lost due to Alyssa Milano:
Biggest help setting up my blog: Roosh
Money earned through blogging: $2.26
Money spent on blogging: $49.80
Times I wished I had an anonymous blog: 4,307

If this list sounds familiar, that’s because .

As a one-year birthday present to my blog, I installed a couple of new plugins, including Top Commenters and Most Commented Posts, both of which you can see on the right-hand sidebar below the blogroll.

Because we’re not Guatemala, Argentina beat Mexico last night 3-0 in la Copa América semifinals to advance to the tournament championship against Brazil – a rematch of the 2004 fiasco.

That final game, which I watched three years ago with a gazillion Brazilian fans at Marx Café in Mt. Pleasant, made an atheist out of me. I watched a 2-1 Argentina lead in stoppage time evaporate as Brazil scored the equalizer in the 93rd minute. The 93rd fucking minute! After my friends – who I warned not to razz me at that crucial moment – left the bar, I went home and cried.

You can’t have it both ways, kid.

Seeing my country line up in soccer’s “overtime” for penalty shots causes a dread matched only by my fear of coconut. (Seriously, that stuff is disgusting, how do you people eat it?) We all saw what happened last year in the World Cup against Germany.

The sting of that loss, coupled with my disgust of Americans’ obsequious worship of the Brazilian team, makes me absolutely sure that this Sunday, when the two South American futbol giants meet again, Argentina will win. Unless the ball is five times bigger than my head and the players are made of plastic.

Photo credit.

The Argentina-Brazil rivalry has been unmatched internationally since their first match in 1914, which we won 3-0. The teams have played each other 88 times, with Argentina winning 33, Brazil 34, and including 21 ties. Red Sox-Yankees seems like child play comparatively.

The Copa América, for those who don’t know, is the oldest surviving international football competition in the world, held for the first time in 1916 in Buenos Aires (won by Uruguay). Argentina is the most successful team in its history but hasn’t won a championship since 1993.

Click for a better view.

I’ll be watching the finale in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, with The Princess and her host family, which, I’m told, hates Argentina. Imagine that! who hates Argentina! How odd.

And when los Albicelestes hoist up that trophy, I might cry.

Vamos, vamos Argentina,
vamos, vamos a ganar,
que esta barra quilombera,
no te deja, no te deja de alentar!

They say no one ever really retires from kickball.

But after more than two years encompassing five seasons, it’s time for me to hang up my cleats and flip cup.

I joined kickball in spring 2005 for the thrill of competition and camaraderie. (Also, I was told, it was full of horny nerd-girls who liked to drink.) I was captain of my first WAKA team, the Bayside Tigers, a team comprised mostly of my goofy co-op neighbors who played like the same Screech who attended our moniker’s fictional school.

I led that team to an 0-10 record. That is not a typo. Oh and ten.

I joined the Kids Who Don’t Read Good in the fall and instantly liked my teammates. I stayed with the franchise as we evolved into Slow Children at Play the following year and, most recently, joined NAKID as Captain McDreamy and the Rainbow Coalition (named such, I think, because of the higher-than-normal ratio of gay guys on our team).

My kickball career has seen some amazing moments on the field, like the time in the spring of 2006 when we, an under-.500 team, beat the first-place team in the playoffs to make it to the .

There were also some great moments off the field, like the time I Evel-Knieveled across four tables and a pyramid of beer cups. Or like last fall, when paparazzi caught me drunkenly going home with the rubber chicken and sold the exclusive photo to Wonkette.

Kickball is not really a sport or an activity; it is, rather, an event — a combination of easy athleticism and heavy drinking. As those who play it can attest, kickball centers around one thing — . We talk about it in e-mails leading up to game time, sneak it past U.S. Park Police, drink it in excess at bars that look the other way, chug it to play flip cup, and rue it the next day when we’re hungover at work.

The truth is, I’m not retiring from kickball but rather the phenomenon of kickball. The general debauchery one can expect on any given kickball night — boob flashing, grinding on the “dance floor”, ass grabbing, pantsing sorry about that, Nickels), , vomiting, watching your male teammate make out with a girl AND a guy – has worn me out.

My teammates are in denial about my retirement. Who can blame them, when I, the team’s starting pitcher, put up the following pitching stats this season:

But yes, Rainbows, I’m done with kickball. It doesn’t mean I won’t still come cheer you on against our arch-nemesis Balls Deep or drink with you at the bar once or twice next season. It’s just that kickball is a kid’s game and, at nearly 32, I no longer want to keep up with you.

A teammate asked me recently what I was going to do with my Tuesday nights after retirement. That’s what I’d like to find out.

“Oh no, no. Too high, it’s too high.” — Cleveland Indians fan Ross Farmer tracking the flight path of a homerun, in Major League.

While watching my L.A. Dodgers pound the natty Nats 5-0 last night at RFK, I overheard two middle-aged men sitting behind me talking out of their collective ass.

Not literally, of course; but enough inane comments to nearly make me turn around and address them.

“Have you seen Fever Pitch?” one of them said. “That’s a great movie.”

Wince.

“He was safe by a mile,” after Ryan Church got caught stealing in the 2nd inning, even after television replays showed him out by a step.

Groan.

“I was rooting for Duke.”

Idiot.

There really should be three guarantees in life: death, taxes, and baseball fans saying stupid things. Attend any ball game and you’ll hear pseudo-managers argue obtusely about topics like the Yankees’ payroll, interleague play, and sabermetrics.

Or you’ll hear fans question a team’s strategy, the umpires’ calls, and baseball trivia — usually contrary to the facts.

Football may have its Monday-morning quarterback phenomenon, but baseball has more fan-based, second-guessing and ersatz expertise than any other sport. We like to think we know what we’re talking about; baseball and the nature of its provincial beginnings bring out that need probably more than any other sport.

P.S. Last night’s Dodgers win raised the ballclub’s all-time record to 9,389-8,542, a winning percentage of .524. Just in case you were wondering. Here are some reasons why some of us bleed Dodger Blue:

My Green Line train was late by six minutes last night on my way home. I mumbled softly something about Metro’s inconsistent train schedule and went back to finishing The Examiner’s crossword.

What I didn’t do was this:



From the :

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina: Road rage is common in many countries. But in Argentina, railroad rage was the talk of the town after riots shut down one of South America’s busiest train stations during a midweek rush hour.

In one of the largest outbursts of passenger fury over poor service in years, mostly working-class commuters rioted at the Constitucion Plaza station in Buenos Aires after a train breakdown threw Tuesday’s departures into chaos.

Rioters set fires, destroyed ticket booths and looted shops. About 100 police fought back with tear gas and arrested 16 rioters. Another 21 people were injured.

Passengers on commuter rail lines, privatized in the 1990s under then-President Carlos Menem, for years have complained the new operators are failing to provide timely service on crowded routes.

My native country has a long tradition of social unrest and demonstrations. In an election year such as this one, it becomes even more common in Buenos Aires and Argentina for people to fight back at perceived inequalities, corruption, and incompetence in our leadership. This riot is yet another example of el pueblo’s level of frustration and, combined with the current airline strike, milk shortage, and threats to halt garbage collection, the frayed strings holding Buenos Aires together are ready to snap.

Thanks to Roosh for the heads up on this one. Good luck on your trip to South America, buddy.

Whenever I need a laugh, I go to my Netflix page and read some of my friends’ movie reviews. There is something inherently voyeuristic about seeing what movies your friends are renting. Luckily for me — and you — this means I get to share some of their more amusing critiques on my blog.

These are written by GoPats, J-Vo, Tits McGee, and Ladder 49.