Movember...

You'd never know it from the weather outside--it's 17 and sunny right now and this could pass for a cool day in August--but we've hit November. This is the month for diseases of all sorts: it's Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month; COPD Awareness Month, Alzheimer's Disease Awareness Month; American Diabetes Month (I guess Canadian Diabetes Month is December); Crohn's and Ulcerative Colitis Awareness Month; and Lung Cancer Awareness Month.

Are you aware of all these diseases? Good, your work is done for another month.

Seriously, it's always bothered me when days, weeks, or entire months are set aside to promote some vague "awareness". It's International Drum Month, too: does that mean drums are verboten at any other time of the year?
Take  Remembrance Day, the 11th of this month, by the way. It's not that I have a problem with Remembrance Day. On the contrary. I just wonder why it's only one day a year. Shouldn't we keep the spirit of Remembrance Day year-round?

The same goes for Mother's Day, or Canada Day, or National Piss-Shiver Awareness Week, or any other pseudo-occasion you can dream up. Valentine's Day? A pointless popularity contest in school (can you tell how popular I wasn't?) and it's not much better in adulthood. Really, does it have to be Valentine's Day for me to acknowledge how much I love my wife? I do it every day.

Christmas? For Christians, it certainly shouldn't be the only day of the year they think about Christ. For the rest of us, sure, the occasion is nice if you don't let it get the better of you, but again, maybe we should give gifts to people "just because".

Back to November: it's also National Novel Writing Month (because any novel worth publishing is written in thirty days!);  National Pomegranate Month (whatever); and National American Heritage Month. Feel free to ignore your American heritage at any other time.

And oh, yeah, it's Movember.

In case you've been living under a beard, Movember is a portmanteau of "mousrache" and "November", The idea here is that men, and particularly hirsute women, I guess, are supposed to shave their moustaches off at the first of the month and let them grow until December. This is supposed to somehow promote awareness of prostate cancer, by some mechanism I utterly fail to grasp. I mean, at the very least, shouldn't it be your ass-hair you don't shave this month?

And get this: you're supposed to seek out sponsorship and raise funds. I can just see it now.  "Hello, I'm Ken from down the road and I'm raising funds to combat prostate cancer. See, here's the deal. You give me money, and I don't shave." Cue the slamming of the door.

By the bye, I shaved last night. Not because it was the first of November...because I dislike chewing on my moustache.