Novel update

Ok. So I finally finished part five of six of this novel I’m writing. Here’s the stats so far:

Part V words: 25,000
Total words: 186,000

I’m printing it out right now, so I can re-read it and see how bad it really is. Let me just say right now, though, that Canon printers suck big cheese.

1: they do not have refillable ink cartridges, so you are forced to buy their crappy ink. Paying $30 for 5 mL of ink is waaaay too much. If I had known that that had a chip that counted pages on the cartridge and refused to print after a certain number of pages had printed, no matter the actual amount of ink in the cartridge, I would have never bought it.

2: their printing software, for lack of a better term, sucks. I can’t save my printing settings at all. If I’m in a rush and just press print then it will print the first page first and the last page last. When you are printing 100+ pages, it really blows to re-order all the sheets. I miss my Epson that would actually save the settings. Plus whenever I try to print webpages, it shrinks them all down to where they are unreadable. I finally figured out how to select fit-to-page. Maybe I’m a dumbass, but I think for the printer should always print to page unless you tell it otherwise.

3: the thing jams like smuckers. Every five pages or so, it jams. Only because it’ll try to grab more than one page at a time. “Oh no!” it freaks out, “What did I do! I should stop!!!” Idiotic piece of plastic shit. My old printer used to keep going until it got the job done.

But that’s what I get for trying to save $20 on the printer. Only a few months more and I’ll feel that I suffered long enough to justify getting a new printer. This time I research ink prices and which cartridges can actually be refilled. It’s such a waste just to throw out that much plastic every few weeks.

Hairs!

Ok. So to continue with my self-deprecating, or else to celebrate the fact I’m getting old, I will write a blog about my hairs, or lack there-of.

Last week I went to my friend’s bachelor’s party. We played paint ball in the woods and when we ran out of CO2 we did what any testosterone loving guys would do: threw the paint as hard as we could at each other. My wife got my turn caught on video. I bend over, two guys chuck paint at me, and I proceed to cuss about how much it hurts. When I watched the video, all I could focus on was the straight view to my scalp when I bent over.

I have known now for a while that I was thinning and tried my best to convince people of it. “I’m getting old,” I would say. To which older people would say, “You’re not that old.” Which is about as annoying as admitting that I’m getting out of shape and then obese people saying, “You’re as skinny as a rail!”

What? Just because I’m not obese doesn’t mean that I can watch my weight? Likewise, time, no matter how illusionary, does march forward and I am getting older.

I think that most people confuse my “I’m getting old” with “I don’t want to get old.” Getting old in this culture has such a negative connotation to it. Maybe I just don’t buy into it. I like getting older–not because my body is starting to fail, but because I have always pretty much existed in my mind. I thrive on intellectual activities. As such, getting old allows me to experience more of life and in more perspectives than I ever thought possible when I was younger.

Granted, I’m pushing the limits of attention span and memory capacity. I find that I can’t juggle as many things as I could when I was younger, but here’s the clincher: the projects I did when I was younger weren’t as nuanced nor complex as now. Rather than doing Mathcounts, acting, music, writing, boy scouts, school, family, pets, and recreational reading, I now only do a few things, mainly family, music, and especially writing.

During high school and before, my writing was shallow, written quickly and then put away before given much thought (much like these blogs). I even published three books of unrevised writing and got my friends to buy them. I still have the master copy, but can’t read it any more. I rushed through it and though I gave it my best shot, I know I can do better. So some day I might take some of those story ideas and breathe new life into them but for now, I’m content to focus on my novel, which by the way, I just started Chapter 29 of 36!

So, back to my hairs. After seeing that video, I realized that no amount of persuasion could convince me that I wasn’t going bald. I had conclusive proof. The next day, I best a hair cutting kit and shaved my head into a buzz cut. It only barely hides the evidence, but rather than attempting the one hair comb over that my wife thought I should try, I accepted my genetics with open arms.