Beans and Beanie

I am very clumsy and prone to accidents.  Right now I am typing this very slowly because I cut my left middle finger open on a can of pinto beans yesterday morning.  Later in the day I rolled over my foot with a A-frame dolly with about 30 pieces of 4’x10’ lauan.  I have bumps and bruises all over me.  None of this, however, is as frustrating as my sinus headaches, which are completely out of control and vary with the weather.  If it were something I was causing I could shrug it off like my finger and purple toenail, chocking it up to my lack of innate grace.  Having no control over my headaches (even drugs don’t cut the pain) just makes the pain that much more unbearable.

I told you all about the day a couple of months ago when I woke up with one of my pressure headaches but couldn’t let the day pass without working on my novel.  I had planned the whole week to spend this day working on a section where I needed Christina, my heroine, to be confronted with the poverty of not having any ambition to make it in New York.  I needed her to see what it would be to not take the opportunities when they were given, leading to a coasting and dependent existence.  Sadly, my head hurt so badly I couldn’t look at the screen of my computer.  My solution was to call my ex since we had been on friendly terms, he owed me a favor, and I couldn’t think of anyone else who would be willing to transcribe my ramblings.

You guys remember this, right?  I talked about it when I was discussing word choice.  Well, now I am going to talk about it in terms of character development.  You see, that day I created Beanie.  My ex named him, though.  Beanie is another man-child content to sloth about and mooch off of his hard working parents.  I hold a lot of disdain for him, I hate asking my parents for money, and I am constantly striving to get beyond a mean and meager existence.  I am jealous of Beanie because he doesn’t think about anything too much, and he is content to wake up on a couch that is not his own. 

I have been struggling to remember what I used to think about before family troubles and dude troubles began to hold a hostile occupation of my brain.  I secretly believe I was bored most of the time but didn’t have anything that I actively didn’t want to think about.  Today seems to have confirmed this feeling because I didn’t think so much about my life, but I also didn’t have much to think about otherwise.  I spent most of the day singing power ballads.  My point being, Beanie has a wonderful ability to float from day to day and meander from job, to activity, to napping in other people’s apartments without worrying about the bills, and rent, and the direction of his life.  On the other hand, I can’t see a very fulfilling future for this peripheral character either.