October is Beard Time

Generally before winter I grow out my facial hair, this year I grew a goatee around September but now I'm growing it into full beard mode because I think it will go better with my Halloween costume (which is going to be totally awesome). It's not a stretch to think that most guys, especially when they're older, are pretty strict when it comes to their facial hair. I know if my father-in-law were to shave his mustache it would be a pretty drastic change for him and everyone that knows him. Last week I was musing if this is a pretty universal thing, is uniform facial hair something that a large majority of guys do or is it just something older guys do?

As I said, I usually grow mine out in the fall/winter for no particular reason, but it kind of makes sense for the colder weather and really I just think it's fun to change things up. I grew my hair out in early college and then again over the last two years, and getting that cut was a pretty big (and seemingly extreme) change for me but I really don't think I'll ever get to that point with facial hair. Sooner or later I get sick of it and shave, and eventually I get bored with shaving it all off and grow it out. Any insight into other observations or stats about this I would be very interested in seeing, so if you have them please share!

I can't believe it's October already, and I really can't believe how much I've been reading just in the second half of this year. I'm now 32% of the way through Fires of Heaven, still on track to finish the book by the end of October and then I'll be reading through 1984 pretty quickly hopefully and onto the rest of the Wheel of Time books. Previous to now I was splitting each book with at least one or two other books between them, and I think this was part of the reason I was going through them so slowly. Taken over time the Wheel of Times books are heavy and cI would even describe a fair amount of what they cover as relatively boring, but when you're reading them and going through it the story is enthralling and I think I need to ride that wave to get through all of the books in anywhere close to my lifetime.

Random Thoughts

Now that my hair has gotten longer, it's horribly apparent how much hair I lose every time I take a shower or brush my hair. I can't help but feel like after a few days, or at most a few months, of this practice I could easily go bald. Warning: this could easily be the most boring thing in the world to some of you, but these are some of the randomly stupid things I think about in life.

Looking at the actual numbers is interesting, or maybe I just have some bizarre (diagnosable) part-time obsession with math. The average human head, at least scientists believe, has between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs on it. What's surprising is that some claim the color of hair determines how many there are, that blondes have more hairs than brunettes and so on. So let's look at how much hair I lose on the average day. During a shower I'd venture a guess that I end up losing about 20-30 hairs, but let's take that to an extreme and say 50 a day, plus brushing I'll go way out on a limb and say that I end up pulling out ~100 hairs in any given day.

If this is the case, and I think the actual number is much smaller, then it would take me 1,250 days to pull out all of my hair. That's 3.43 years! Considering my hair is about down to my shoulders now, and I've been letting it grow for under two years still, I don't think I'm at much risk of going bald with my regular day-to-day practices! I'm quite relieved by this, and honestly I expected (and hoped) to find out just as much, but really when you see how freaking much hair comes off of my head you have to be amazed that I'm not bald already! (I have had a widow's peak since I was a baby, however)