A letter from the future about the past.
Verizon, you are my… density!
1) Shpongle @ The Orange Peel. Rapturous indeed.
2) 80 mile drive home along the most scenic and gently banking mountain road; but completely in the Night Driver arcade game from the eighties. Thank you Steve Miller, Dennis Brown and all the highway workers that assured my pleasant journey home.
3) Invigorating, life-affirming shower. Thank you, water.
4) Discover Google Earth now has stars. All of them. No really, I mean it.
5) Spend next 4 hours cataloging ‘Galactical Observations’ in folders brimming over with placemarks for categories like ‘Its all to beautiful’, Jewelry Box, Disco is Back!, Blueberry patches. Found precisely, incontrovertably where God actually lives. And where the Lizard People come from.
6) Lovely morning stroll with the one I love.
7) Blueberry Waffles. All that trapesing though cosmic blueberry patches definitely had an affect on growing hunger.
8) Send email to my friend Alan at NASA apologizing profusely for complaining once that all that mind-numbingly dense observational data ought to be available to everyone in a contextual framework we can comprehend. “Dear Alan, just saw the stars from Google Earth. Sorry, my bad.”
Is it just me, or does it seem disgraceful that fully articulated dancing humanoid robots exist - in fact are built by one of Japan’s largest and most well known companies, but instead of robots, Tokyo Power has been using human workers who are knowingly sacrificing their lives to attempt containment and assessment in Fukishima.
The pace of life is hard to quantify; it’s so subjective. Sometimes it seems to drag, when you’re bored or unhappy. Sometimes it seems to fly; you can almost see the calendar sheets flying off in the wind like leaves.
Today, I decided to try and quantify it anyway. Just what’ve I got left?
When it comes to life expectancy, the Floyd said it best: “80 years with luck or even less”.
I’m 45 this year, so that leaves 35 years. I’m just 5 years past the halfway point, right? It’s been a wild ride up till now, so the movie has a lot farther to go.
Next, the old lament about sleeping away a third of your life is unavoidable unless you’re a robot (or perhaps a transgenic cyborg mutant). I believe the quality of sleep should be enhanced as much as possible with buttery sheets and an ultra-comfy mattress, but there’s not much you can do with those hours except whatever biological purpose it serves your body. So, I will only count waking hours in considering the remainder of my time since for all intents and purposes, I may as well be dead at night.
Average Human Lifetime Waking Hours
80 years x 365 days x 16 hours = 467,200 waking hours
Wow, that’s not a lot of hours really. It’s humanly comprehensible. You can compare that to numbers you’ve actually managed like a mortgage or yearly salary in dollars.
Personal Remaining Waking Hours
35 years x 365 days x 16 hours = 204,400 waking hours
Ok, knowing I’m a little past the halfway point this isn’t suprising, but it’s still sort’ve chilling. And it gets chillier when I take a totally accessible figure like that and begin to think how much of it will be frittered away or otherwise spent engaged in mindless tasks like cleaning the fish tank, showering, shaving, eating, commuting, taking out garbage, sorting the real mail from the junk mail, etc, ad nauseum.
When I was younger, I was able to pull off 12+ hour workdays with ease. And although I’m still hyperactive as ever, I have to be honest. 8 hours of real productivity per day is about the most I can hope to average with the rest of my time. Until I’m 80. That’s assuming that in the near term, I might see more, while toward the end I might bunk off just a tad. And occasionally go on holiday.
Personal Remaining Productive Waking Hours
35 years x 365 days x 8 hours = 102,200 productive waking hours
Zowie! Now we’re getting down to the amounts where the bank applies a monthly service charge to your account if you don’t have that much in your account. Crap!
So, here’s the bit about time seeming to fly. Earlier, I thought I was only halfway through the movie. Turns out I’m 3/4s of the way through! What?
If my lifetime waking hours were 467,200 and I only have 102,200 left; holy flying spaghetti monster, the show’s almost over! I better get crackin’ and stop this mindless blogging!
-=Cliff>
