In today’s Journal
▪ A guy once said to me
▪ Today is Sunday, and Easter
▪ Topic: Sometimes I Hate the Truth of Numbers
▪ Daily diary
▪ Of Interest
▪ The numbers
A guy once said to me, “You shouldn’t work on Sunday. Even God took Sunday off.”
To which I replied, “Ah, but I am not a god.”
***
From the Department of Stuff You Already Know, today is Sunday, and Easter, and a short day for me.
Sometime today, I’ll help my wife set up a small office for a surprise party kind of thing for a co-worker of hers who is retiring soon.
Today is a slow “news” day today too, as you’ll see in the “Of Interest” section.
Anyway, I wish you a Happy Easter in the joyful, Easter-Bunny, enjoying-children’s-excitement kind of way if you’re still fortunate enough to have those odd little people running about.
And I wish a thoughtful Easter to those of you for whom today is a major religious or spiritual holiday. I should have done yesterday since most of you who read this won’t see it until much of the day is gone.
Topic: Sometimes I Hate the Truth of Numbers (A Brief, Maybe Humorous, and Possibly Sobering Essay)
When you talk about any god, you’re talking about eternity. Gods don’t sweat “time” much because it holds no consequences for them, except in terms of what they hand down to their creations.
One of my favorite passages from the Christian bible is Psalm 90, in which the author writes in Verse 10, “The days of our years are threescore years and ten.”
My favorite verse from that song is Verse 12: “[T]each us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”
Hey, truedat. Only by “numbering our days” can we see them clearly enough to make use of them. So I thought I’d do a little numbering here.
“Three-score and ten years” is 70 years.
(See, sometime a long time ago, some guy decided to call 20 of anything a “score,” though I’m not sure why. For example, I don’t believe it had anything to do with making a goal in soccer or any other sport where the term “score” actually makes sense.
Or maybe it did. Maybe the shooter was required to take 20 steps before attempting to kick the ball into the goal. I really don’t know.
But I digress.)
Anyway three score and ten years is 70 years, and it occurs to me that 70 years of 365 days each adds up to only 25,550 days.
(Another aside — in an effort not to be nitpicky, I will stipulate to slight inaccuracies in my calculations as I’m writing-off the 17.5 extra “leap” days that occur during those years, depending on which year we were born.
Those leap days are sort of included anyway when we count hours, because leap days exist only to make up for the few extra minutes we add to each day to round up to 24 hours. Frankly, the whole thing seems more than a little suspicious to me.)
So our starting point is 25,550 days. Now for the math and why I sometimes hate it.
First, let me subtract the 8 hours per day we’re advised to sleep.
After all, nobody can argue that sleeping is actually living. Breathing, yes. Existing, maybe, sort of. But living? Uh, no.
There are 24 hours in a day. The 8 hours we’re told to sleep adds up to one-third of that time, and one-third on one scale is one-third on another. So we’re advised to sleep 23.33 years of our allotted 70.
Which leaves us with 46.67 years of actual living (17,035 days).
But we should also subtract the Sundays (46.67 x 52) from those remaining days. After all, we aren’t supposed to accomplish anything on Sundays. Shrug. We might as well sleep.
So of the 17,035 days we are given to actually live, we are advised to spend 2,427 of those days not doing anything that might be construed as “work.” And trust me, there are people out there watching.
So that drops our effective lifespan to 14,608 days. Or 40 years.
But my head’s beginning to ache, so I’m gonna go back to the macro scale of three-score and ten.
Of my very own personal allotted 70 years, on my 67th birthday later this year I will have used up 95.7% of my time. (Or, if you wish, 38.28 of my 40 years.)
Either of which explains, at least to me, three things:
1. why I hate the accuracy of math;
2. why I “work” on most days, usually without noticing at all which particular label the day carries; and
3. why I spend as little time in suspended animation (sleep) as possible.
Oh, and as a bonus, it also explains why, when I want a cigar, I have a cigar.
***
Rolled out at 2 this morning, then spent a few hours playing silly games with myself. At least I wasn’t asleep.
I was going to write today, but my wife and I decided to set up the office early. And then while we were out, I remembered I had admin things to do (some stuff on PWW, prep and distribute BO5, etc.) so I’m using today for that.
Talk with you again tomorrow.
Of Interest
Via Karen Riggs, see “Rare Manuscript Found…” at https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/04/19/libro-de-los-epitomes/. (Thanks, Karen.)
See “150+ Famous Writing Quotes…” at https://blog.reedsy.com/writing-quotes/. I list this as entertainment, not necessarily as valid information. As you can see from yesterday’s post, I’m a little addicted to quotations. Which is like saying if you stand in the path of an Oklahoma tornado, you might experience a little wind.
Fiction Words: XXXX
Nonfiction Words: 930 (Journal)
Total words for the day: 930
Writing of Blackwell Ops 6: Charlie Task (novel)
Day 10… 3212 words. Total words to date…… 25902
Day 11… XXXX words. Total words to date…… XXXXX
Total fiction words for the month……… 35940
Total fiction words for the year………… 253741
Total nonfiction words for the month… 25630
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 102700
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 356441
Calendar Year 2019 Novels to Date…………………… 5
Calendar Year 2019 Novellas to Date……………… X
Calendar Year 2019 Short Stories to Date… X
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 42
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 7
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 193
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31