Stuff to See!

9,893 Down, X to Go

The year 2005 has an odd significance to me.
Much like 2001, which I began, oddly enough, watching a Stanley Kubrick film, I have actual plans for the upcoming New Year (January 1st, 2005). Extra bonus points to anyone who can guess which movie I will be watching when 2005 is upon us.
The passage of time is something which each person on this planet seems to see a little differently. From my point of view, I remember beginning 2004 with a rather nasty bit of flu and a well-deserved week off from work. Days pass with their minute or major challenges, trials, tribulations, and next thing I know it's June 30th. Where is my life going?
To be fair, this year has been a pretty wild one, so far.
So naturally, my mind turns to food. For whatever reason Chinese food comes to mind. I don't have any Chinese food, or means to either buy or cook any, so I'll have to live without it. I should live, so that will be like every other day...until the one where I don't wake up, or wake up in Hell. Not that I believe in an afterlife.
So summer is here, and all the cicadas are gone from this region. Funny how no one seems to talk about them any more. Where is the cicada interest uproar? Why haven't I been treated to hundreds of newspaper articles bemoaning their fate? Or should I be sorry? The ones which survived, as opposed to the trillions who died without begetting offspring, should be nice and snugly buried so that they can lay their eggs. In 2021, they'll be back.
So how will I view the passage of 17 years, assuming I survive so long? Will they seem to have gone by quicker than the last 17? Will I be running into strange and unusual acquaintances from 2004 as I have from 1987 (which I still think is super-cool)? Who the devil knows?
In 1990 I was entering high school. From that perspective, the four years which awaited me seemed like an eternity. In 1994, I had a hard time remembering exactly where all the time had gone. Ten years later...well, has it been ten years yet? A hair more, actually.
I have a theory...probably not unique to myself, but one which seems to fit the relativism of the perception of time elapsed. The older a person becomes, the lower the proportion of time period measured to time period elapsed. Or, more succinctly, age and time measurement are inversely proportional to each other. The ratio of four years to seventeen is greater than four years to twenty-seven. On the face of it, that makes perfect sense.
'But wait, Zen,' someone cries in the wilderness. 'A year is a year is a year, correct?'. A just question. Assuming time is itself stable, which for the moment ignores the perversions of time which can occur as one travels in space at speeds approaching the speed of light, assuming time is measurable much like mass or volume, the time which elapses in a year, a minute, an hour, is relatively absolute (as I choke over that ugly phrase). In my experience, this has proven true.
Yet I too have felt as if time seems to pass more quickly as I get older. In my rather shoddy theory, the more I look back on measurable periods of time, the more measurable periods I see, and I perceive those absolute periods against the background of my greater experience. The individual years become a less significantly measurable part of my total existence. Having experienced more of these measurable periods, each one of them becomes a smaller part of my experience, and as such become, perceptually, smaller themselves. Or, more plainly, I'm getting old.
Again, I'll return to high school. In the beginning, I'd experienced 3.25 4-year periods in life. By the end of high school, I'd experienced 4.25. At this point I'm up to 6.75, and the last four years, especially, seem to have flown by. Yet each individual year was still somewhere in the neighborhood of 365.25 days. In absolute terms, each year was essentially of the same extent.
This is making my head hurt.
At the same time, the individual days seem to drag on. The day itself is a much smaller measurement of time, and, as such, the passage of one day to the next doesn't seem any more precipitous from day to day. I've experienced 9,893 days so far. October 14th of this year will be my 10,000th day of existence, and I plan to celebrate it mightily. The difference in the ratio of 1:10,000 (.0001) and 1:9000 (.000111...) is, and I hesitate to use technical terms, really small (.0000111...), or somewhere just over 1:100,000. Small enough to be effectively nothing, in other words. So what's the point of that exercise?
The accretion of these minute insignificances has a cumulative effect. Each day elapsed becomes that much smaller in relation to the number of total days passed.
Sounds like I'm trying to have it both ways here, and I am, just as most people do. I just felt the urge to make something which seems so perfectly obvious nearly incomprehensible by means of simple math. It's a hobby.
So what about sleep, then? Recently I've had less and less sleep, mostly because I have plenty of things on my mind (such as continuing my RZ tales), but sometimes because external events interpose themselves into my private monologue of a life.
There are many people who say that sleep deprivation is cumulative. I figure I'll make up my sleep debt when my life is over, but what if that isn't the end? Like I said earlier, I don't believe in an afterlife, so most of what is to come is pointless, but here it comes.
Let's say, for the moment, that the Judeo-Christian ideas of Heaven and Hell exist when we escape these mortal coils of flesh. Leaving aside the various and inconsistent prerequisites for membership in one of these post-mortal realms aside from justice and villainy, I'll suggest an aphorism as a postulate: sleeping the sleep of the just. For the sake of argument, I'll define that aphorism as follows: the just sleep well. Justice and villainy can be undefined terms which are diametrically opposed, but let's assume that those who have justice will go to Heaven, and those who are villainous will go to Hell. That's close enough to the bare bones Judeo-Christian perspective that it should stand.
Using these terms and the definition of the postulate, I can logically infer that the unjust, aka the villainous, sleep unwell. I know nothing other than justice leads to sleeping well, and villainy leads to sleeping unwell, or justice=sleep and villainy=unsleep. Sleep deprivation is a form of sleeping unwell, and, as such, using my arbitrary terms and definitions, is connected to villainy. Therefore, it is logical that those who accrue more sleep are more just, and those who accrue less sleep are more villainous. Let's say that a sleep number of 5, in a scale of 0 (villainy) to 10 (justice) is the cutoff point for membership to Hell and Heaven, respectively. Those who score below 5 go to Hell, and those who score above 5 go to Heaven. The scores are directly proportional to the amount of hours spent asleep to those spent awake, with those who sleep all of the time earning a 10, and those who never sleep earning a 0.
Leaving aside the troublesome question of people who score exactly 5, it follows that those who sleep more will go to Heaven. Considering that most people sleep no more than one third of the time, it would follow that most people will go to Hell. Those who end up in Heaven will generally sleep more often than not, so what's the point? Sign me up for a first class ticket to Hell!!
Then again, like I said, I don't believe in the afterlife, so that entire exercise was pointless. I don't believe anything remotely like what I've detailed above, and I can see that my argument, which may be perfectly logical, has some factual questions, leaving aside the existence of the afterlife for the moment. Is it factually correct that justice is solely tied to sleep? No. Is it factually correct that villainy is tied to wakefulness? Well, most acts of villainy are performed by people who are awake, as are most acts of justice. I only mention this so that I can disavow any belief of my afterlife play before people decide to rain scorn and hatred upon me, which might be fun, but would be better suited to other aspects of my life.