To Seeing the Invisible

The following has been in my mind lately, it was inspired by a book I've been reading recently ( Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond - you should check it out!) In my body right now, biochemical reactions we call "life" are occuring. It's cool that they've been going on my whole life, my heart has done well over 750 million beats at this point. Pretty awesome. My life processes date back longer than that. Consider that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of our ancestors on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of our pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering that tiny permuation of A, T, C, and G to the right partner at the...

650,000 Six hundred and fifty thousand. This is the number of hours a human being is expected to live in a developed world, if he's lucky. Just look at that number again--those six, plain, numbers. Am I the only one that's surprised to see such a concise numerical representation of my expected lifespan? It saddens me to know, there's only six digits on that thing...A Google search tells me that Barnes & Noble sells more of that shitty Nook reader in a day than this number. I've already lived at least 175,000 of it, and it sickens me to even think of putting into perspective how many of that 650k is sleep. I don't mean to bring it up as some kinda personal death clock, or reminder of doom or something--especially for you Rachel--but I think it's a good idea to start changing things. I've come up with a few: Stay friends. An hour with a friend is definitely not an hour. I don't want any regrets. Weasel your way through to find that one positi...