Day 18,466

Portland, Oregon

Glad to be here on day 18,466, though my expression might not suggest it. It took a long time to get here,  but I can honestly say it was worth it. I look forward to day 18,467–it has promise! And day 20,000 will be here before I know it. How time flies.

My wife, to whom I shall refer in these posts as ‘my wife,’  or ‘the wife,’  and sometimes ‘the wife unit,’ recently challenged me to defend our various cockeyed time counting systems. How we got on this topic I have no idea, but something triggered it and I suddenly found myself having to defend six thousand years of time keeping history.  I suppose I didn’t have to defend it, but she seemed determined to completely discredit our age-old ways of counting; someone needed to step up and give a defense. She was ruthless in her cross exam. I did my best, but ultimately, the question remained floating in the air mostly unanswered: Why do we count in 7’s, 12’s, 60’s and 360’s? Is there anything inherently ‘360’ about the universe? Or is it just a pleasant fiction?

The largest natural cycle I can think of that has a one to-one counting correspondence are the months–clocking in at twelve, so to speak, in a year. But the division of a day into hours and the aggregation of days into a year,  as well as days in a week–this seems a little more arbitrary, and due to elliptical orbits and various planetary motional perturbations, our time reckoning as it exists now will never precisely line up with the celestial realm. The Swiss will undoubtedly figure it out, eventually. Why count by 12’s? Who knows? It just seems to fit pretty well for the most part.

What I do know is that my alarm clock doesn’t give a snap about these deep questions–I’m slated to wake up tomorrow at seven a.m. sharp, Pacific Time, day 18,467 of this life,  orbital quirks or no.