November 28, 2011

• By the numbers

  Concepts in life, by the numbers.

  4: Hours spent apart before you need to greet someone again.

  When someone leaves after having hung out with you, the need to greet them begins recharging immediately.  If you see them within four hours, no need to regreet is necessary.  There has not been enough experience in-between greets for another full greeting to be appropriate.  Sometimes I will be in the same building with people and they will greet me again minutes after our original greeting.  That is called greeding: being greedy for greetings. 

  5: Max amount of hours in a nap.

  I have been considering this one for some time, and I have weighed the arguments for every prospective hour.  Five I think is the most tenable cutoff point.  You can live a day happily on six hours of sleep, but below that it gets kind of fishy.  Even as a career level 8.9 napper, I can take a five hour nap and still get to bed by 1 AM and sleep for another seven.  Not that I’m usually in bed by 1, but I’m just saying it’s possible.

  (Also, I know this isn’t a post about nap philosophy, but I would like to point out that there is nothing inherent to the nap that makes it by nature a half-hearted venture.  Naps can be just as sweet a spiritual feast as a full night of sleep; their defining characteristic is their length.  So enough of this foofaraw about naps intrinsically lacking the existential zing of a full night’s rest. Yes, you heard me, foofaraw!)

  60 seconds, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 6 hours:  Versions of your life story you should have rehearsed. 

  Sixty seconds is for over coffee with an acquaintance, or that acquaintance’s friend.  Five minutes is for at a bus stop.  Thirty minutes is for a car ride to somewhere else in the city; possibly a round trip.  Six hours is for being trapped in an elevator with someone.  Also, some plane rides.

  6: The average amount of months it takes a movie to recharge.

  Like greetings, movies take time to recharge before you can watch them again.  This one is highly subjective and the average means practically nothing.  Some movies recharge after two days, like Ocean’s Eleven or The Emperor’s New Groove.  Others, perhaps serious movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Braveheart, will take longer to recharge, maybe six months or a year.  Still other movies, like Brothers Bloom and Toy Story 3, were ok, and therefore might take awhile to recharge because they were nothing special.

  There is actually a word for the last time you watch a movie.  You enjoyed the movie, but you know you won’t watch it again, because it’s just its time.  ‘Nosam’ (pronounced no-sam) is a verb meaning ‘To reach the peak of watching a particular movie; the act of watching a movie for the last time’.  The etymology of this word comes from Lord of the Rings when Frodo says to Sam, who wants to follow him to Mordor, ‘No Sam, not this time’.  Frodo has realized that while Sam has been great, the time for them is over.   So I nosammed Office Space the last time I watched it.  You have probably nosammed movies recently without even knowing it.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking.  Sam does eventually go with Frodo to Mordor.  But then, in our lives we watch a lot of movies again that we really shouldn’t.  So it all works out.

  Here is a graph of people using the phrase ‘was like’ as opposed to ‘said’ over time:

   

  Well, that’s all.  Join us on the next By the Numbers segment to see how many hours spent on facebook per day equals a meaningless life.  So long! 

  • 9:25 pm
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