So I came across an interesting Web site that breaks down people's lives in weeks. Looking at the charts on there was sort of humbling, seeing how short our lives our and how long periods of time are really just a set of weeks that we string together.
Having looked at those charts, I figured I'd do my own. First, I plotted out some major points in my life--beginning dates were circled. That kind of points out important times, but to get a real feel for how long certain things have been as relative to my whole life I opted to color the squares.
When I do, some things become really evident. I've been at my current workplace a long time--longer than just about any other string. I have been there longer than I went to grade school through high school (when I add in college, however, I have still spent more of my life in school than at my current employer).
If I look at the color blocks at time in particular states, the blue is formidable, but it still has a long ways to go before catching up to what the California bar would be--pretty much all the boxes before the yellow section. But if I put the yellow, green, and blue together--time out of California--it looks like more time than I've spent in Cali. That's an illusion, caused by how much I've broken California time up. Still, I'm getting close; give it three more years, and I'll have been out of my birth state longer than I was in it.
School life it appears still takes up more of my life than work-only life, but if one considers that I was working during the time I went to college, then the story is quite different.
Anyway, below are the charts.
Four people from my high school have died since our graduation that I know of. I went to a small high school, so there were only about thirty or so in each class (my graduating class had thirty-five). One of those who died was one of my best friends, from about age ten through a little after age thirty. Unfortunately, we had a falling out about that time, and the friendship never recovered. A couple of years after our friendship came to an end, my friend's body started to shut down through the auspices of some odd disease, such that the past decade has been one of great pain, a pain I could only read about third-hand through a blog that at the end of April came to an conclusion.
Here is a chart of the way people from my high school have died:
All of the deaths are unique, as I guess in some way all deaths are. The first to go was someone else in my own class; he died within a year, in a motorbike accident. Tragic as it was, somehow, it didn't seem surprising; he had always had something of a wild streak in him. I don't remember the order of the second and third, but suffice it to say that marriage did them both in: one had a wife who left him and his response was to hang himself; the other had a husband who killed her. They were each a couple of years ahead of my own class in high school.
Forty-two seems a young age to die, let alone nineteen or one's twenties. But I suspect that as I grow older now, the deaths will begin to mount up, more and more of them by disease.
