My Life in Weeks

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.

Women in My Life as an Adult

Until about a week ago, I'd never had an official girlfriend--that is, a girl I was seeing exclusively who was also seeing me exclusively, with an eye toward marriage (sometimes I've had an eye on a gal and spent time with her and not had anyone else in my life, but when we finally got to "the talk," I've always learned she just saw me as a friend; likewise, there have been a few times when I had more than one gal in my life, which led to my own inability to be decisive, and I ended up losing out on all the women, usually in quick succession--something that almost happened to me again this past spring). Anyway, I was talking the other day with a rather consistent phone companion over the first half of 2013, and she noted that I probably always had some gal who was a friend who I spent time with to kill the loneliness. I said sometimes, but I didn't think that had been the case with me most of my adult life. Hence, I decided to do a graph to see. Below are women I averaged probably at least an hour with on the phone or in person each week during a particular span of time (these are estimates; it's likely I've undercounted time spent with a few women along the way and they're not showing up, just as I've likely overcounted time spent with a few of these women):

Pretty much, I've only had such "relationships" since graduating from college. Of those, the longest was a strictly platonic friendship--I had no romantic intentions and the woman knew this. Right around age thirty--the end of my time in Texas and the start of my time here--I had quite a few women in my life; unfortunately, none of them ended up quite suiting me. Since then, I've tried to stick to mostly spending that much time with women only when I had some real intentions toward them. It's not that I wouldn't have a platonic friendship again that involved as much time as that (or those--since most of the gals in Texas were women who I dated who turned into platonic friends) in the late 1990s; it's just that I've been more focused on trying to find someone I'd actually want to settle down with. Unfortunately, I lost out on the few women I'd gone for since about 2003, sometimes because I was unwilling to commit but most of the time because the woman didn't like me in that mysterious way. Quite a few women I've had a strong interest in don't show up here because I could only manage to get smaller snatches of time from them. Since 2010 I'd been fairly blessed by women's presence (though I keep expecting a return to a more consistently quiet and depressing time, as that has seemed more typical of my adult life).

Life Timeline

Some things don't go quite as one might desire. Actually, I never had much faith that I would win a Pulitzer, but it was nice to dream. However, I'm still waiting on the first book publication (many a writer ten or fifteen years younger than me has a published book now; I don't know that I ever had an age in mind, but certainly by age thirty), and on that wife (around thirty) and kids (around thirty-five). I'm forty-two now, quite a few years past those ideal ages. At least I've had steady jobs that I've mostly enjoyed, in what would have been my dream profession and in my dream location (I wanted to work as an editor at a publisher in the West or South, then later as I refined my desires, as an editor at a university press in a small university town--and that's what I do and where I live).