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.

Classmates Who Died

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.

Grade Point Average and Standardized Tests

A few years ago, I was reviewing my grade reports from elementary school and was surprised to find that I was not that good of a student, since by college I was getting a 4.00 consistently.

Well, today, I went back to those records and was actually surprised to see that I really wasn't as bad as I thought--and that I also wasn't that good. What kept me from the 4.00 consistently through high school was almost always physical education; in elementary, penmanship could be added to physical education as a bane to my grade level (though I got B's and C's in other classes as well, especially early on).

Neither penmanship nor physical education were things I had to worry about in college, so my grades improved accordingly, though there were a few classes I was almost certain I'd get a B in and somehow squeaked by with the A. C below equals college (I did 5.5 years, as I worked full time for most of my undergraduate years), G equals grad school.

Not surprisingly to me (as I knew this as well), my standardized test scores dropped throughout elementary, though there wasn't as much correlation between higher grades and lower standardized test scores as I thought. And apparently, in seventh, I was back to being high on those test scores (too bad that wouldn't stick through the SAT and GRE, where I did above average but nothing close to scholarship level).

Another interesting thing about those standardized tests. I did exceptionally well in the language portions of the tests early on but not as well at the math. I remember not quite understanding many math concepts when I was younger. By seventh, my scores reversed--math had become my strong suit, but language not as much. That said, where I largely faltered in language was with vocabulary, something that to this day I do not test well in, whereas I do very well with comprehension or grammar. Probably, the problem with vocabulary for me is that those tests often pose words out of context, and for me, context is key to my understanding.

Number of Classmates Who Kept the Same Faith

A minister said in a sermon recently that, in his experience, fewer than one in ten children stay faithful to the religion in which I was raised. I had always thought the numbers more like one in two. However, with the church that I grew up in having completely overhauled its doctrinal beliefs and then subsequently splitting apart, I thought indeed among my generation--which was in its early twenties at the time--the number might be one in three. So I figured I'd go back and check out my old high school yearbook (my high school was affiliated with the church), and try to figure out just how many still follow the old ways.

I was thinking I wouldn't know the status of many--and I don't. But I have more knowledge than I thought I might--rumors of where people have gone, occasional run-ins at church activities (rare these days, since we've all scattered into different places, both church-wise and state-wise), some contacts on Facebook, or other online networks. So here it is, a rundown on those who still hold to the old faith:

The graphs pretty much confirm what I thought. If my guesses are correct, than 40 percent of the students in my class stayed with the religion in which they were raised. On a most liberal scale, the percent might be as high as 63 percent (which I highly doubt), but on the most conservative, the number would be around 21 percent--still not anywhere as slim as what this minister estimated.

That said, we're talking about children who went to a religious school. That could have an affect on how many stick with the religion, though the effect might be both positive (knowing more about the faith than kids gaining a secular education) and negative (being disgusted by some actions of those at the school such that their faith in the religion is damaged). Years ago, one minister quoted some statistic that children of ministers were more likely (possibly twice as likely) to stay part of the religion; if this is true, then it would follow that the effect of a religious school would generally be more positive than negative.

Single versus Married Classmates

I went to a small high school and, as such, knew everyone in my graduating class. For a while after graduation, I even continued to know what was going on in most of their lives. But time passes, and people move away, and then I myself moved away. My knowledge of people faded.

And yet . . . Well, there's Facebook, and there are people who e-mail me out of nowhere, and some of them know what happened to some of the others, and somehow that keeps me somewhat in tune with what's happened the last twentysomething years.

Most of us have married, and lot of us have kids. I'm neither of those. I'm unusual, I guess, but just how much? Let's see:
I'm unusual, but apparently I'm not that unusual. There's a chunk of us who have never married, not once (the guys are a slight majority here). Of course, some of us might have live-in significant others, but I don't know anything about that in most cases. And some of us may have divorced, though I can only think of one I know for certain. And I can only list off a few who I know for certain have children, though I suspect many others do also.

Somehow, I suppose, I should take solace in the fact that there are other never marrieds still out there, but mostly I just think, Why didn't those folks ever marry? Some of them were/are certainly good prospects.