I haven’t wanted to talk about it, but it’s my birthday. AGAIN.
And granted, it’s not what anyone would call a
”
milestone birthday,
”
which is all you’re going to get out of me. But you could say
that I’m now officially in the same group of people who shouldn’t
wear leather halter tops or drive after dark.
I haven’t wanted to talk about it, but it’s my birthday. AGAIN. And granted, it’s not what anyone would call a “milestone birthday,” which is all you’re going to get out of me. But you could say that I’m now officially in the same group of people who shouldn’t wear leather halter tops or drive after dark.
So it stands to reason why I’m a bit sensitive this year and would rather avoid the whole thing altogether. But I’d be a fool to think this would happen.
“Happy birthday, Mom!” my daughter said when I came down for breakfast, “Say, have you seen the Death Clock site on the internet? It’s cool!”
Granted to some of you this may seem, well, macabre, but is just the sort of remark I’d come to expect from my family on my birthday.
“Very funny.”
“No, it’s real. You type in your information and, Viola! It tells you your date of death,” she said, a little too brightly.
Let’s just stop right here and say that there are several items on my List of Things to Do On My Birthday and looking up my death isn’t one of them. But we all know preteen kids live for this kind of weird stuff.
“Well, I don’t care. I just hope it’s not before next Tuesday because I have a hair appointment,” I said dryly.
Okay, I’d be lying to say I wasn’t tempted to at least look. After all, I’m now at the age where I should probably be thinking about things like good moisturizers and death.
And, yes, we all know that even with the staggering technological advancements of the past decade, a computer can’t really know your date of demise. It’s all in, well, fun.
So, since I’m the type of person with heaps of curiosity and not a lot of character, I waited for my kids to leave for school then went to the site to see for myself.
Now for those of you lucky enough not to have ever seen it, let me just say you’ll know you’re in the right place when you see the words: Welcome to the Death Clock, the Internet’s reminder that life is slipping slowly away.
Which, I suppose, is exactly the sort of greeting you’d expect from a site like this.
Next, if you’re not depressed enough already, you’ll be prompted to type in your age, gender and something called a BMI, which I had always thought was a type of sports car, but which turns out to stand for “Body Mass Index.” A precise ratio of fat versus muscle that is arrived at by using a complex calculation of weight and height divided by the gravity on the moon multiplied by the number of times the earth rotates around the sun.
But I digress.
After spending what seemed like a (ha, ha) eternity punching in the required information, I finally received my death day: Aug. 20, 2045. Or, in the words of the death clock site: 1,992,823,551 seconds. Mind you, three hundred of which were just wasted looking up my death.
Now, I have to admit, a site like this does teach you a thing or two about life.
For instance, if I was an intellectual sort of person I’d say the lesson is that time goes by fast, so we should all live our life to the fullest.
If I was a halfway intellectual sort of person I’d say the lesson is that we’ll all die someday so we might as well accept it and move on.
But me, I say the real message is that I shouldn’t be wasting my apparently precious time sitting here on the computer when I could be out, say, shoe shopping.
That said, I’d best get going. After all, I only have 41 years, three weeks, two days and 54 seconds left. Converted, that’s 489 pairs of new shoes.
But who’s counting?
