On Feb. 3 I stopped posting twice a week — I was out of stories. This is the first of the new stories I hope to post every once in a while, once a month, maybe.
The idea for this post was stolen, lock, stock and barrel [together with the line about shoes], from a paper written by Kaylee Stith, one of my granddaughters-by-love, when she was a junior in high school.
OK, here goes:
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Have you have ever thought about how much time you waste waiting on a traffic signal to change from red to green compared to how much time you spend kissing? Or getting kissed?
No?
Well, think about it now. Do the math. Wait, I’ll do it for you but I warn you, you’re not going to like the results.
I estimate we spend, on average, at least five minutes a day waiting for red lights to change. It’s probably more like 10 minutes most days. I know, I know, some days we don’t go anywhere and some days –not many– we hit most lights just right, green. So let’s be conservative and call it five minutes a day.
Five minutes times 365 days equals 1,825 minutes a year. Divided by 60 minutes equals 30.4 hours a year. We won’t count the years where you’re too young to have a license, where you’re just a passenger. And let’s assume you live, and drive, until you’re 80. So, 30.4 times 64 equals 1,946 hours. Divided by 24 hours equals 81 days.
Over the course of our adult lives we spend 24 hours a day for the best part of three months just sitting there, waiting, waiting, waiting on a light to change, twiddling out thumbs. Or, maybe, tying our shoes.
Kissing is harder to figure.
Most people, at one one time or another, have participated in kisses that lasted a minute, maybe several minutes. But most kisses, are more like pecks — they’ve over in a second. OK, call it two seconds.
I know a lot of Moms kiss their babies 50 times a day but I think for most people, over the course of their adult life — say, 16 years old to 80 — an average of 5 kisses a day would be about right.
Five kisses a day, at two seconds per kiss, is 10 seconds of kissing a day, times 365 days is 3,650 seconds of kissing a year, divided by 60 seconds is 60.83 minutes, divided by 60 minutes equals 1.01 hour of kissing a year. Multiply that times 64 years [80-16 = 64] equals 64.9 hours, divided by 24 hours equals 2.7 days.
Sad, isn’t it.
Over the course of our grown up lives — age 16 to 80 — we spend about 81 days waiting for a light to change and only 2.7 days kissing. Or, put another way, we spend 30 minutes waiting on a red light for every one minute kissing.
Something needs to be done about that.
