I was trolling around Wikipedia after watching Wedding Crashers with Brad which I’m wont to do these days. Our friends Dave Jilk and Maureen Amundson departed from our cloudy town on Thursday morning, just before the sunshine finally returned. During their visit we engaged in lively conversations ranging in topic from the identity of Maria Bartiromo’s husband and the Iditarod sled dog race to various Stoic philosophers, including Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. I thought I’d continue exploring a bit and ended up reading about Mark Antony and Cleopatra and noted that their history descends from 33 BC to 32 BC to 31 BC to 30 BC when they commited suicide and it struck me as obvious but strange that as they were living their lives they weren’t counting down in time. They didn’t mark their own days the way we mark them now. I’m fascinated and bewildered by time zones and calendars and the way humans create and change them. I still don’t really get the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar by Pope Gregory XIII. In high school chemistry, our teacher, Miss Pomeroy, had a bulletin board in the back of the classroom with the title "I Wonder…" and we could paste different items on it. I remember putting up diatoms, but if I had to do it over again, I’d put up Time.
Who knows what we might be counting down to, what some future beings might mark our days as?
Thoughts In Random Patterns 