Happy Birthday to me.

Happy Birthday to me.

Happy arbitrary day when I lost my umbilical cord,

Happy Birthday tooo me.

 

Well, as of today, December 27th, 2006, I have reached 25 years of age. Since I took my first breath of air, the planet Earth has gone around its parent star 25 times, relative to the backdrop of distant stars (aka, 25 sidereal years). A year is a period of time based entirely on the mass of a habitable planet orbiting around a star of a particular mass and luminosity, producing an orbital region that our planet happens to fall into - making it habitable. The tilt of our planet gives us seasons, and thus a cycle that affects our lives and makes the marking of this kind of time meaningful to us. And only us. Following the stars allows us to more accurately measure this cycle.

25 is significant because it cuts the number 100 neatly into four parts, as we commonly cut dollars and years and cups of flour into quarters so we can deal with them more easily. Whats significant about 100? Well, we use a base-10 number system because we have ten fingers on our hands. 100 is ten squared. If we had six fingers per hand, like some people in Portugal, 144 would be the round number, and 36 years would be a fourth of that.

In our societies, we also tend to celebrate the completion of something, whether it is a year of life, another year in love with someone else, or another calendar year, all of which fit into a neat 1-month window for me this December. What if instead of celebrating these arbitrary marking points, we just celebrated aspects of our lives completely at random while they are in progress?

So I have reached an easily digestible chunk of an arbitrarily arrived at “round” number, of a period of time that matters not probably anywhere else in the universe, not counting the time that I was gestating, or at least my brain functioning, or whatever arbitrary starting point you wish to use. So what am I going to do now that I’m five to the second power?

I’m going to Disneyland!

Well, ok I just got back. Anyway, my point is, in the grand scheme of things, these points are arbitrary, but they are still meaningful to us, and to me. So they are worth celebrating for that. While everyone’s in the New Year spirit, know then that the real sidereal New Year is on January 1st, at NOON. Remember, each year is 365.25 days long, which we add up on leap years. So party twice!

I’ll now leave you with an infectious limerick that I came up with as we pulled away from Disneyland - no this is no philosophical position, just something funny I came up with given that the cityscape drowned out the stars at night and all I could see was Venus. Sing it to the Disney “When you wish upon a star” song.

When you wish up’n a planet in the sky,

Makes no difference if your a girl or a guy,

Everyone gets cancer and dies,

So parrrtyyy onnn!

P.S. I’ll be back to blogging and posting podcasts a little bit into January, I’m just busy getting into, well, places like this.