Lauren Biron was born in a presumably sterile room in Mission Viejo Hospital, 16.6 miles from the place she would call home for 20 years. For the first few years, her primary interests were burping, sleeping, and eating pureed squash. She lived for the moment: she enjoyed the shininess of keys jingled over her head, and the sound of a bowl full of cheerios clattering to the floor as she gracefully upturned it. Her first word was “go” her second word “car,” her third “cart.” Ever a fan of compound words, Lauren quickly learned the word “gokart,” though she would retain an irrational fear of driving them, even after she got her license.
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Lauren got older, and some stuff happened. She can’t remember most of it – something she regrets to this day, and a reason why she loves writing things down. Now she measures her life in 10 week increments, marveling that 10 of them have come and gone since she entered college, 5.6 miles from the place she still calls home. Her new primary interests are not much changed: she still loves a good burp, a good sleep (which, as of yesterday, is apparently intended to occur from 4pm to midnight), the shininess of keys, and the sound of a cheerios cascading to the floor. She doesn’t like squash now though. The very smell of it makes her want to gag. Her favorite words now have more than one syllable in them, most of the time. Her only irrational fear now is one of bees, though she still isn’t that big a fan of gokarts.
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Lauren used to be really good at math. She never liked it, but by gum, she was good at it. Lauren still occasionally likes to do a few calculations. Lauren might even do some now:
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Lauren is 20 years old. This means, as of her last birthday, she had been alive for:
240 months, or
1,040 weeks, or
7,300 days (but if you factor in leap years from 1988, ‘92, ‘96, 2000, and ’04 it’s really 7305 days), or
175,320 hours, or
10,519,200 minutes, or
631,152,000 seconds.
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It is also equivalent to 104 UC quarter system Quarters, 10 of which have actually been spent in servitude at said college. She is 140 years old in dog years.
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Her life has been equivalent to 350,640 episodes of The Simpsons (plus commercials). This is equivalent to 175,320 episodes of House M.D. or American Idol, thus equating to 58,440 minutes of sarcastic British wit (if you assume that takes up 1/3 of each program, which I do). She could have listened to The Beatles’ White Album 112,665 and a half times by now. Alternatively, she could have listened to Bohemian Rhapsody 1,777,893 times, and would be thoroughly sick of Queen.
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In the time she has been alive, the Titanic could have sunk 65,745 times… assuming it just kind of bobbed to the surface and started sinking again.
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If she had been born with a fully functional camera with unlimited battery power, snapping photos at 6 frames per second continually, she could have taken 3,786,912,000 photos by now, and would have an amazing scrapbook complete with that fresh, just-out-the-womb feel.
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She has been around 5/422 as long as the Babylonian empire existed. And if, as scientists suspect, the universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old, Lauren is 1/685,000,000 as old as the universe. But, on the plus side, she has lived 260 times longer than the average housefly. So, in one sense, Lauren is quite ancient.
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