Death & Life - and - Life & Death

!SUGGESTION! - In order to get the full effect of this post, I suggest you play "La Petite Fille De La Mer" by Vangelis in my sidebar after you read this post. Don't blame me though if you cry... After watching The Dark Knight recently, I naturally got thinking about my own mortality. How long will I live? Out of habit, I went to the place with all the answers: GOOGLE. Which is starting to scare me, becuase I mindlessly plug queries into that search engine and often just accept what I see in the top 10 results. Wouldn't Bill Gates and Dick Cheney kill to have that power? But maybe they do already...

So who was at the top of the list for caluculating life expectancy? Our good friends at Wharton University. Are you going to question them? I didn't think so. Here is the link if you care to discover your own expiration date:

http://gosset.wharton.upenn.edu/mortality/perl/CalcForm.html

I shall forbear the details of my own entries. The results are what fascinate me. Here they are:

Life Expectancy: 84.39

Lower Quartile : 76.63

Median Lifetime: 86.87

Upper Quartile : 94.83

Not bad, assuming Julie can handle all of my bad humour, manners and unyielding flatulence for another 53 years. But wait! It gets better, I took the option of analyzing my health risks. I selected all of them since I'm hungry for precise, indisputable information about my future.

ANALYSIS RESULTS [Law & Order sound]

-Not smoking is a great choice! Your life expectancy is maximized by not smoking

-If you have 2-3 drinks per day, your life expectancy would be 0.26 years longer

-If you do not drive, your life expectancy would be 0.34 years longer

-If you do not have any stress listed in the table, your life expectancy would be 0.51 years longer

-If you become a conditioning exercizer, your life expectancy would be 0.59 years longer

-Consuming all 5 classes of food everyday has maximized your life expectancy

-If you do not have any sexual partner, your life expectancy would be 0.34 years longer

-If you sleep 7 hours a day, your life expectancy would be 0.30 years longer

If all of the above choices are adopted, your life expectancy would be 2.11 years longer.

That's it?!? Two measly years if I start drinking, quit driving, eliminate all stress, exercise like a fiend, abstain from my wife (that one really hurts), and stew in bed for one more hour per day.

Talk about a bad commercial for healthly living. Maybe the statisticians and actuarial scientists that cooked these calculations are just trying to justify their current slothful, beer-filled, sleep-in lifestyles and show that change is futile. And maybe it is. After all... (I'm kinda serious here) the world may not make it to 2061. Nuclear holocaust, global warming - brought on by Buy n Large (the satanic corporation in Wall-E), hostile alien invasion, or religious events such as the Second Coming or End of the World. Why bother saving for retirement, changing lifestyle habits or abstain from skydiving?

If none of the above happens. I get two more years. Honestly, it dosen't seem worth it. Like Austin Powers, "I also like to live dangerously." So I say: ROCK ON, go to Disneyland, climb Long's Peak, Hang 10 on a pipeline, go cliff diving, splunking and fight crime as a vigilante - Assuming you can get away from your desk job for long enough to do that stuff.

In honor of this auspicious discovery, I have added a widget on my side bar that will now track the days I have left on this beautiful planet (Unless I am compelled to take it off the site by forces much more powerful than me). The painting on the right is entitled, Obscured by the Passge of Time by David Luksha. It helps make this post seem much more deep than it really is. In closing, let us say as as Cameron from Ferris Buller's Day Off : "Have a nice life..."