Thursday Time
It often seems to me that I don’t think like other people. I mentioned this to God and she agreed. She went on to say that that’s a big part of why she chose me to to come and talk with. I’m mostly very logical in my thought processes but, being human, I’m certainly prone to my flights of fancy. Sometimes these two things combine in interesting ways.
Well, they’re interesting to me anyway.
An example is what I’ll call “Thursday Time.” Like most people, I suppose, I get asked what time it is. Now except for an experimental few years when I was in my late teens and early adulthood, I’ve never worn a wristwatch, so I don’t usually have the answer to that question as readily available as most people. The obvious thing to do then is to just say, “I don’t know.” This can be followed or replaced by “Let me check,” as I dig out my pocket watch. That would be the simple, straightforward, and, as I said, obvious thing to do.
I don’t really like obvious. It has its uses but by default I prefer to be at least a little bit off-center.
So I started to answer the question by telling people the day of the week and then, if I felt like it, somewhat grudgingly, getting out my watch to give them the information they were actually asking for. Now the downside to this was that a lot of people just assumed that I had misheard the question and would try to correct that, pretty much wasting my time and theirs. So I started telling them the day of the week but not the day of the week that it actually was. This had the affect of throwing them for just enough of a loop that I had time to get out my watch and give them a legitimate answer before they could figure out how they were going to fix the question.
I’d like to think this brightened their day a little bit, made it a little less boring, but if I’m honest I’ll admit that probably more of them found it annoying than amusing.
Now the downside to giving a wrong day, for me anyway, was that I had to essentially generate a random day of the week in my head. Humans aren’t really well designed for random number generation. Our two main faults in this area are that we tend to have favorite numbers and that we tend to think that randomness should have a fairly even distribution. Real randomness has short-term clumps that look non-random to us and we tend to avoid using that data when we “hand” generate random data because we’re afraid that we’re biasing the generation, in some way, to our favorites, or at least to something familiar, or even to something that we’ve carefully designed to not be familiar.
So I don’t like thinking up random data, because it’s too much work to try and be actually random, and I don’t like giving in to being actually non-random.
So I picked a day and went with it. When people would ask me what time it was, I’d usually just answer “Thursday” and then I might or might not follow that up by either getting them the actual time or by telling them that I didn’t know.
So to me this was all fairly logical, but not necessarily in the same way that anyone else would think of as logical.
And that’s why God talks to me?
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