The exercise:
Write four lines of prose about something that is: unprecedented.
This morning seemed to be one of transition. The beaches and parks were extremely quiet, while the roads were extremely busy. By the afternoon traffic had settled down and the beaches and parks had filled up again.
It all worked out fine in the end, was just a bit of a different sort of day.
Day four arrives tomorrow, followed by my weekend. Looking forward to it.
Mine:
I arrived this morning at the washrooms at our main beach to find something completely unexpected: I could have left without doing any cleaning. The floors and toilets in both the men's and women's sides were okay (that happens occasionally), all four paper towel dispensers didn't need replacements (happens more often than not), and not a single new roll of toilet paper was required (that's 24 rolls between the two sides - that has never happened for me before, not even back in April). I was stunned - delighted, but stunned.
I cleaned both sides anyway, as first thing in the morning is the only time I get to do a proper, full clean without being interrupted, but it was much quicker than usual... and I will gladly take a break like that in mid-August.
I may have asked this already in one of the as-yet-unreached comments, but how did you cope with a five-day week? Or is it just that the last day of a week always seems to come too slowly (you should probably work one-day on one-day off in that case!)?
ReplyDeleteThe state of the washrooms sounds rather pleasant! I can see how you might have wandered around there looking for the punchline, since I'm not sure I'd believe it was in a good state either. I was definitely waiting for you to say that you then found more dead fish, or dead animals, or something :)
Unprecedented
One meaning of unprecedented is that nothing comes before it, which happens when there isn't an ordering on something. In mathematics, all complex numbers are unprecedented: it's not possible to construct an ordering of the complex numbers like the one we have for the reals. If you think of the complex numbers as being points on the plane (Argand Diagram) then you can easily see the problem: if your complex numbers form a circle, for example, which one of them is "first"? And if you're willing to pick one, now consider 7,000 concentric circles... which of those has the "first" point?
Greg - I feel like the closer I get to the last day of my work week the farther away it feels. So the number of days in the week doesn't seem to matter.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I kept walking around wondering what I'd missed. Then I figured I should probably get to work before someone came along and ruined it.
... and now my brain hurts. I think I shall go to bed now :P