Content Notice: Family Death
The other day I was talking to a friend who mentioned how arbitrary it is that we measure things in base ten. We just so happen to have ten fingers (eight fingers and two thumbs, if you're a pedantic dork), so we ended up counting everything using base ten. Personally, I think there is a compelling argument for counting in base five because we have two hands with five fingers each. One hand could count the number of ones we have, and the other could count the number of groups of five we have. That way we could count up to thirty (in base ten) with only ten (in base ten) fingers. I've noticed recently that I measure time in chunks of four years. Something that is certainly the product of being in a school system that divides high school (the thing I just did) and college (the thing I'm doing now) and medical school (the thing I want to do next) into chunks of four years. This way of dividing time has been at the forefront of my brain recently. Last Saturday marks four years since my dad died. A lot has happened in those four years. My dad never saw me graduate from high school. He never saw me when I was president of every club I was in during high school, or when I got a bid to the Tournament of Champions in policy debate, or when I got my IB diploma, or when I got into Brown. He didn't hear about all the things I learned last year, about the doubts I had about whether Brown was the right place for me, about my independent concentration, or about how my friends and I successfully negotiated the rent for our apartment next year to $300 below the asking price. He isn't seeing me become an adult. He won't see me graduate from Brown. I try not to think about what our relationship might be like if he was still alive. My dad was a complicated person, and so to speculate is to idealize. Still, that doesn't mean I don't do it. I remember my dad talking about Kant long before I cared about Philosophy or even knew what it was. I wonder how he would react if I told him that I took a class from one of the leading scholars on Kant. Is there some sort of heritable characteristic that makes people like Philosophy, or is it just a coincidence that we both gravitated toward it? He never mentioned to me that he was a Philosophy major — I only found out after he died, and at that point I'd already dipped a toe into philosophy and critical theory because of debate. Personally, I doubt it's a coincidence — the universe works in strange and mysterious ways. I remember the day before my dad's birthday when I found out that my first-year academic advisor was a Philosophy professor. It felt like that decision was governed by some force more profound than a computer sorting algorithm. If it is all coincidence, I'm not sure that it matters. Meaning-making allows each year to get a little easier. I learn some more lessons, make sense of it a little better, life goes on. This year is four. Next year will be 5. Or 11, depending on how you count it.
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