It's a living.

I worked out last night that if I sleep nine hours instead of eight every night, and I live to be 75, I will have lost nearly five years of my waking life (16-hour days). Even with eight hours' sleep, I'll spend 25 years of my life totally inert. No wonder the scriptural injunction to "cease to sleep longer than is needful."

I've spent the last few weeks staring at spreadsheets all day long, repeating the same 10-second process ad nauseum. I don't know how the assembly lines of the late 19th century functioned without television. If I didn't have something to anesthetize my sense of mortality and purpose, I think this job would make me insane. But my head is swimming with mysterious disappearances and amnesia and other hackneyed daytime-TV plot devices. Who needs friends when I've got Hurley and Charlie? Who needs a girl when I've got Kate, our inexhaustible sexual-tension dynamo? And with adventurous exploits like Jack's and Locke's to spectate, why bother going outside?

I don't believe Satan invented television, or even serial television drama per se, but it is certainly a handy diversion with which to steal life away. It's the magic wand, the fluttering fingers, the incantation that momentarily draws your eyes away from your wallet. It sure doesn't feel afterward like I've spent ten hours in absolute silence, pushing buttons a monkey could push, and with as much comprehension of what I'm doing.

I've been reading C.S. Lewis again, and it's very interesting to revisit his ideas after a two-year hiatus. In his words, "Nothing makes an absent friend so present as a disagreement." He can be so perfectly right when he speaks experientially, and so totally off the mark when reciting dogma or speculating.

He loses me completely (as he must, by definition) when he starts talking about his unknown-and-unknowable, abstract, theoretical God; and yet he knows the intimate, Fatherly, "the true and living God", by his own experience. His means of reconciling the two is simultaneously so obviously contrived, and yet sincere... which is most religion, I think. Honest people trying to make sense of nonsense. I wonder how offended he would be if he knew of all the Mormons who see him as a 'noble heathen', kept from the truth only because he knew not where to find it.

--Kevin