Live a little.

I recently read that human beings cry up to 30 gallons of tears annually. That's each of us, not all together. And it's a good thing that we don't do it all at once, or we'd be dead. In fact, we'd be worse than dehydrated, like we got zapped by the Kelvans; 30 gallons of water weighs more than 250 pounds, so a lot of us would disappear up the spout, as it were.

The fact is, we live out our entire existence on earth incrementally, one meal, one breath, one tear at a time. Years ago I heard about the "bologna loaf" method of tackling large and daunting projects -- no one can just sit down and eat an entire 10-pound loaf of bologna, but anyone (except perhaps the most bologna-adverse) can eat one slice. Do that every day and eventually: no more bologna.

Now, I don't know why someone would need to consume that whole loaf, nor how it could stay fresh long enough for such a period, but the point is illustrated well. You can't do it all at once, so do a bit now.

People sometimes like to advise us to live one day at a time, and there was even a hit country song along those lines in 1974. And while this doesn't mean to go hog-wild and throw away all your money today like Don Ameche leaving for space in Cocoon, it does mean that there's no day in which to do anything but the day we are in. So focus on that.

The mathematics of increments are always mind-boggling, though. Based on an average lifespan, the American male will brush his teeth more than 57,000 times, eat more than 86,000 meals, take something like 576,700,000 breaths. Hell, I'll probably spend 100 hours playing a game on my phone that I don't even like that much. And yet we think life is too short.

The Huffington Post's more useful Australian site addressed this topic two years ago, and their calculations provided some weird figures: You'll spend:

• just over 13 years of your life at work 
• with an extra year on top in unpaid overtime
• more than 11 years looking at screens
• 16 months exercising
• 4 and a half years eating
• 26 years sleeping

Man, just looking at all this makes me tired. I think I'm about six months behind in my sleeping, so I'm gonna lie down and catch up, k? See you at Christmas.