2007-06-08 3,500

Does it make me an arrogant piece of shit that I want to scream and shout every time I catch a random glimpse on code that most of my co-workers are writing? It's just that I know that I'll have to debug these lines sooner or later, because instead of... oh, never mind. At any rate, it wasn't a good office day.
But instead of doing what I felt like doing at that very moment (which would have gotten me in jail eventually), I turned my anger into something useful later this evening: I finally mastered a climbing route that I had almost given up on.

***

Tonight I am not going to sleep. Not because I have so much work to do, but because I just don't want to. When I was younger (like 16 or so), I used to spend a lot of nights in front of my computer without sleep. Now that I am older and get paid for sitting in front of the computer, I no longer spend my nights that way. But that doesn't mean that I couldn't if I wanted to, right? To be honest, I don't know, and that scares me.
So here's the deal: I will stay up until sunset (I looked it up on the Internet, the sun is going to rise between five and six in the morning), climb a hill (there's an awful lot of hills around here) and make a photo of the rising sun.

***

My word of the day is "three thousand five hundred".

The town in which I grew up and lived for almost twenty years has approximately 3,500 inhabitants. There are two churches, a primary and a secondary school, a public library, three bakeries, a football ground, three supermarkets, at least three doctors, a dentist and a lot more. There are 3,500 people that need to live, eat and work somewhere. When you think of it that way, 3,500 is not a large number.
But imagine you knew each and every one of these 3,500 people personally. Not only their names, but also their birthdays, what food they liked, if they've ever been to Paris, if someone once broke their heart and if they liked light rain just as much as you do. When you put it that way, 3,500 people is quite a lot. So much in fact, that even though you cared a lot about every single one, you couldn't help confusing them every now and then. In other words, 3,500 is too much to grasp.
Why I harp on about this number? Because 3,500 is how many American soldiers have died in Iraq until now. Take a minute to think about it.