The way the federal government does business causes dollar numbers to soar to astronomical heights. The words billions gets thrown around with little thought. I was curious if there were any way I could relate something in my personal life with the term billions, so I multiplied my age times the number of seconds I have lived on this earth and arrived at a paltry number, indeed. Now seconds of time don't seem like much, in fact it took quite a few to write this last sentence. My total comes to less than two billion.
Time does go faster the older you get. When a child three years old waits for his fourth birthday party he has to wait for a quarter of his life, so that year really drags by, but someone who is 65 that looks toward his 66th birthday only has to wait 1/66 of his life, and it's gone just like that.
For whatever it's worth, I had a hard time coming up with something in my life equal to the use of the word billion. Cells in my body are uncountable, so I wouldn't try to use that. Billions are spent each year on the war, billions are spent servicing the country's debt, billions a year are spent on pork barrel projects like Alaska's "bridge to nowhere." It won't be too long and we'll have to get used to trillions.
