The Point of Five

Today was a basic Disappearing day - no walking, no biking, basic eating. I haven't done proper Disappearing exercise since Monday, so this is likely to be a deeply dodgy Disappearing week.

Had a Thought earlier though, which is, as you know, is often dangerous. I've often thought that people with penises shouldn't really be allowed to do Thinking, we're not properly equipped. It's like women peeing standing up - doable, but rarely a good idea, least of all in company.

This particular thought was about five stone.

I mentioned a while back that having gone through the 3.5 stone barrier, I wasn't aiming at 4 stone as the next 'Big Barrier', but oddly, and unreasonably, 5 stone. I was on a tube today when the  reason finally hit me.

Four stone is less than halfway. Five stone is definitively more than halfway to my nine stone goal.

Yeah, simple as that - It's the power of fractions and percentages. Three stone's a third. Four stone - nada. Really speaking, the next Big Barrier is 4.5 stone, cos it's half, or 50%. So in terms of stone barriers, five is the Next Big Thing.

See? Thinking - not for those with penises, generally. The weirdest thing is that the Thought, such as it was, wasn't even original. It was given to me in a blinding flash by a press of a button.

"50%" said Virgil...or Kenny, depending on whether or not we have posh company. Virgil Kenny is of course my Kindle. It was letting me know I'd reached the halfway point in Aristotle's Ethics, and just like that, my subconscious palaver made at least a sort of sense.

Not a great deal of sense, granted, but some.

I don't know whether this is a human thing, a guy thing or just a me thing, but everything seems more manageable, and somehow weirdly more meaningful, if you break it into fractions and percentages. I swear, it's one of the simplest and best things about e-readers, it's a thing regular books have been sadly lacking all these years - just a little superscript line every now and again that says "Keep going - this might be a crappy chapter, but you're 23% of the way through!" I think birthdays should come with this sort of information too - then maybe we'd get more done and play fewer online games - can you imagine that - "Happy 21st birthday, you're a quarter of the way dead!"

So there you go - that's the point of five, revealed by an e-reader. Oddly enough, there was a headline last week that said most people are reading relatively low-brow stuff on their e-readers. But you see - you never know when you'll get profound thingummyjigs from the additional extras, no matter what it is you're 50% through.