Just wondering...

This morning at breakfast I had to load up my weekly pill container. Another 8 days had gone by (wait.. there's seven days in a week!) so it was empty. Like most folks, I suppose that when the time comes to do this task, I count out eight pills each... one for this morning, seven for the pill container. I gain a day that way. I don't do much for drugs... 100 mg of Zoloft that I should have started when I joined the military (except SSRIs hadn't been invented yet), something for my sinuses (I think I may be allergic to the dogs, but I won't give up my sweeties), and a stack of vitamins (which includes one of those memory thingies, whatever they're called).

Maybe I should take two of those.

Among the vitamins is chelated potassium, which does this delightful little thing in my mouth when I take it. A cooling, soothing sensation... maybe every Mexican restaurant should have a bottle of chelated potassium sitting on the table next to the chili sauces. But they won't.

Hell, they don't even have toilet seats in the bathrooms.

The process of counting out eight tablets, capsules, caplets, whatever- makes me think that I'm being efficient ("I gain a day"). And that that is a good thing. But it bothers me to think that many, maybe ALL of my decisions and processes are designed and implemented around the concept of efficiency. And that's a frightening thought. Am I living my life like a @%^$&* business? MxSailor, Inc? If you ask the 1st Mate, though, she would laugh at the idea that I'm living an efficient life. It would be downright hysterical to her.

So maybe I needn't worry about that. I can worry about something else, like,

WHAT'S THE OPPOSITE OF A QUANTA?

Well, maybe that's not important either.

How many coffee beans?

I was wondering about a mental phenomena as I dumped my vitamins on the breakfast table. It is said that we can instantly count up to five objects without actually counting. We KNOW there's five B Complex tablets sitting on the tablecloth. But what if there's six? or seven? I don't know about your brain, but my brain tells me that there's "more than five" with just a glance. Why is this "hardwired" into my brain? Maybe it has to do with having five fingers, I dunno.

How many coffee beans? (No fair counting)

But I wonder about that feeling I get when there's more than five. If there's six, the "more than five" (call it MTF) sensation isn't as strong as if there's seven or eight or nine. Then I wonder, maybe that feeling is a way to sense six objects. If you practiced at it, could you increase the number of objects you could sense? By being sensitive to the amount of MTF feeling you get, could you ramp up the number to something really large, like "How many coffee beans in a kilo of coffee beans.." or something important like that.

Think how efficient your life would be then...