DOLLY PARTON AND THE TREADMILL

Thoughts this week have included: Hmm. I’m not as clever as I used to be; yes, that post-gym buzz is amazing but look out for 3pm, and, did Dolly Parton diddle her employers out of thirty minutes’ work every day and still have the audacity to complain about it?

Anyway, while I work my own 9 to 5:30 (admittedly it would never have made quite as good a song) and sit here at the end of it, I’m wondering about a whole load of things.

I watched a video on a thing called Euler’s Identity. It’s a mathematical thing that brushed me by the first time I saw it. This week I was kind of amazed at the fact that it uses two very different numbers that just appear everywhere in nature, a strange concept number that doesn’t really exist, a 1 and a zero, and makes an actual equation out of them.

I quickly realised that I wasn’t clever enough to understand the proof, though I sort of get the idea that: compound interest eventually does tend to a limit (e), that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is always the same (pi), and that if you express an ever decreasing value that tends towards e using imaginary numbers spinning around an Argand diagram, you do see how eventually it just draws a circle.

Well. I’m afraid I’m not clever enough to explain it more simply - and as Einstein once noted, if you can’t do that, you don’t understand it properly.

So there was that.

Then I went back to the gym for the first time in ages. I thought it might pep me up a bit, get me feeling brighter and happier in the mornings. I ran 2km in 15 minutes (leisurely) and wobbled off the treadmill.

Later, I noted a friend of mine, Russell, had just run 5km in 18 minutes on his latest park run! I tried to imagine what that would have felt like on the treadmill and realised that had I attempted pushing it all the way up to the requisite speed of 16 km/h, I would have been summarily projected backwards into the cycling machines, like a sweaty sack of potatoes.

I suppose Dolly might have been contracted to only work 35 hours a week (9-to-5 x 5) in which case, fair enough. She could, of course, have restricted herself to just thirty minute lunch breaks, in which she would have had ample time to think up ways to deal with Jolene. Anyway, either way, her employer was apparently ‘using her mind’ and not giving her any credit for it, so it’s a case of swings and roundabouts. And for someone who probably never really worked a day of her life in an actual office, she sure has a handle on the thing.

Someone asked me about the difference between a simile and a metaphor today. I told them a simile was like a comparison, but a metaphor was the real deal. They didn’t even crack a smile.