I had the BEST weekend with my parents celebrating my birthday (MUCH more detail to come soon!), and am correspondingly in the happiest, sunniest mood today. What's not to love about a weekend that combines the Olympics, wine tasting in Napa, eating Michelin-starred food, and tourist-ing all over my home with my two favorite people? Nothing is not to love, I tell you. Add to that the fact that I've got a vacation coming up on Thursday and I am feeling pretty grand about life in general.
Maybe that's why I find this so giggle-inducing: I'm reviewing a memo that one of my colleagues drafted about a very technical valuation process, details intentionally vague. The memo kept referencing "morality tables," and it took me a couple seconds to parse out that the item under discussion was actually a "mortality table." For those of you who aren't hopeless, helpless nerds, a mortality table is used to determine a person's statistical probability of death. They are, in a word, morbid, but are hugely significant in industries like insurance, accounting, and planned giving (ding ding ding!).
I got the giggles when I started thinking about what a morality table would actually look like - some kind of chart that tells you how to be a good person? A sliding scale of how moral an action is relative to situation, agent, and recipient? A scatter plot of the judged morality of a person on an x-axis of, let's say, age and y-axis of, hmm...privilege? A "moral brightline" as the mean in a scatter graph of moral judgments? I sat there musing on it for a solid few minutes, sort of laughing to myself and sort of actually contemplating how interesting and revealing it would be to actually create a morality table for myself.
And then, because I've got sh*t to get done today, I control F'd "morality" and replaced it with "mortality," and that was that.
Happy Monday!