My Perfect Day

Do you ever fantasize about the perfect day? I'm not talking about winning the lottery, lying on a tropical beach sipping Coronas, or watching Yankee Stadium fall into a big sinkhole. I'm talking about the kind of day where everything in your mundane little life simply goes right for once, and nothing goes wrong.

Below is my list of the routine events that, if they all came to be, would constitute my perfect day. At the end of each event is the precise, documented success rate that I currently enjoy for that item.

• I successfully get myself up in bed (usually between 3:00 and 4:00 AM) without Kim's assistance, pee, and lie back down in bed without Kim's assistance, thereby not interrupting her sleep. 20% success rate
• After the previous, considerable exertion I'm able to fall back asleep before Kim's alarm goes off at 6 AM. 50% success
• In the morning, I'm able to get out of bed and get into my wheelchair without Kim's assistance. 50% success
• It’s not a shower day (shower days are more work). 50% success
• When I let Phoebe outdoors for the first time in the morning she doesn't bark incessantly and wake up the whole neighborhood. 75% success
• I have some interesting e-mail awaiting me when I open up my computer, instead of just a bunch of crap. 25% success
• As I'm listening to the Today show in the background, there's not some story that pisses me off because of deficient reporting or clueless people (I keep watching, though, because there are often segments that inform me, entertain me, or otherwise make me happy). 10% success
• I do something that significantly improves another person’s life. 25% success
• Our cat doesn't walk on a countertop, sun herself on the kitchen table, or puke somewhere (Kim likes the cat). 50% success
• At no point during the day do I become frustrated because I couldn't reach something important, or I dropped something important, or I had to forever stop doing something that I've always been able to do before. 8% success
• It’s a nice enough day that I get to leave the house and go somewhere in the neighborhood on my own. 14% success in the winter, 95% in the summer
• I do something truly productive during the day (like publishing a blog post or digitizing old photographs). 50% success
• I remember to tell Kim that I love her (I like to make it special, not routine…) 25% success
• I learn something, maybe in a book, an online article, a blog post, or a video, that genuinely helps me see the world more clearly. 25% success
• When Kim gets home we do something interesting, either inside the house or outside the house, instead of sitting in front of the TV and/or our computers all night. 50% success
• A friend comes to visit. 10% success
• Something good happens during the day to make me smile or laugh. 99% success

I learned in statistics class that the probability of a group of events occurring simultaneously is the product of their individual probabilities. So, in order for me to calculate the odds of experiencing the perfect day, as described above, I just need to multiply all of the success rates and see what I get.

So, what do you think my odds are of having all of the above items occur in a single day? Is it one in a hundred, one in a million? Nope. My odds of having a perfect day are one in a billion!

Fortunately, it's not important that I have any perfect days. It’s only important that I have some good days, which I do.