I was thinking last night about how strange our money system is. Or any money system, for that matter.

This month I accidentally made two student loan payments instead of two. Unfortunately, I only had enough money in my checking account for one payment, so on Monday (when the second payment went through) I wound up having a negative balance. I tranferred money from my savings account to cover the shortfall. There’s more I won’t explain, but the upshot is that next month I will be transferring money among my savings account, my checking account, and my student loans to straighten things out.

It’s strange that so many of our economic transactions today are electronic. Electrical pulses zipping around the world over wires. Debit cards, credit cards, online payments. My salary is paid by direct deposit, so I don’t even see a check. You have money, but how much of it do you actually see anymore? Only your cash.

And cash – at least paper money – is only that, paper. The only reason it’s worth something is because we all agree that it does.

The only real money, some say, is gold. There was a great New York Times Magazine article a few months ago about “gold bugs,” people who are fetishistic about the value and reliability of gold. But what is gold, after all, but a rare, shiny metal? It has no magical properties. You can’t eat it. Wood and steel are good enough for shelter, and fabric is good enough for clothes.

Gold, like paper and the electronic impulse, has no value for what it is but for what it does. From the above article: “As the greatest theorist of money, the German sociologist Georg Simmel, recognized, money is only money when it is in motion: ‘When money stands still, it is no longer money according to its specific value and significance.'” One of the themes of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon is money and how it has evolved from gold to information and electronic data.

It’s so odd that you can have “millions of dollars in the bank” and feel safe, when what “millions of dollars in the bank” really means is that you can see a big number on a computer screen, made of pixels. “Millions of dollars in the bank” is nothing but a promise. And yet it’s the biggest thing in the world.

(Not that I have millions of dollars, mind you. But one can dream.)

I broke down yesterday and became decadent.

I finally got HBO.

I couldn’t get HBO in my old apartment, because my cable TV was part of my apartment and not changeable. Last month we signed up for cable service in the new place, but I didn’t want to get any premium channels because of my preconceived notions of how expensive it would be. That, and I felt guilty spending money on something that would just encourage more laziness.

But the other day I decided, screw it. I’m tired of feeling out of the loop when my family talks about “The Sopranos” or my brother talks about “Entourage” or the blogs talk about the final episode of “Six Feet Under.” When the next good show comes along, I can take part in the conversation. Since my rent-free status is really a function of living with Matt, we decided that I would pay for cable, so it was my decision to make.

So I ordered HBO yesterday after work and it was even cheaper than I’d thought – $7.95/month for six digital HBO channels. (Well, seven, but I don’t speak Spanish.) Not three minutes after I ordered it, the channels were on my TV. I left a note for Matt before leaving for my fiction-writing class, and when I got back and checked the TiVo, I saw that Matt – who had been indifferent to HBO – had already added a movie and three programs to the “To Do” list. Then I added a few of my own.

What this means is that I’m going to have to buy an extra hard drive for my TiVo. I have a 40-hour machine, but I don’t like recording things at the lowest quality, so I really only have about 25 hours of recording space. You non-DVR-owners might think that’s a ton of space, but it’s really not.

Now, if only HBO showed movies in letterbox format.

Anyway, if I start to look like a potato, you’ll let me know, right?

I agree with Verlyn Klinkenborg that many skeptics of evolution have an inaccurate concept of time. Life on earth is about 3.5 billion years old. That’s 3,500,000,000 years. How many years is that, really? The square root of 3.5 billion is approximately 59,160. Therefore, imagine 59,160 discrete units of time. Now imagine each of those discrete units of time, each itself containing 59,160 years. So if 59,160 years pass (or, all of humanity’s recorded history times 12), you’re only 1/59159th of the way there. That’s a fucking huge amount of time. And as Klinkenborg says, “All those years have really passed, moment by moment, one by one.” We puny human beings can’t grasp such immensities, of course, but a few billion years seems like a reasonable amount of time for us to have evolved to our current state of existence. (Just imagine what our descendants in 3.5 billion years will look like!)

Humanity is just a small, insignificant part of what is Out There. Time, like most grand concepts, is beyond full human comprehension. Religion is a desire to bring the incomprehensible within the realm of human comprehension – to create meaning where there is none. (Or at least none that we human beings will ever be able to understand.) That may sound like a criticism of religion, but I mean it merely as an explanation.

I’m not religious. But that doesn’t mean I think everything can ultimately be known. On the contrary, I think it’s the adherents of the world’s major religions who claim to know more than they do. I think that we, as a species, are tremendously well-suited to figuring out how things happen. But the whys? We’re not terribly well-suited to those.

I’m not religious. But I will always look at the universe with awe and wonder.