Richard Zimmerman
Professor Garcia
English 1302-043
July 7, 2013
Seventeen Thousand Four Hundred and Twenty-Two Days
From conception, life is the beginning of death. A forty- nine year life span is seventeen thousand eight hundred and eight five days. What we do as a person differs in everyone’s life. “You can get busy dying or get busy living.”(Berardinelli). Randy Pausch got busy living.
Approximately between the days eighteen hundred twenty-five and three thousand six hundred and fifty most boys during the ages of five and ten were doing the same thing. During Randy Pausch’s era, at this age boys were using their imagination to play outside in activities such as football, baseball, freeze-tag, Cowboys and Indians and the infamous hide and seek. Football and baseball is self explanatory. The outside game such as freeze-tag was the use of the imagination. It was a basic game like tag, but if you would freeze before being tagged and yell out a name of cartoon character, the “it” player could not tag you and would start chasing someone else. There was no such thing as video games, IPods, or any hand held devices such as a cellular phone. The only communication device rather than a land line was a transmission communicator used as a prop on one of Randy Pausch’s television itinerary, Star Trek, which was part of his childhood goals. The most important extra activity, bar none is daydreaming.
Daydreaming was an important part of Randy Pausch’s childhood. A list of goals that Pausch created through his dreaming were playing in the National Football League, authoring in the World Book encyclopedia, experiencing zero gravity, working at Disney as an Imagineer, being Captain Kirk, winning stuffed animals, becoming a productive member of society and raising a family. This is a list of goals that would take an average individual a lifetime. Pausch was an exceptional individual and above average.
Pausch’s athletic interest was football and one of his...