First, there were the mudslides. Then there were the wildfires. Now, an earthquake centered near the Mayor's home.

Is it just me, or is this beginning to sound a little like Sim City? What's next? Godzilla?

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I may have bitten off more than I can chew, here. I'm signed up for both NaNoWriMo and NaPoBloMo, so for the next month, I'm going to be pretty busy.

For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is short for "National Novel Writing Month," an event held annually in November. It challenges those who sign up to write a 50,000-word novel (more of a novella than a novel, really) within 30 days.

A derivative of NaNoWriMo, NaBloPoMo challenges its subscribers to write at least one blog post per day during the month of November.

I've got a lot of writing to do.

Some time ago, I read an abstract of a study on verbal communication conducted by a group of linguists. The focus of their research was the sentence structures we use in casual verbal communication, and as their methodology, they secretly videotaped zillions of informal conversations and watched them, keeping careful notes on the verbal mannerisms of their test subjects.

They found, to their surprise, that about 80% of a conversation is made up of short, simple sentences, and that most of the things we say to each other are spoken in a single breath. We're lazy, they concluded, when it comes to speaking - so much so that we can't even concern ourselves with pausing to inhale so we can expound upon the things we say.

At first, I was unsure whether their results spoke (no pun) more negatively about us or about the quality of our ideas, but then I realized that some of the most important things we can ever say to one another can be spoken in very few words. In fact, it has been my experience that the more verbose we become when we speak, the less important the things we say can be.

The simplest way to tell if someone is lying, by the way, is to observe how much they say. The more they try to elaborate on any statement, the less likely it is that they are telling the truth (take THAT, all you presidential candidates!). Credibility, when it comes to bullshit, comes only with a great deal of effort, so much so that we can't fit it all into one breath.

It is a simple thing, to breathe, and yet so critical for life. It's the very first thing we must do on our own when we enter this world. It's also the last thing we do at the opposite end of life, when we die. We speak of a person's last statement as being uttered "with their dying breath," and we frequently sterilize the ominous word "death" by saying instead that someone has "breathed their last."

In between birth and death, though, breathing is such an automatic function that we rarely think about it much, save for times of rigorous exercise or illness. It's just something we do, but breathing is the one thing without which we would die in a matter of minutes.

At a deeper level, breathing has taken on a metaphorical symbology in literature and folklore. Cats, an old wives' tale holds, will try to steal the breath of a sleeping baby, a legend whose origin lay with people whose fear that the mysterious creatures are not to be trusted led them to fabricate this myth. When we're upset, we're advised to pause and "take a deep breath," and when something new and exciting comes along, we deem it a "breath of fresh air."

Even as far back as creation, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we read that God formed man from the dust, and then breathed life into him (interestingly enough, the etymology of the word "human" derives from the Latin humus, which means "earth," and the name of the first man, Adam, is a derivative of the Hebrew word adamah, which means "ground"), and in Greek translations of the Bible, the word used for breath - pneuma - is also the word for "spirit."

Biologically speaking, respiration is a curious phenomenon because it's the only autonomic function which we can voluntarily control. "Autonomic" and "voluntary" are antonyms, in the realm of biology, but breathing tints their distinction with shades of gray.

When I was young, I had a friend whose father refused to give her permission to do something she desperately wanted to do, so she threatened to hold her breath until either he relented or she died. She then melodramatically hyperinflated her lungs to their full capacity (about 50 psi, had someone stuck a tire gauge up her nose), and the standoff began.

Her father, seemingly unmoved by the prospect of losing a child at such a young age, folded up his newspaper, tucked it beside himself in the armchair in which he was sitting, and watched. It apparently wasn't the reaction she thought he'd have, and despite the fact that she realized he held the trump card in the game, she stuck with her guns. I watched with horror as her face cycled through each of the colors in the visible spectrum and she finally fainted. At that point her father calmly picked up the newspaper and resumed reading. "How callous and unfeeling!" I thought to myself.

He, however, knew something which I did not. He knew that when she fainted, the automatic mechanism designed to keep us well-ventilated would kick in and a few seconds later, she would awaken. Indeed she did, and the headache she then had was of such magnitude as to make whatever it was she was so adamant about doing no longer seem so important.

Dad: 1, Kid: 0.

Hypoxic children aside, though, humans breathe, on average, about fifteen times per minute. If one were to do the math, one would find that the average person breathes over 150 million times during a 72 year lifetime.

It's such a simple thing, taking only about four seconds, and something we do all day long, awake or asleep, that we take it for granted, and yet with each breath comes opportunity. It's the opportunity we each have, over 150 million times during our lives, to say the important things.

Things like...

"I forgive you."

...or...

"I care."

...or...

"Let me help."

...or...

"I love you."