So today is February 29, a day that only occurs (at most) once every four years. Is this a cause for celebration? Well, maybe, but today wasn’t actually a great day for me. I went to work as usual, and then two things happened:
- I finished reading No Longer Human, which is possibly the most depressing book I’ve ever read. The narrator attempts suicide at least twice during the course of 177 pages.
- Someone told me that a middle-aged gay man I briefly talked to last week referred to me as “that gay boy” behind my back, which made me feel all sorts of insecurity. Am I giving off some sort of signal? Do I have strange mannerisms?
And then I was depressed out of my mind. Not enough to actually do anything like drown myself in the ocean with someone I’m in love with (because I’m not in love with anyone), but you know, it’s really hard to see the upside of a book where the narrator wants to die and a gay man who’s judged you in a way that high school bullies did.
So then I started thinking about other things to take my mind off of my misery. Like random stuff about leap year.
One thing that always bugged me was that the extra day kind of throws things off, since most of the time it’s assumed that there are 365 days in a year. Take paychecks, for example. If you get paid semi-monthly (that’s twice a month), you get paid the same amount this year, since you have exactly 24 paychecks that are each 1/24 your annual salary, as you would in a non-leap year. But is that fair? You’re working an extra day, and yet you get the same salary. Shouldn’t you get an extra day’s worth of pay? Or at the very least, get an extra holiday? I don’t think companies give an extra day off in leap years.
On the other hand, if you get paid biweekly (that’s every two weeks), on average you end up getting paid slightly more in leap years, though you do work an extra day. You’ll always get paid 1/26 your annual salary every 14 days, no matter what. So on average, you get 365/364 times your annual salary in non-leap years, while you get 366/364 times your annual salary in leap years. The extra 0.27% is negligible, I know. But you hardly ever get anything for free. I guess in this case you still don’t get it for free, since you’re working an extra day. I just can’t win.
Well, March starts tomorrow. Which means I should pay my rent tonight…