Have you ever had one of those moments where you’re just sitting there doing something that’s more physical than mental and then your mind starts to wander and think about other things entirely and then you stumble across a truth that really changes things for you? I think I’ve had a Toilet Epiphany of this nature.

Often, when bored out of my mind (like having read all the available items in my porcelain library), I’ll ask myself a question in my mind and force myself to elaborate on it. It helps to keep me thinking, in general, and it usually makes for some interesting discussion … with myself … in my head. You have to work with that you’ve got. So I asked myself today: “What is love?” Initially, it was for no more reason than to see what semi-poetic answer I could come up with that wasn’t playing off of someone else’s quote or what-have-you (Victor Hugo: “Life is a flower for which love is the honey.”; Franklin Jones: “Love doesn’t make the world go round. Love makes the ride worthwhile.”).

After I went a few rounds and came up with nothing either useful nor quite poetic, I then asked myself: “Well, that was an attempt at the emotional answer, what’s the logical answer?” Fairly quickly I said to myself: “Well, it’s fear.” Specifically, it’s a fear of losing someone. Love could be described as a nebulous attachment that animals make to one another, or it could be described in more concrete terms as saying that you love someone when you fear that someone being removed from your life.

It makes perfect sense as a survival instinct, given that fear itself evolved that way. The natural size of a group of humans has been said to be around 150 people (this is known as Dunbar’s Number).

After doing a substantial number of grammar checks on my writing, I’ve started to become really curious about the reading ease scores that Word keeps throwing in my face afterwards. Useful, but curious. After looking up what they mean I decided to test the limits of the scores and found that, well, they don’t mean squat. Observe:

• The cat jumped over the dog.

• The feline succeeded in a spectacularly executed vertical displacement beyond the canine guard.

The first gave a score of 100 and a grade level of 0.5. This means, and I agree, that everyone in the world who knows English can read and understand that. The second sentence was graded with 0 and a grade level of 12. This means that only collegiate readers would have an ice cube’s chance in hell of understanding it. That’s a sentence I could understand in middle school and this formula thinks it takes a grad to read?

Syllables do not make a work difficult, and longer sentences simply require a larger attention span. This is silly. Frankly, I won’t think that I’ve done my job as a writer until I can drill the score down to at least 40 for the whole work, at which point I’ll be satisfied enough at my work to release it.

Until then, off I go adding large words to large sentences!