Stark reminder of inevitable mortality

I have 249 movies on my Greencine queue. I know that this is not a lot, compared with several denizens of the public discussion boards, but it's a bracing figure nonetheless. Greencine (for those who don't know) is one of those services that mail DVDs to your home with return envelopes for a monthly fee... yes, like Netflix. I had a Netflix account for nearly a year, but Greencine has more of the cult horror and foreign flicks I want to watch, so I switched, even though their lack of distribution centers means that I have to wait about three days for transit (I keep stats, so when I say "about three days" I mean an average of 3.73 days for arrival and 3.15 days for return.)

My plan allows three discs out at once, and since the beginning of the year I've averaged 12.94 days from the point they go out to me and when they are received by Greencine. This includes two discs that we held onto for over a month (42 and 41 days) for some reason. We've averaged 6.63 discs per month so far this year, which means that if you round up and grant us seven discs per month, it will take me over 35 months to watch all the items on my list right now let alone things I haven't put on yet. So, I've got about three years of DVDs listed there.

The result is that every time I put a new disc on the queue, I must resign myself to the reality that I may not see the movie for years. Actually, it's worse than that; I may never see some of the movies on that list. I move things up the list if I really want to see them, but I've clicked any number of intriguing titles that I know little about or that I've always "wanted to" (read "thought I should") see that languish still at 222 (The Big Clock, if you must know) or 163 (Time Regained.) Not only are these items far from the top of the queue, they are regularly leapfrogged by other movies, meaning that they may stay in the ungainly and unloved middle of the queue for long spells. Many items at the top are high-priority, while those at the bottom are recent additions and more likely to be favored with a move to the top. Those in the middle are likely forgotten and must, like the snail in that math puzzle, creep up slowly only to slide back down in idle moments.

I may die with The Big Clock still hovering in the second quartile of my Greencine queue. Any insult to Charles Laughton is entirely unintentional.