Time is a Fickle Bitch
Freshly showered, looking through a steamed mirror, slicking pomade through my sorta flowing locks. Confidence growing with the length of day. A warm current slips through the chilled air, signaling things are on the up seasonally, personally, professionally.
The raw emotions during the vernal and autumnal turns in the seasons strike everyone uniquely. To me, they are intensely warming times, regardless of the thermometer. Much of my most poignant memories were forged in these seasons of transition – school, sport, travel, love.
But such is language. It is merely a representation of thought. Semiotics. A word is a best attempt at conveying an idea from one person to the next. An apple to a farmer is different to what an apple represents to a schoolboy. They are not the same. Snow to me is not the snow of the Inuit. Time to me is not time to anyone else. Of course, Einstein told us all that. Ish.
The vicissitudes of time have been the topic of countless poems, novels and silly blog posts. This is my hack.
Eureka Moment
For a typical American college student, time is measured against education. It’s measured by grade, by semester, by midterms, by finals, by projects and papers and p-sets and presentations. It’s measured by friends and girlfriends and somethingfriends come and gone. It’s measured by days until the next exam, by parties since your last hookup, by hours til you fly home for Thanksgiving.
For myself and my other young millennials, time is still measured by school. Grad school, nursing school, should-I-go-back? school. For myself, the short-term prospect of grad school is minimal, so I’m struck by this realization:
In a short amount of time, I will have been out of college longer than I’d been in it. Yikes.
And without this temporal touchstone intact, I’ll need a new relative calendar to measure up time. Normal calendars are too impersonal.
Time since I started the last job. Months since my last trip. Hours since my last mug of coffee.
Turns out, watches are also great barometers of time. Who’d’ve thunk?
Watches
Back to my semi-naked self, readying to go out. Socks and briefs on, hair slicked. Okay, maybe it’s time for a shirt. Probably go with New England’s Male Dress Code: flannel and jeans. Oh wait, maybe not. Spring’s coming. Too warm for that. Jeans and a T. What color T? Black, blue, white? Choices, man.
Okay black T. Time for a watch. I don’t have an extensive collection. Like three kinda decent ones and a Walmart Casio I use for runs. Ah, what about the one from my brother’s wedding. I’ll bust that out. Oh but I’ll have to adjust for Daylight Saving Time.
What time’s it now? 10? Okay so gotta move it an hour back. Wait, what?!? It’s already set.
I don’t have to set the time on my watch because so much time has gone by, huh?
That moment struck. (Shitty pun intended.)
Time flew from November 4 to March 19. Four and a half months of my life. Gone. Whipped by.
What do I have to show for that time? Did I really *do* anything? Who am I?
Millennial, angsty questions steamed out my ears like a cartoon. Existential Crisis Alert: Code Red.
The moment I realized time flew was a watch I didn’t have to set.
Daylight’s Savings Time
[This section will be short.] It’s stupid. There’s no reason to have it anymore. We have a globally piecemeal system of keeping time. Arizona kinda doesn’t have it. China definitely doesn’t have it; hell, they don’t even have time zones. Europe does it at different times than us. God forbid you schedule a transoceanic phone call and don’t realize the intricacies of this antiquated timekeeping feature.
End it.
The Books of Changes
I always kept a journal in college and beyond when I lived in China for a few years. It’s always great to go back and see what stupid awesome stuff you did.
Beyond aiding it memory recall, it simultaneously encouraged me to do cool shit. You don’t wanna have a lame journal, do you? Do you??? No. Hold my beer.
Looking back through unpublished personal entries, I was astonished at the changes that occur in the Middle Kingdom, both personal or otherwise.
You don’t need a casual observer to remind you – China changes remarkably quickly.
Umpteen books have documented the transformations. This Last Days of Old Beijing. Or Wish Lanterns. Or Factory Girls. All fantastic reads, tenuously related, documenting the unyielding progress of the Middle Kingdom.
Change in Time in China vs US
In China the speed of change is breathtaking. In the US, it can be too, but for an opposite reason.
In China, cityscapes transform with such rapidity, that you stand stupefied on an urban corner you thought you once knew. Where’s my neighborhood foreigner bar? Where’s my bubble tea shop? Why are there three new bubble tea shops?
In China, changes make you realize how little time has passed to enact meaningful transformations. You’re left wondering where everything has gone. In the US, changes make you realize how *much* time has passed to enact anything meaningful. You’re left wondering where all the time has gone.
In college, change was quick. 24 hours till my next paper is due. That goes quick. Essays, parties, speeches, graduations. A week after I experienced my fourth graduation ceremony on campus, I grabbed my diploma finally, and boarded a plane a week later to a country with pacey change, as well.
My time scale was shrunk, like how we conceptualize time for human history. I was dividing time into tiny, tiny chunks. I was conditioned that way.
When I moved back home to the US, I had a different framework of time. I used to track minutes and days and weeks with regularity. Now I tracked months.
In my lovely hometown of Springfield, Mass, an MGM casino was finally built over a process of perhaps a decade. This is by far the biggest thing built in the city and will be for the foreseeable future. Condemned buildings from 2011 still stand. Streets and curbs in need of repair are lamentably still in need of repair. Buildings don’t change. People don’t change. Nothing changes.
Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. It took 3 billion before we had multicellular being. It took, 4.48billion before we had things that looked like humans. Yet I was thinking about the world: how long did it take to go from megabytes to gigabytes to terabytes?
In the End…
A watch four and a half months late, stuck in last year’s Daylight Saving Time got me thinking. Got me thinking about the bursts and bevies of change. Got me thinking of change in China. Got me thinking of the slowness of small town America. Got me thinking of time scales.
And I gotta say: I miss China’s version.
Let me know what you think in the comments below! Agree? Disagree? Think I’m an idiot? Let me know!
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