Time

I feel ever-constricted by time, but it's not time's fault: it's the way our social structure uses and abuses it. In his poem “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home,” Craig Raine catches this idea perfectly as the “Martian” tries to explain life on Earth:

… time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

Yesterday I sat down with a friend and colleague as he showed me a huge web project he has almost finished. Colleague Friend is not a computer expert and he taught himself Dreamweaver to do this. This man accomplishes more on his lunch hour than I do in a week.

How is this????

We both get 24 hours per day.

My current dilemma? It’s 6:00 a.m. I must be “up” by 7:30. I woke up, however, at 3:30 and have been trying to exhaust myself back to sleep ever since. Later I will drag myself through the day only to not be able to sleep tonight. I fully expect that before the day is over, Abe Lincoln and a beaver will give me a pep talk as a silent astronaut observes.

Of course, I’m not really sure I’ve been awake since 3:30.

When we rolled into this experimental Daylight Saving Time, my home computer and cell phone automatically adjusted for the change.

I changed the time on my stove, but I changed it wrong. It’s – somehow – 15 minutes early. To get to the real time, I’ll have to take the time to scroll forward 11 hours and 45 minutes. This is a bad system.

I changed the time in my car.

I changed the time on my alarm clock and bedroom VCR. I can’t change the time on my living room VCR because I lost my remote somewhere in my house and I’m waiting for the new used one that I ordered from eBay.

I don’t care whether my living room TV and stereo know what time it is.

I haven’t changed either of my hanging-on-the-wall clocks yet.

My work office phone adjusted for the change; my work computer didn’t.

I feel like I'm ticking with impatience.
And the boxes are as confused as I am.