Tuesday, March 13, 2007

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.

1 comment:

AMorris said...

You really need to move to Arizona. They don't do any of that silly time stuff here. It's really like setting your clocks fast to somehow trick yourself into getting up early anyway...just silly.