This week I have been dying of the plague. My chances of
survival have improved since Monday, when my throat may have been housing a baby porcupine. I've literally been on drugs this entire week. If I
wasn’t at work staring miserably at nothing, I was home asleep in my bed. I’ve
gone through 4 quarts of chicken noodle soup, a pack of soothing menthol cough
drops, a combo Nyquil/Dayquil family pack and a box of Alka-Seltzer Cold &
Cough tablets. I somehow managed to survive 34 hours of work. Don’t ask me how,
considering I phlegmed on my phone headset Monday morning and
thought I might be fired. What I’m trying to say is I lost an entire week of life
to the strangely viscous reality stew of medicinally-induced sleep.
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| Will you take the Nyquil, or the non-drowsy Dayquil? |
This morning I was bitching to a friend about my life and
how little I’ve accomplished. I feel like I left Missoula ages ago, and I feel
like I should be a much more successful human being by now. I mean that’s the
point, right? Growing up, growing away, hitting my stride out here. I guess
essentially I expected to be more. Once I wore myself out on that tangent, she very
gently reminded me that I’ve only been in this town for three months. Oh my
god, you guys. She’s right. I’ve only been in Portland for three months and
three days.
This brings to light my extraordinarily warped perception of
time, something I’ve always been peripherally aware of. I never really
considered its pertinence to the way I view my life. I obvs know the solid time
markers. Like that “last Tuesday” means the Tuesday that preceded the week we
are currently occupying. Because time is a thing that we occupy, it’s a
conceptual idea that we make physical by being present in it. Or something like
that. You should know I’m not really scientifically oriented. I prefer the
literary realm. I get more excited by dialects and etymology than genetics or
astrophysics. But the scientific concept of time in and of itself is
fascinating. Plus human perceptions of time and the way our cultures mark it? Mind
boggling.
Here are some examples of the arbitrary ways I process time:
The other day
refers to any time in the last 5 years. It could be “I was driving home the
other day”, which completely works. You can infer that I drive home a lot, and
I’m probably referencing sometime in the past week or two. Just as comfortably,
I’ve been known to say something like “So I was talking to S the other day…” at
which point my conversational partner becomes confused, because S has been in
Africa for the past 7 months and has had little to no contact with the outside
world.
A while ago is
similarly broad. I was supposed to be somewhere “a while ago”? I’m either five
minutes or five hours late. Rarely but occasionally five days. Related to this:
in a little bit really could be
within the next five minutes! Unless it’s something I don’t want to do. Then it
means sometime this week. Probably.
Forever really
just expresses my growing irritation with a situation or activity. It doesn’t
pertain to any sort of time measurement. Not even a little bit, not even at
all. So when I say “Holy shit, it seems like we’ve been waiting forever”, we
probably haven’t. We’ve probably been waiting the expected number of minutes for
said activity (ex. getting seated at a restaurant or standing in line for a
roller coaster). The length of Forever directly correlates to the amount of
sleep I got the previous night, my blood sugar/alcohol levels and my personal excitability.
Writing is inordinately hard today, like my headspace is all
cluttered even though I spent all day today making sure my physical space wasn’t.
By all day I mean the approximate hour it took me to do a load of laundry and sweep my loft.
On an unrelated note, I discovered this mid delirium. Seriously, go take a dose of Nyquil, wait 20
minutes and then look at this site.
I love you
ReplyDeleteI love you too.
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