Clockwatcher

The matter of punctuality drives me insane. I'm prone to being late sometimes, I'll admit. Some of my most frantic, unglued moments have been ones in which I am late or at risk of being late. When one is running late and reliant on public transportation, the knowledge that one can do absolutely nothing but wait and hope for the best is not pleasant. Driving, one has the hope that comes from knowing an alternate route could conceivably speed things up. I don't have that hope generally.

Mostly I manage to avoid such incidents of lateness, whether it is for something critical like an audition or something unimportant like a casual get-together. It seldom seems that people appreciate the lengths to which I go, but the compulsion to be on time is very natural to me, so I guess I don't need to have my efforts validated by other people. It would be nice, but I take comfort in knowing that I have lived up to my own standards, or tried to.

Daylight Enslavement

Growing up in Arizona, it's a peculiar way of experiencing Daylight Savings that we have. We don't do it. I have always endorsed this policy, and still do today. It's one of the few things unique to my home state that I'm still proud of, although it's not entirely effective thanks to the encroaching of the outside world (which includes the Navajos, who are an island of unreason in a land of otherwise sane time management.

As we never had dealings with Navajos personally, that was not a problem for us. What always was an issue were the friends and loved ones who lived in places that do abide by it. All my life, I knew that sometimes it was so many hours difference from where family was if we were calling, and sometimes it was an hour more. That's all it was to me, and I don't enjoy at this point in my life having to learn to deal with the clocks, although most of them handle this on their own.

Time Travelers All

I find it somewhat difficult to manage the time. It's not being places on time that's generally the issue, although I invariably find that I must rush out of the house at the last minute to do so. Really what it is that provides some difficulty is knowing just what time it is. Maybe that sounds like a rather anachronistic problem, given that most clocks now are part of a global system. What is left behind except for your older microwaves and toasters?

My wristwatch does need to be kept up, any every time it falls behind I must re-teach myself its operation without a manual. Presently it's three minutes behind, and if I can remember that then it hardly needs fixing. It does take a moment to bring it to mind, however. The case is the same with my standard alarm clock, except that it's considerably more reliable in keeping the time. Still, there is one thing that it needs.

This Means You

There are certain things one would think were almost included in the Twelve Labors of Hercules, but in fact are extremely easy things if people cared enough. Learning names is one. Some say that they're bad with names, but I bet that they learn the names of people they care about pretty well. I know I do. Also easy if you care is showing up on time. I haven't got a car. Sometimes it takes me two solid hours to make a trip that someone with a car can make in a quarter of the time. I still manage to be on time more than a lot of people.

This is because I respect the people I'm going to see, and value their time. It seems reasonable to expect the same in return. I figure that if I play my cards right and have some lucky breaks, I may have fifty more years ahead of me on this Earth. I don't mean to seem morbid or fatalistic. It's just my way of saying that life is short. It's so short that even those with no ambition wish they had more time, and I have a lot of ambition. I just have no time to spare, and I definitely have no time to waste. That leads me to consideration of the intolerable attitude many seem to have towards me.

Prioritize

I was saying to a friend how scheduling used to be very easy for me. First, there was nothing to schedule apart from eating, sleeping and work, because no one offered me anything to do. That changed when I began to be invited to a monthly event. That went on the calendar, never to be threatened by a conflict or crowded by anything happening on another day of the week. I would look forward to it all month while watching dvds alone or working with people who I only saw outside of work if there was a wrap party. It was when I met my current roommate and moved in that things began to change.

I now have a bewilderingly large and wide-spread community of friends, acqaintances and well-wishers from whom I receive invitations for activities ranging from the improv and acting stuff that largely defines it to events as far afield as church and exercise. For a time, there was one thing to do most nights, and I did it. Empty nights I spent resting, reflecting, and doing the solo activities which had been reduced from their previous exclusive hold on my time. There are still nights like that, and there have to be, so long as they're the exception.

March 1st

The end of February really snuck up on me. I sometimes think about the way our calendar works. Months of 30, 31, and 28 days. I guess that it more or less evens out in the end, what with leap days and all that. There are all sorts of corrective patches slapped on here and there to keep our feeble system of time measurement going, aren't there? It's not just the calendar, but hours and minutes and seconds. Who's going to fix this? We need a really good system. I blame my problems on the one we're laboring under.

There's no way that it's going to come up with any really cool predictions like the Mayan calendar. It's really enough to make one sink into despair.