allmostrelevant

As spring begins to close and students begin to part for the summer, they want something to hold on to. People turn their ankles unexpectedly because students start taking bricks from the paths around campus, leaving big holes. Some poor guy has to go out in the morning rain and get on his hands and knees and put a replacement brick in because it would make a cool memento. I saw that guy as I walked the path today. He looked tired.

You ever done the same thing so many times that you can’t remember doing it anymore? You just zone out and the clock moves? People say it’s a form of hypnosis, like driving the same stretch of road everyday that you zone out and just ‘appear’ at your destination. “woah–how’d I get here?” Some people say it freaks them out and it’s really weird, but I think I just invented teleportation.

I work fast. I eat hard. I can run a book faster than I can read a mile. I eat dumbbells for breakfast. Sneezes come in one’s. I can baby sit an entire elementary school for a week—in just one day. Cars look both ways for me. I can wash the dishes while I give a massage. I remind the reminders what they’re supposed to remind me of. I can sleep for an hour in 5 minutes. I dream for other people, and they tell me it was awesome. I’ve grown old a thousand times and can still wrestle a hippo. My teeth make my toothbrush cleaner. I high-fived a bald eagle mid-swoop. I can draw the line and then cross it, and draw another line. I am the answer to your next exam question. I can fill in the blank. I am the blank.

It’s funny how on the first sunny day in a long time you will see students out enjoying the sun, playing frisbee, tanning, reading outside, playing music. And then on the second sunny day hardly anyone is outside because they’re all catching up on the work they skipped the day before.

Time is a funny thing. It’s very constant, as constant as things can get, but it seems to act in such a relative way it baffles the mind.

“They grow up so fast, don’t they?” I don’t know who to trust when I hear that statement. When I grew up it took me a long time, an extremely long time. A school year was an eternity, and if I had to wait an hour until dinner I might as well forget about eating. Time passes so slowly when you are young, but now an hour flies by in the blink of an eye, and I completed four years of college like it was nothing.

In the most unscientific explanation possible, I feel like this is because of two things, both having to do with the relativity of things; their ‘context.’

The shorter you have lived, the longer a second is relative to how long you’ve been alive, and conversely the longer you’ve lived, the shorter a second seems.

Routine and memories. If you fall into a routine where you start and end and execute your days in the same manner day in and day out, each day will be the same and they will all blur into one memory, and thus time will seem faster. When you are young there is not much routine and everything is new, so you are constantly making new memories and time seems much slower.