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My watch: a little rough around the edges, but it gets me where I need to go.
You are viewing stuff tagged with time.
Annie Dillard:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
With the recent dusting of snow and the consistently cold temperatures, I think biking season is over. This means I have already taken my last ride with Ess on the front handlebars. It gives a dad watery eyes: the first realization of this, and then typing up the thought now. It’s hard to see something that brought so much joy be taken away by dispassionate, objective time. It makes you feel small, powerless, helpless. Mykala anticipated this day six months ago, and when I wasn’t thinking of taking a bike ride this past summer, she was, and got us out for jaunts I wouldn’t have even thought of. Even Ess helped out: asking to go on rides when I least expected it.
In a few hours, it’ll be three years since Ess was born. For the first two years, there was kind of a catching of the breath after each stage: after she began sleeping more reliably, after she stopped needing to be burped, after she could sit through a meal out at a restaurant. Beginning with this birthday, it is a less of a catching of the breath and more this sense of taking a memory (“hope I don’t fall down” whenever she climbed the stairs) or a mis-pronunciation (dooDAHNdaht for banana) and reverently setting it on the shelf, leaving it behind.
“Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to Dada…” is what I heard Ess singing in her pack and play on the morning of my birthday. She and Mykala sang it again later that day, and we drew with chalk on the sidewalk. Mykala baked a yellow cake (one of my favorites), and frosted a birthday greeting on the top of it. I visited my parents, and the sun was out for the first time in a few days. I tripled my age and got 96; I looked back and realized I started at my current job when I was only 27, and that Ess was born when I was 29. I recalled looking at my official birthday certificate when I was in college, and seeing my mom’s age at my birth: 29.
This morning I watched big big snowflakes fall down outside my office window, then float up when they came close to the building, then fall down again. I walked the skyways to the bank and stood over South 8th Street, watching the same thing, transfixed. I wasn’t fixated on avoiding any thoughts or solving any problems. I had no breakthroughs about my life. But I thought I wouldn’t mind sharing peace like this with my daughter.
A Tall Tree’s Tale; the beginning and end of Encino California’s 1,000 year-old oak.
Heartsick, I myself took nothing more than a single, small leaf that I still have. It was enough.
I took a picture a little over ten years ago and I want you to take a look not at the foreground (hi, Steve and John!), but rather at the background. See that maple tree back there? That’s in my parent’s neighbor’s yard. The Nelson family: Ken, Reenie, and Ken Jr. (‘Kenny’ to me and Katy). Kenny and I grew up next-door neighbors, and his parents lived there next to mine since 1991. Almost a quarter of a century, now.
I looked down while waiting at a stoplight today and somehow was surprised to see a wedding ring on my finger, dress clothes on myself, sitting in a car I own, coming from a full time job.
Where did the time go?
The ex-potato field felt empty but not desolate—lot stakes, light posts, and the bafflingly windy streets of modern suburbia were all in place. Ours was the second house in Brighton’s Landing, a development in what would soon become one of the fastest growing cities in the nation. I knew none of this context, nor would it have refined my picture of my place in the world—like any child, my life was defined by low walls and narrow vistas. But I did know we were moving, here, to this new house. I gazed up into the vaulted entryway, looked down at the unstained ornaments for the front window. My memories of this construction phase are spotty, but I know we visited regularly during dim fall evenings. I remember little from the days we moved, but the vast expanse of fresh carpet lodged in my brain. Perhaps because I was six years old and still close the ground. That was 1991, over 20 years ago.
How to Make a Clock Run for 10,000 Years | Wired.com quotes Jeff Bezos, the sponsor of this $40+ million dollar 10,000 year clock project:
“My opinion is that human attention spans haven’t changed much over time. We’ve always been a fairly short-sighted species,” Bezos says, and laughs. “But while our attention spans are staying roughly constant, our problems are becoming much bigger, because of our past successes as a species. Our tools, our technologies, now require us to step it up, and have a longer attention span.”
Alright! 599 days of dental school remaining. Plus 4 hours and 56 minutes.
In case you are wondering, yes I am actually serious. That’s the amount of time left in school. Not bad, considering we started at almost 1400 days.
In the New Yorker article Time Bandits lies the best plain English description of special relativity that I have ever run across (you owe it to yourself to read this carefully — it’s worth it):
An interesting snippet I saw today in a wonderful illustrated piece in the Times about Thomas Jefferson:
Time wastes too fast: every letter
I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours
of it are flying over our heads like clouds of a windy day never to return
The 18th Century Sundial and Compass is a great gift idea for that wanderer in your life who also has a timeless (har) sense of style. This isn’t a hint as a gift for me (I could use a kitchen table, frankly), but I thought I’d pass it along.
My watch: a little rough around the edges, but it gets me where I need to go.
10,000 Year Clock - The Clock of the Long Now is an exquisite feat of engineering and art, designed to last for over 10,000 years. I will be following this. (Thanks: kottke)
I found out what my scheduling slash time management problem is.
1.) I need to organize my to-do lists into discrete blocks of time. This will allow me to actually get everything done.
2.) In order to help with part one: I need to reduce perfectionism. My problem has been thinking “I can’t do this to the N’th degree of perfection, so I’ll do something lower on the priority list” … this leads to a rough cycle of anger at myself for not completing tasks, and further reduction in productivity.
Stonehenge Watch - A watch that is a sundial. Who wouldn’t want one?