by Jon Eckert
I’ve recently fallen into a paradoxical blip in the time-space continuum. That is, to me, each day lasts for one week (7 days; 168 hours; 10,080 minutes; 604,800 seconds) while each week is as short as a single day (24 hours; 1440 minutes; 86,400 seconds). Wrap your firing synapses around that one. Believe me; I’m just as bewildered as you are. As far as I can tell, for the rest of humanity, time crawls by second-by-second, minute-by-minute, hour-by hour, and so on. For me, however, the past two months—I mean years, no, minutes—have been the slowest, fastest months I’ve ever encountered. Imagine: in the same amount of time (I struggle to use that term with a straight face) it takes the earth to make one 360° rotation, I’ve aged a full week. Yet, after the same earth has completed the same 360° rotation seven times, I’ve only experienced one 24-hour period. At this rate, I will have aged approximately sixty years in the next ten; but I won’t celebrate my 24th birthday until the year 2014, 25th until 2021, and so on. This doesn’t compute.
With all of my extra free time (that I keep running out of) I have been trying to pinpoint the exact moment this paradox began. I ate some stale cheese a while back. I knew it wasn’t healthy, but extreme hunger (just like extreme boredom, lust, fatigue, obsession, and temperatures) cause one to do things outside of one’s character. I figured the worst that would happen to me is an upset stomach, a doctor’s visit, or a stomach pump—nothing too serious. How was I to know that some green cheese was would cause a catastrophic lapse in time? I doubt that was the cause.
I have also been trying to convince myself that this is simply a stage of life. You know, like a mid-life crisis, except for twenty-somethings. I wouldn’t be as worried if I knew there were others experiencing the same thing. I don’t know how I’d identify the others. I could work it into a friendly greeting, “Excuse me, hello! My name is Jon. Have you, by chance, recently experienced a time paradox in which a week becomes a day and a day becomes a week?” Hmm. Maybe I won’t do that.
I took some Tylenol. I thought it might help; nothing so far.
Well, I suppose the only thing I can do is to keep on keeping on—boy, I hate that phrase—and hopefully this phase will pass; unless, maybe I’m dreaming? Perhaps last night was the night I ate that bad cheese and I’m paying for it now. Maybe I’ll wake to my cell phone’s alarm and everything will be back to normal. This is weird.
I’ve never looked forward to the alarm as I do right now.
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Jon Eckert is a co-host of the podcast Digital DriveBy. www.digitaldriveby.com or e-mail him at jeckert@digitaldriveby.com |
