Tag Archives: time

No conception of time

I’m always going to bed way too late, like I try to commit myself to being asleep by midnight, but it never happens. I don’t know why, but whenever I try to get myself to abide by a schedule, time has a way of skipping past my consciousness in twenty-minute chunks at a time. So I’ll be on the computer, it’s eleven forty-five, I think, OK, fifteen more minutes and then I’ll go to sleep. And then it’s past two in the morning.

timeconcept

That’s OK, I’ll tell myself, as long as I get up early, I’ll make up for the lost time. But my alarm goes off and my body gets out of bed and walks across the room to shut it off, all without even disturbing me from my sleep. And then it’s ten o’clock. Which, yeah ten is kind of late to sleep in, but I work at night, and so it’s not totally unreasonable. And besides, I still have five or six hours before I have to head back to the restaurant, I should be able to make constructive use of my time.

And then it’s noon, and I’m still in my pajamas. And actually starting the day, it shouldn’t be this hard. But there are so many little steps that I need to complete to get past this late morning limbo that I’m stuck in. I need to brush my teeth, go to the bathroom, get dressed, make the coffee, take my dog for a walk, come back in, eat breakfast, and then brush my teeth and take a shower.

But I’ve been thinking about it too much, how I’m going to get started right away, how if I can ust concentrate on completing each mini task as efficiently and quickly as possible, I shouldn’t really have to spend more than half an hour, tops. But now it’s getting close to one-thirty, and so the idea of breakfast is slowly starting to merge into where lunch should be. I’m figuring that I’m probably only going to have enough time for one meal, something closer to three, I’ll make myself a big sandwich or I’ll buy some pizza and I can just eat my cereal as a dessert.

It’s too much thinking, I can’t believe I’ve already spent this much time not doing anything, two o’clock already and I’m still in my pajamas. Wasn’t I supposed to get some writing done? Didn’t I have plans to go for a run, maybe get to the gym? Nothing’s going to fit into my schedule anymore. And I’ve got to be real here, I don’t have a schedule, I don’t have anything, not even a basic conception of how long a minute lasts, ten minutes, half an hour.

Shit, I’ve really got to get going, at this point I’m going to be late for work. It’s OK, I’ll just drink coffee when I get to the restaurant. Hopefully I’ll have enough time to grab a stale bagel at the coffee shop next door. What about my writing? Well maybe I’ll get some done when I get home from work. That’s what I’ll tell myself, even though I know it’s never going to happen.

Or, I wish that I could tell myself that it’s never going to happen. If I were sure that there was no chance of me coming home and starting my productivity at close to midnight, I’d put it out of my head, I wouldn’t entertain the possibility that it could happen. But once out of every thirty or forty times, I actually will come home and start working. I’ll get this insane focus to just sit down and crank out some writing. And it’s not forced and I’m not compulsively checking the Internet every ten seconds.

I’ll plow through three, five, ten pages of writing, this is crazy, I can’t even get ten pages of writing out if I have a whole day off, something that I’ll dedicate strictly to productivity. And I’ll be so into it that I’ll start to fool myself, like yeah, I’m doing it right now, there’s no reason why I won’t be able to get this done tomorrow also.

And so I’ll wake up late the next day, but it won’t matter, because I’ll have gotten done so much work the night before. And I just loaf around all day before going to work but, whatever, I’ll just do that nighttime thing that I did last night. But I’m sitting at my computer and it’s happening. And then it’s three in the morning, I give up, I think OK, I’ll just get up early in the morning and make up for all of this time wasted. But why can’t I ever hear my alarm clock going off? And what am I doing all day when I should be up and going? Why does so much of my life feel like I have no control over anything, not big-picture stuff, not even minute-by-minute decisions? It’s like I’m sitting on top of a giant cork that’s exploding from a huge bottle of Champagne or … no, that’s ridiculous imagery, I’m trying way too hard, it’s like I’m on a really long waterslide, lots of twists and turns, I’m constantly feeling my body lift off the tube, and then I’m pressed up against the side, all I can really do is try to keep my neck somewhat straight, there’s too much water in my eyes for me to see, but hopefully I can keep my nose and throat open long enough for me to take the occasional breath of air … no, that’s equally crazy, I still feel like I’m forcing it, and I can’t believe this took me forty minutes to write, I was banking on twenty, and now I think I’m going to be late.

We’re all wasting too much stuff, too much time

There’s just too much waste, so much unnecessary trash clogging up our lives, the streets. Like cars. Why do they need four wheels? Why not three wheels? I guess traction, right, or safety? I guess a car with three wheels isn’t as safe, like you could tip it over easier. Maybe. What about one wheel? Just one giant wheel, so that way it couldn’t be tipped over. And the car could be on the inside. And instead of brakes, I don’t know, I think you’d need maybe some clamps or something that pop out and help you to stop. Maybe it’s a little impractical, sure, but think of how much money we could save on tires, three tires for every new car, totally saved. Think of the savings.

Or think smaller. Like what about those little plastic pieces that pizza places stick in the middle of the pizza, so that way the top of the box doesn’t cave in, doesn’t smush the pizza? You know, they look like little plastic tables, with three legs, it’s like the size of a half dollar, maybe a little bigger? How many of those are we throwing away every year? I’ll tell you how many: way too many. That’s a lot of plastic, an unnecessary amount of plastic. I think that pizza places should either start like a collection system, maybe a drop-off box where you can return your used plastic mini table things, or, and I think that this is a better idea, just bake a garlic knot right in the middle of the pizza, so there’s a huge lump, so the box can’t get crushed. I mean, I guess it could still get crushed, but it would help, it would be a deterrent. And think of how much less waste there’d be.

Bu what if you don’t like garlic? Just tell the pizza guy, maybe they’ll make like a garlic knot with no garlic. But what are you going to call it, a knot? That’s not descriptive enough. A plain knot? A regular knot? That’s better, sure, but think of all of that waste though, all of those extra words, “plain,” “regular,” all saying the same thing, the same nothing. So much extra time spent saying all of these unnecessary words, syllables, right, it’s not a lot of time, but here and there, those microseconds add up, and so, yeah, I guess just knot, it would be awkward at first, customers saying, “What’s a knot?” and the pizza guy would have to be like, “You know, like a garlic knot with no garlic.” That might seem like a total waste of words, of whole sentences even, but again, I urge pizza guys to think long term, invest in a few extra minutes of instruction now, save all of that time in the future just saying knot instead of regular knot, or plain knot, or garlic knot with no garlic.

And I know I’m trying to cut out the fat, really eliminate waste here, and so I’m kind of reluctant to bring up my next point, one, because I don’t want you to think I’m just getting hung up on garlic knots here, and two, because after what I’m about to say, you might think, hey, he just wasted everybody’s time with that last paragraph. But I’ve got to. A garlic knot? Why bother spending time on a knot? Why not a garlic unknot? How many minutes, hours, weeks are pizza guys just tossing away, knotting all of these unknots into garlic knots? What is it before, a little rope? Right? And then you tie it up into a knot? Just call it a garlic rope. Or just a rope. Production is going to triple.

Or maybe a garlic ball. Right, just ball, because you still need something to prop up that pizza box. Maybe a garlic cube. Or would it be too hard to make one of those plastic tables out of garlic knot dough? Probably. That’s probably not going to save any time at all. I really ought to think about this some more, but I don’t have any more time, I’m too busy, I’ve got to free up some room in my day, to think, to eliminate waste, to free up more time to think about more ways to cut more waste and free up even more time.