Thursday, August 10, 2006

There is not enough time in the day

One promise, one commitment can change the speed of time. Time is not relative to mass so much as it is relative to massive commitment. I cannot possibly accomplish everything I have set out to do because I just run out of steam and have to stop and eat or sleep.

In the movie "Time Cop" Jean-Claude Van Damme steals up behind Mia Sara as she looks at clocks in a store window.

"There is never enough time," he says.

"Time enough for what?" she asks.

"To please a woman," he replies.

"Then you had better hurry," she says.

The problem with hurrying is that we seldom have enough time to do things fast. In the movie "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", Alan Quartermain (played by Sean Connery) tries to teach Tom Sawyer (played by Shane West) to shoot at extremely long distances. "Take your time," Quartermain admonishes Sawyer. "You have all the time in the world".

The first time they share such a scene, Sawyer shoots too soon and misses his target. In the movie's finale, naturally, he takes his time and aims well and hits his target.

When I try to relax, I often have enough time to realize that I really want to rush. Rushing wastes time and compresses it. But mostly rushing just causes you to do things you normally wouldn't do when you were rushed.

I remember one 4th of July (an American holiday) where I had to go into work on a special project. A girl who did not have access to the building (I was a manager and had a key) was waiting for me. I overslept (I don't recall why) and flew down the highway. Well, I was speeding about as much as I normally speeded when going to work, but on the 4th of July there ain't no one else on the highway to hide you from the police officers with their radar guns.

So naturally I got a ticket and the officer didn't buy my "I was just keeping up with traffic" excuse (he said something like, "Son, you were the traffic, so that don't count").

Needless to say, getting the ticket made me 20 minutes late, whereas had I simply driven the speed limit I would have arrived about 5 minutes late and I wouldn't have gotten chewed out by a girl who really didn't want to be in that neighborhood by herself on a day when no one else she knew would be coming around the parking lot.

Ah, memories.

I sit here at 1:30 in the morning typing into my blog because I want to get the blog done for the day so I don't have to worry about whether I wrote anything interesting throughout the day. The burden of writing a blog becomes a massive weight on the soul. "Have I said anything anyone gives a damn about today?" is a frequent thought.

Frankly, I rarely say anything that anyone actually comments on. Most of you surf in, read my page for a few minutes (I should be grateful you don't leave immediately) and then you go on with your lives. But I'm left grasping at a moment that has already slipped by because I didn't have enough time to write the next Pulitzer-winning blog entry.

And people wonder why I use Blogger anyway instead of putting a blog on one of my own domains. The truth of the matter is that I like simple blog interfaces. Dixie doesn't. She wants buttons and gizmos and links and tabs and things that are so complex I'll never use them. Maybe she would use them if she blogged but she doesn't blog she hogs -- that is, she rides a hog. Or is that a chopper? I'm not sure because I don't have time to look up which nickname goes with her motorcycle. She doesn't have a Harley-Davison, if that matters.

Maybe she just has a 'tweeler.

Mark Twain reportedly once wrote, "I apologize for the length of this letter but I didn't have time to write a short one." I might as well point out that every time I quote him, someone inevitably says, "Wasn't that Voltaire?" (or some other famous person from history). I have no idea, to be honest, because I don't have time to look it up. Proper research would require that I weigh all the attributions and sources against one another and determine who the final authority is and then come back and fix the blog to accurarely attribute the remark to someone.

Screw all that, I said it.

Hope you got something out of this, because I don't have time to write anything else.

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