Monday, January 14, 2008

tick tock

in other news...

i spent the afternoon reading my brains out at borders, so much that i pretty much just stumbled home in a spatial and temporal warp, but anyways... it still managed to occur to me, as i stood on the BART platform at embarcadero just how fast 11 minutes can just whiz by. how many 11 minutes of my life have come and gone as i've stared at the wall in a stupor? time is a slippery customer at the best of times, and especially when it's spent waiting for the next ride. even when the wait seems interminable... from the longest 3 minutes EVER to the longest 30-minutes-in-the-cold-that-should-have-only-been-5-minutes EVER, it's like... damn, those minutes are come and gone forEVER, and at the end of my life, those are the ones that I'm gonna want returned to me because I always forget or decide not to bring a book. today's 11 minutes went faster than usual (often, you'll find me rolling my eyes incessantly) because i had mentally prepared myself by mishearing the announcement as "1 minute" and when I found out I was wrong, quickly steeled myself against disappointment by saying "whatever, I have my ipod." and then good-bye to 11 minutes of my life. they went so fast, and then next thing you know, i'm sitting in a dark tunnel wondering why the heck the train stopped moving. and then, with no explanation, we moved again, and from there it was smooth sailing all the way home.

the story this time had nothing to do with anywhere i had to BE (though, if you want to be fair about it, i was tired, dazed, hungry, and needed to pee), but the fact that there was nowhere else i COULD be, because if i wanted to be anywhere else, then i would just have to continue waiting.

and i thought that if i ever figured out just how much of my life i have spent and will be spending during an interim, i might be awed, or philosophical, or indifferent. but there's also the likelihood that i'd be quite depressed, and so i'm going to refrain from any calculations to that end for the time being.

No comments: