Chronometricals

Since we've had Gillian, something strange has happened in my personal mental universe. I have finally become synched with clock time. I look at the clock and think to myself, I have six minutes to do X; I do X, and then I look back up at the clock, and I have indeed completed the task within the allotted time. Occasionally, even when working with segments of time as small as 3 minutes or 75 seconds (the amount of time it takes to warm a cup in the microwave), I actually have time leftover.

I can honestly say that this has almost never happened to me before--certainly never routinely. Throughout my life, my basic mental state has been intermittently focused on a task at hand but generally absorbed by my own thoughts; I might accomplish something, or even a number of things, but it was all while thinking about something else, so I was used to losing minutes and even hours with helpless constancy.

A memory from childhood: I was often assigned the task of flipping the filmstrip to the next frame when we would watch them in school. You remember, right? There would be a recorded story, with a chime, and when the chime dinged, the person manning the little machine (which was supposed to be a reward) was supposed to turn the knob (?) to make it move to the illustration. I vividly remember that not only would I space out and miss the chime--not only would I fail to notice that we'd been on the same frame for way, way too long--not only would I fail to hear my classmates beginning to fidget and complain--but I would only be brought back to the space of the classroom by the whole class of other third-graders chorusing my name in irritated dismay. And even as I was rapidly flipping to the end of the film to try to catch up, I would know with dire, ashamed certainty that it would happen again the next time because there was no way I could keep focused on a task so repetitive and boring for the entire length of a filmstrip. Even as an adult married woman, I would set the oven timer, but not hear it when it went off; I would absently say to Sam, "I wonder why the oven timer hasn't beeped . . ." and he would say, "It's been going off every five minutes for the last fifteen."

But I have been somewhat brought down to earth, at least in the sense that I check in there more frequently and don't lose such huge swaths of time constantly, by having children. I have not wandered around the grocery store and discovered that nearly two hours have passed since some time before February 29, 2008, and I have not even lost much time at home since Gillian was born. There just isn't time to lose. I am suddenly realizing how other people can be so much more efficient than I am about certain things (JS and Sam, for example). I am realizing that if I stay focused, I too can become someone for whom time is predictable.

I think I may become somewhat less productive--I read not long ago about how disorder can be the most efficient organizing tool in the sense that it permits natural order to emerge, as when you don't organize your files but end up with the most frequently used ones at the top of the heap. But then again, that system wasn't working out as well for me since we've had kids because entropy seems to have accelerated, and my efficient disorder would rapidly become complete and utter chaos (un-ordered tasks would pile up because I couldn't return to them).

So perhaps this adaptation will allow us all to survive. I don't know; I would need some time to drift off into space and think about it.