Tick Tock

I forgot to wear my watch today. It's odd--back in the States, people would say they felt naked without their cell phone on them; I was never quite that attached, but it was still a major inconvenience if I left mine behind. And I didn't own a watch.

Here, though, I've forgotten my cell phone many times, and it's only ever been a "huh, well that's odd" sensation. Several times, I haven't noticed it was gone until I got home and saw it sitting on my bedside table. (I guess that's what happens when you're not much of a phone person and you move to a country where you suddenly have a grand total of 22 contacts.) My watch, on the other hand, I missed within two minutes of leaving my apartment.

I live on schedule. I always have, roughly since I entered high school, but in America I come into much more contact with clocks than I do here. You get in your car: clock. You look at your phone: clock. The radio DJ announces the time: clock. You drive past a bank: clock.

Here, not so much. I have a clock in my room and a clock on my phone--though, as I just mentioned, I never check my phone--and there is a single digital clock on my way to school, above a Panasonic sign next to the airport where I turn off to go to Cing-Shan. My scooter has neither clock nor radio. Most of my classrooms have clocks, but by no means all; some at Han-Min are hidden amongst the piles of homework on the homeroom teacher's desk, and hard to read even when they are visible. At Cing-Shan, the clock in my classroom runs approximately 5 minutes fast--and by approximately, I mean I've never quite been able to nail down the exact number.

So I live by my watch, all old-fashiony and quaint--and uniquely American.

I feel that there's an underlying reason, or several, behind the lack of clocks around here, and it has to do with the fact that Taiwanese people are not Americans, us with our obsession with schedules and being efficient. I never see those scootering along with me check their watches (of course, those flying past me might have just checked it and found out they were late or something, but they're moving far too fast to know for sure).

In an organizational behavior class I took in college, I remember reading in a segment on international business that in China, a watch was an absolutely unacceptable gift, as it reminded the receiver that he or she would someday die. I blame this fact for the absence of clocks in, for instance, hotel rooms around here. Because I'm American, and I need to know what time it is! But I'm in Taiwan, and the Taiwanese may just have a better idea about time. When I was running late yesterday, and arrived at school all out of breath, Alsion took a moment to tell me "next time, take your time--the kids will wait."

Wait, really? The world will still be there if I don't have a by-the-second accounting of where I am and what I'm doing? Astonishing thought--and that's not me being snide. It truly is something I need to learn

So maybe it was a good thing that I left my watch at home today. A bit of time left uncounted may be precisely what I need.