Wormhole

Some things just disappear into mind-numbing nothingness. Today featured several of those things for several different reasons. Let's just catalog them, shall we?

1. My sleep schedule. Let's just throw this one out there: it's currently 2am. Why am I up? Because I woke up today just before noon. And why did I wake up just before noon? Because I went to bed last night just before 4am. And why did I go to bed just before 4am? Because I took a long nap Friday afternoon. And why did I take a long nap? Because I had to wake up early Friday morning, and I had gone to bed just before 1am. And why did I go to bed just before 1am? Because I had gotten up just before noon.

The end of my week, every week: it's just completely, totally screwed up. Also, it makes Mondays (and Friday), Hell.

2. My work ethic. What did I do today? Ummm.....

3. My decision-making ability. Today, my original planned productivity was to be centered around choosing and booking a hostel for Australia. However, as I've noted before, my ability to choose such a place utterly sucks. I have had it narrowed down to four for over a week now, have asked several people's opinion on the subject, and have still not found a way to pick. It's a wormhole of too much information.

Cue today. I did pick a hostel, sort of--like 85% sure now--but I haven't booked. Why? Well, because I realized that to book a hostel, I need to know what nights I'm staying there, and to know that, I need to know what nights I won't be, and to do that, I need to know when I'll be on a boat at the reef, and to do that, I need to know what company I'll be going through, and to do that, I'll have to pick one.

And, incidentally, the picking may require me to go through my hostel to get the best deal...

4. My evening. Like I said, it's past 2am. The last productive--or even semi productive--thing I did was at least three hours ago. What have I been doing in the meantime? Watching Youtube videos. Several of which did, in fact, involve wormholes as part of their conceits, and which did, themselves, form a wormhole into which my evening was sucked. Here are a few, to illustrate the wormhole effect for you:

 

 

 

No, for those who hear an accent and stop paying attention, those are not the same guy (or rather, the first three are the same and second two are the same), but they are friends, and both quite hilarious and relatively famous Youtube Vloggers. Also, if you haven't watched "Alex reads Twilight" (the last clip), do so immediately if you want to see the horrible deadening effect those books have on actual human readers. Also, it's funny.

So those were the items being sucked into my wormhole of a day. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did! Or, you know, hope you remember to wave to the time that slowly seeps out of you as you watch them... :)

Timing

Today, I read an article (sorry, it's only an abstract online unless you're a subscriber...) in the most recent issue of The New Yorker about Christian Marclay, an artist who created a 24-hour video collage illustrating each minute with a visual and audio reference taken from different movies. He called it "The Clock." It was a colossal work, and one the results of which I'd love to see in person.

And the point--or rather one of the points--of the work was to draw the viewer's attention to how much attention we give to time; to reverse the standard tendency to lose track of time in the watching of a movie and to rather accentuate precisely how much time you have irrevocably lost from watching. In explaining this, the author of the article mentions that, ordinarily, people look at a clock in order to bind themselves more closely to an ironclad schedule; the act of looking at a clock, he says, is often accompanied by worry and apprehension.

I found this particularly telling as a descriptor of my day today. While I looked at the clock significantly less than on a usual day--it was a Sunday, after all, so I had no ironclad schedule to adhere to--I have rarely been more aware of the absolute and stringent rule of time, and timing, over my life.

I wrote a few days ago about the choices I face in my life going forward; what I failed to mention, though, was the absolute and unknowable time lines that guide each choice. Today, I felt the full weight of these. I spent several hours perusing various job boards, drooling over the eight or so positions currently open for which I may actually be qualified, yet with the full knowledge that I can't apply for them. (To make myself feel better I amped up my resume, but it's just not the same if it's still just stored on you computer.)

I know, logically, that four months is far too long to expect anyone to keep a job for me. I know that looking at jobs now will do little more than depress me that all the great jobs I see now will never be mine because they will be long filled by the time I can apply. Yet I can't shake the time-illogical sense that I should still look, now, just in case. Sigh.

Then there's the issue of travel. I'm looking at taking a little trip before heading back to America in July, and I've been monitoring flight prices for a few weeks now, hoping they'll go down around the (supposedly) magical 2-month-out point. Instead, I checked today to discover that the heretofore frontrunner in cheapness had sold out, apparently leaving me with an unaffordable $700USD hike in prices. Talk about discouraging.

I later found more flights that are at least in the same arena as my previous low price, but I'm now stuck in an unknowable conundrum of timing: should I buy now, and so avoid the possibility of more sell-outs, or hold out in expectations that prices will drop? I don't know, and have no way of knowing, yet if I make the wrong choice, I may find myself unable to afford the journey. Again, sigh.

Whether we pay attention to it or not, time rules our lives. And somehow, even on the day that I give it least heed, timing rules mine. I can watch the second hand move or smash the clock and look away, but either way, my life is being eaten by it as surely as those of the movie-goers in "The Clock." Now the question is what to do with my time until the minute hand moves forward to the next scene.

Basking in the light of Taipei 101

Turn on the TV on New Years' Eve in America and, after watching the pre-recorded yet utterly necessary footage of the ball dropping in Times Square, you'll be treated to a montage of fireworks going off all around the world. You'll see Paris. And Sydney. And Taipei, where fireworks spurt from the many tiers of Taipei 101 to create a magnificent spectacle of light and color.

And guess where I'll be?

If you guessed the Eiffel tower, you're wrong.

This is the view from our hostel window. Really. See, Karina booked us for a hostel out in the countryside of Taipei because that was what was available, but apparently, they were overbooked, so they offered us an alternative--you know, MERE BLOCKS AWAY FROM THE MAIN EVENT. We didn't say no.

I'm psyched. This will be my first major New Years event I've ever attended--New Years has historically been an understated affair of board games and watching the ball drop for me--AND it just so happens to be one of the first celebrations, too. It had never really occurred to me before, but obviously all the footage shown on New Years Eve is pre-taped; America's actually the last place to get New Years, while Taiwan comes in at around the halfway mark. (Though, major country-wise, it falls behind just Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Korea, and parts of Russia, since it turns out time starts in the middle of the Pacific.)

Tomorrow, I'm sure we'll wander around in the crowd for a while. Karina wants to see if we can get a primo place to stand in the crowd, but I'm skeptical. In my mind, we should just come back to our hostel and hang out with our brilliant view of the focal point of this New Years celebration.

So when the time rolls around in your neck of the woods and they start showing the fireworks, keep an eye out for us, basking in the light of Taipei 101.

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.