News From Hawkhill Acres

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(If you’d like to know what I was thinking two February’s ago, read this post from 2.22.07))

Are you always a day late and a dollar short? Do you often find yourself wondering what happened to a couple of weekdays or a weekend that you must have lived through but can’t recall? I’m not talking about “Lost Weekend” kind of lost weekends here; not the ones that drowned under a sea of Seagrams. I’m talking about the times that someone says, “Wow! Thursday already!” and you’ve spent all morning doing Tuesday.

This kind of thing has been happening to me a lot lately. Looking out from the weekend, I see two doctor’s appointments on Monday, a trip to the library on Friday and lots of empty, home-based hours in-between. Plenty of time to work on my websites, get my proofreading done, think up some scintillating blog posts and help my kids learn.

Heck, there might even be a little time in there for a spot of housework. That would be a good thing. We’re either going to have to vacuum the dustbunnies or catalogue them and offer them on ebay as collectibles. And there’s only so long you can write “TEST SITE! DO NOT REMOVE THIS DUST!” on furniture before visitors catch on, although apparently everyone in the house believes it, because no one ever dusts.

So, I’m kicking back on Sunday with a good book and a glass of Cabernet and then all of a sudden, it’s Thursday, the mortgage is two days overdue, there are piles of dirty clothes all over the basement, we’ve missed a dental appointment that I forgot to put on the calendar and my daughter is a size bigger and can’t fit into any of her clothes that I bought her just… Well, actually, I guess it was fall, when we last did a mall-crawl, although it’s such a traumatic experience for me that the afterimage is imprinted on my credit cards for months.

TMJ has struck again. (That would be Temporal Manipular Join Syndrome, where my sense of Time doesn’t mesh with actual Time.) It doesn’t help that I’m one of those down-to-earth types who lives in the “Now”, like all the self-help gurus tell us we should. Right. That makes sense if you’re never going to plan anything or recall pleasant memories or imagine your future. Living in the “Now” isn’t really helpful for learning from one’s mistakes either or anticipating the consequences of present actions.

True, paying attention to what we’re doing “right now” is a really good idea, especially if what we’re doing now involves chainsaws, cooking candy, bathing cats or voting for President. But human minds never really focus totally on what they’re doing to the exclusion of everything else, no matter how long their users meditate on a candle flame or listen to white noise. You can bet your bottom dharma that some of the meditator’s attention is in the past and/or the future, thinking about what they’ve done or what they’re going to do.

Nope, this Time thing is a real poser. Einstein almost had it figured out, but then it went all bendy on him. And Hawking is still working on it and may be close to tying it all together. At least, I believe he’s answered the question of whether energy escapes from a Black Hole, and that will certainly help. I haven’t yet found a practical application for it in my own life, although I’m working on applying it to lost socks, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Who am I to belittle anything Hawking comes up with, no matter how impractical it seems. The man is probably the smartest man on the planet and, by the way, tell me HE lives in the “Now”, hmm? I don’t think so.

Well, the clock says it’s lunchtime, although I’m sure that I looked at it twenty minutes ago and it was right after breakfast. The kids have probably segued from The History Channel to Cartoon Network and, no doubt the dog’s water bowl has dust in it and the cat’s litter box is crusted over. I’d better go make some lunch and then try to accomplish at least a couple more things on my list. I’m not doing too badly; I have almost everything checked off, except for three or four things that I’m sure I’ll have done by tonight. And then I can move on to the next list in the pile from January. Or maybe I’ll tackle something easier and work on a Unified Field Theory instead. Now, where did I put my String?