Waiting for the Time

I was sitting at work today, the foam green receptionist's desk like a rock in front of me, when a lull in the phones almost put me to sleep. The digital clock on the 13-line telephone's LCD display was stagnant. It was 3:12 and, five minutes later... it was still 3:12.

The panoramic view of the Rockies out the twelfth floor conference room window was my only reprieve from the dull office decor and hum of attorneys on telephones back in the labyrinth of cubicles.

I pulled out my New Media Reader and turned to Jorge Luis Borges's article "The Garden of Forking Paths." When I finished the introduction, it was 3:16. I read it again. It was 3:17.

Then, as I began to embark on Dr. Yu Tsun's journey into his past, the digital clock unexpectedly read 4:00 p.m. I closed the textbook, considering all of the possible histories and divisions - perhaps even versions - of time that Ts'ui Pen illustrated in his parabolic garden and corresponding novel.

At this same moment, my suitemate, a few intersections away, was waking up from a nap. In Austin, where it was 5:00 p.m., my mom was reordering the few flyaway papers left on her desk, sweeping up her big black bag, and logging off of her flat screen. Simultaneously, I was aware of the fact that I was in my mom's apartment in Austin eating a pint of Ben & Jerry's, and also in my dorm room in Denver reading my biology textbook, happily without a job, and also in the Driscoll office of the internship that I didn't get last year, working to organize an event.

It was 4:39 p.m. and I was supposed to take down the mail at the law office where I work.

I closed my New Media Reader and walked back to the copy room.

When I checked the wall clock above the photocopier, it was 4:42.

When I left the office at 5, I felt as though I were walking through a labryinth where time was inconsistent and malleable. I was aware of the fact that, within the span of two hours, I had visited several different times "in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times," as Borges put it.

As I headed out to my car, I thought that perhaps I was living in a time I created. Had the clock really moved at a turtle's pace and then sped up at such an alarming rate?

Like Chris mentioned, we experience the loss of time as we complete the process of filing away chunks of data. As I passed the time, waiting for the phones at work to ring, an act certainly not worth committing to memory, the time seemed to expand and linger. As soon as thought began to occupy my time, the clock sped up as my mind set about committing these thoughts to memory and extending energy in order to feed these thoughts.

The future does not already exist, and while it is possible for time to manipulate us, it is also possible for us to use it to our full advantage. Today, I got paid $10 an hour to read my textbook for class when there was nothing more time-consuming to do, and in that way, created for myself the time I needed once I got home to study for my midterm tomorrow. However, if I didn't have the idea in my head that time is money (each class period here at DU costs how much? for two hours?), or, in a more general sense, a commodity, I wouldn't have utilized time in such a way. In our culture, though, it makes sense to view time as a tool at your fingertips, waiting to be molded.