WHAT TIME IS IT ONLINE?

I live on the west coast and do work on the east coast, so I often have conference calls in several time zones. Pretty much every week, I mess up a time conversion. Sometimes, I put the meeting time in my calendar as three hours ahead, but other times, I do it backwards and enter it three hours behind. Often, I don’t know what time it is now, so the conversion is off, no matter which direction I go. Occasionally, the electronic calendar converts the meeting to Pacific Standard Time, but every now and then, the event magically appears in Eastern Standard Time. The result is that I am never quite sure what time the meeting is. It has become commonplace for me to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Late is obviously more upsetting than early; the wrong day is the most alarming.

What I like about the internet, is that it is always the right time there. Online, I am rarely in the wrong time zone and I'm never late. I can begin whenever I arrive, no matter what time it is.

Is this freedom? Does this alleviate the daily constraints of hour-counting and structure? Or is it deepening my inherently upset sense of time, widening, bit by bit, the gap between my Self and other people?

THE HOLLOW

Nowadays, around 6pm, I begin to prepare for bed. I cook, I eat what I have cooked, I clean the mess from the cooking and eating. My mind already just a slice towards the lie down, my head just a bit towards the pillow.

I take the dog out one last time. I lock the front door and the back door. I scan the house and fluff it, so that in the morning, this day will be long gone.

I wait until at least 8pm, sometimes 7:45pm is fine and I ready my body for slumber. I wash, I stretch, I look, I brush, I balm, I change into snooze clothes, I ready the bed. And as I climb in, as I cover myself and turn to the original position, I am already vanished, have already entered the hollow.

COUNTING SLEEP

It has been one month since I kicked my cellphone out of the bedroom. And since that first evening, I've slept an average of one-and-a-half more hours every night. Which means I have slept 42 more hours this month than last month. Or the month before that. Or since I can remember. I'm no good at math, but if I add up the hours of lost sleep over the past, say, five years, I have deprived myself of over 2,500 hours of much-needed rest.

I am staggered by the figures, stunned when I think about where those hours have gone. You see, hours just vanish. You don’t have to be a math genius to understand that time is a kind of currency. A moment is like cash. But it cannot be saved. Only spent.