Time goes by...

I've been singing the beginning of Madonna's song "Hang Up" all night long... "Time goes by, so slowly... time goes by, so slowly." I guess it's just been on my mind today, what with having my schedule thrown off at school because of CSAP testing at school these two weeks, having a relaxing weekend (aka lots of time on my hands), and of course, having that mysterious and unfathomable force, Daylight Savings Time, throwing everything off today.

Time's one of those things... one of those topics that you could easily spend hours contemplating, thinking through, and attempting to figure out, (kinda like what happens after death or the Stock Market). It's a silly concept really - little numbers that add up to other numbers, that add up to our days, our weeks, our years... that add up to all our moments spent on Earth - yet it's amazing how much it governs our lives. I've always been fascinated by how arbitrary it is... how not-rigid it is, when we make it seem all-powerful.

Have you ever had a moment where it feels like time must be wrong, must be some how befuddled? For example, I typically get home from school at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and feel like my day is over, like it's already the evening. But on weekend, that's usually the time my day is truly beginning, when I've gotten through sleeping in, eating breakfast, reading, or messing around online, puttering around the house... and finally sit down to do homework or scholarships or something productive. How can those be the same times?

The same feeling - the thought that one moment that is mathematically the same as the day before could feel so radically different - occurs everwhere. How is it that a morning of block classes feels like ages, while I can sit through a 2 or 3 hour movie and still not want it to end?

And how is it that an idea that turned into a governmental decision, which in turn was passed into law, causes us to jump up one morning (or evening,if you think ahead), and suddenly change this concept of time, the time-space contiuum, the all-powerful force that we have created to govern our days? How is it that 8pm can suddenly be 9pm, that we can just lose an hour - lose a bit of time - then and there?

Well, this is turning into quite the philosophical waxing, but I find time really odd... I mean, it's like looking at English grammar or the metric system. (Why the heck through ever be prounounced throo? Why are there 5280 feet in a mile?) Why do some months have 30 days, some have 31, and that silly random February is stuck there with 28 - wait, wait - sometimes, 29? It's just weird.

And so I know many of you woke up today bemoaning the lost hour - I was one of you last night, watching my reasonable 11:15pm bedtime turn into past-midnight with the click of a clock button. But this evening when the sun was in full swing at 6:45pm, when I wasn't eating dinner with the moon beaming through the window, well, that was kind of cool.

Although, come to think of it, I'm not looking forward to getting up in the dark tomorrow. It was just getting light at 6:30 in the morning. Ah, well... That's time for you, always changing its mind.


P.S. Though I usually hate the spring side of DST, just for the record, it was pretty darn easy to just flip the hour up one on the clocks, rather than having to go all the way through the cycle to go back an hour. =P