60

Tick Tock, said the clock to the Siamese cat. Meow Meow, said the cat, looking right back.


Today was my two month anniversary! My contract is for 16 months, from October 2009 to February 2011. That means I am already 1/8th of the way through. Wow! Looked at like that, it’s really going to fly by. See? Even in Korea I can go through an eigth quickly. Ba dum chish.

But seriously folks, time is a funny thing here. It expands and contracts unpredictably. I can’t get a handle on whether life is flying past like a cow in a tornado, or if it’s sluggishly pumping by, more like if the cow was in a tar pit, or a large container of maple syrup. Maybe sometimes the cow drinks some of the maple syrup. Maybe other times the cow stops to have a smoke, and accidentally lights all the tar on fire. Oh, Bessie, you are a messie.

Maybe I’ve become detached from a normal sense of time because my last three months in America were so routine. I was living at home with Mom and Dad, job free and almost alone in town. I filled the days decently well, but in a very predictable way. Exercise, books, movies, correspondence with friends. These months passed quickly. Each day bled into the next and the passage of individual days was irrevelant. On the last day, I got a haircut. Haircuts are such a great marker of time. I want to start keeping all my hair in clear glass jars, put up shelves in a room in my house, and fill those shelves completely up with jars of hair. When it’s a big enough collection that it becomes striking, so that when you walk into that room you say “wow, that’s a lot of hair”, I want to make it an exhibit in an art show and it will be called “I Have Been Alive This Long”. You know what I think would be really funny? If I wore a blonde wig to the opening.

So anyway, as I haven’t gotten that haircut yet, I am less than one jar into my time here. Stated that way, it’s like I just arrived. I haven’t even needed a haircut yet! You know who else hasn’t needed any haircuts? Babies.

So you see, I’ve become unmoored. I can’t tell if things are going quickly or slowly. I’m in flux. And I know why. I know how it works now. The trick to losing track is to increase novelty in your life. The novel hits your psyche and leaves a firm impression. It’s like throwing a heavy stone through a smooth surface of water. It’s a thudding plop and it makes big ripples. You can see it and feel it long after the source is gone. Where the routine passes through almost unnoticed, new experiences hit with a thud, then linger.

It feels good. It feels right. I feel like people aren’t meant to live their lives believing that the passage of time is something to be tracked. It feels better if it’s impossible to track it. I like the fact that, if I threw away all the calendars in my life, and never looked at dates, I’d soon be completely lost, with only the weather as my guide.


Meow Meow said the clock to the cat on the floor. The cat said nothing. He just walked out the door.