Grab your Days
There's an Aussie film called "Bliss." Have you seen it? In one memorable scene our anti-hero follows his love interest, Honey Barbara, a country lass, to a noisy city hotel, where she forces him to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to find the city quietly waiting for the day to begin. Then she looks over at him, the camera pulling back to reveal a romantically pink and orange painted sky, and she sighs and says to him, "yo-wa alahm clock is yo-wa key to freedom."
I don't have a lot of time in my life. Days, minutes, writing time, thinking time, eating time, they are all too short. When it gets dark I am limited to squinting by candlelight, squishing ants and pondering why my London produced shampoo bottle omits the Oxford comma.
But in the day there is potential on every front, home office, world, language, body, mind, connections. There is more swimming through my mind than I know what to do with, more things added to the list than one uncloned human could ever accomplish. I don't know if I came here for learning, for experience, for escape, for kudos. I'm also not sure if it matters in the middle of the day when I'm trying to create resources out of thin air, make sense of these surroundings, do meaningful work and still get home in time to pump some water and boil a potato. I've never been a big fan of artificial means of waking the life back up each day, viewing alarm clocks as relatively oppressive little dieties. But something's changing here for me. Personal leisure time doesn't feel so necessary, sleep is only possible when I'm too worn out to do other stuff. And I'm usually trying to solve problems in my dreams anyway, so it really isn't wasted time, but quite justifiably used in the scheme of things. I don't know if I should thank the Imam for waking me up with his call to prayer every morning, but I don't want to pound him or throw him across the room, so that's a start. I can't say the same for the donkies, (why do they make that sound?) but I can feel their urgency too. It's time to get shit done. This is not a feeling I expected to have in West Africa, where the answer to "how's is work?" is "I'm on it slowly slowly."
I don't have a lot of time in my life. Days, minutes, writing time, thinking time, eating time, they are all too short. When it gets dark I am limited to squinting by candlelight, squishing ants and pondering why my London produced shampoo bottle omits the Oxford comma.
But in the day there is potential on every front, home office, world, language, body, mind, connections. There is more swimming through my mind than I know what to do with, more things added to the list than one uncloned human could ever accomplish. I don't know if I came here for learning, for experience, for escape, for kudos. I'm also not sure if it matters in the middle of the day when I'm trying to create resources out of thin air, make sense of these surroundings, do meaningful work and still get home in time to pump some water and boil a potato. I've never been a big fan of artificial means of waking the life back up each day, viewing alarm clocks as relatively oppressive little dieties. But something's changing here for me. Personal leisure time doesn't feel so necessary, sleep is only possible when I'm too worn out to do other stuff. And I'm usually trying to solve problems in my dreams anyway, so it really isn't wasted time, but quite justifiably used in the scheme of things. I don't know if I should thank the Imam for waking me up with his call to prayer every morning, but I don't want to pound him or throw him across the room, so that's a start. I can't say the same for the donkies, (why do they make that sound?) but I can feel their urgency too. It's time to get shit done. This is not a feeling I expected to have in West Africa, where the answer to "how's is work?" is "I'm on it slowly slowly."
posted by mchughtie at 11:11 AM
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