Time

How could they kill Casey Jones?!



They say your perception of time changes through life. Time seems to move slowly when you're young and gradually speeds up as you get older. Seems true enough to me. I recall many times when I was a kid that time seemed to crawl forward: school, birthdays, Christmas, vacations. Excitement is one thing.

So maybe as you get older, you just don't have anything left to be excited about. Not sure I buy that wholesale, but there's certainly less than there was before. I feel caught between the two: time moves both fast and slow.

I have about three or four irons in the fire, so to speak. An idea I think might make a good short film, adapted from a story I'd been writing. And a short story. And some other ideas, nebulous, in the ether, what have you.

But then, there's everything else. Thankful as I am for all my opportunities, it's getting difficult to squeeze everything in. Grading online, I only recently learned, is incredibly time consuming. This is probably my second and last semester as a grader.

I'm a better teacher than I was (probably not saying much), probably because I'm far more loose and prepared than I ever was before. It's fun. But time-consuming.

Then there's the move. We're about 6% through all our stuff? That might be an optimistic estimation, but there it is.

And classes. I don't read any more, did you know that? I don't read, and yet I read more than I ever have in my life. Something like 4-6 or more books a week. I managed to squeeze in a few books over the holidays, just for fun. That's over now, to be sure.

So, the theme. There must be a theme. Time. There's a chronic shortage of it in my 'verse right now. And that's probably as it should be. But lack of time becomes preventative at some point, keeps me from doing things I really want to do. Like say, acting in a play. Writing fiction. Reading books. If you know me, you know I like my time. I like those days (not minutes, not hours. A drop of water isn't a lake. Neither is a puddle.) where I can let the mind range free. Instead of the wild, I'm in the proverbial mental slaughterhouse. For the umpteenth semester in a row.

My grandmother asked me to paint something for her. Haven't had the time.

Elias Koteas I am not.