Time on Your Side

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” - Lao Tzu

Where did we go wrong?

It’s not where you might think.

Okay, maybe it is. I agree that the speed of life has hit warp ten, and in the immortal words of Montgomery Scott, “we’re going nowhere mighty fast.”

Why is that? Why do we continually lament a loss of time in which to get things done? There is so much on everyone’s plate you’d think we’d accomplish something, but we end up spinning in circles, abusing regulated substances and each other, and getting no further ahead than our next paycheque.

So much for the pursuit of happiness.

Maybe we’re trying to do too much in too little time.

Or maybe it’s how we look at time itself. We view it as a limited commodity when we probably shouldn’t view at it as anything. We certainly shouldn’t regard it as linear. It’s not linear. It’s cyclical. Ask anyone with an inbox: you can’t empty the darned thing before it’s refilled as if by (black) magic. Time is the same. You can’t run out of it; it’s always there.

Better still, it’s there for you. In abundance. Honest. But if you believe you don’t have enough of it, or that you’ll run out of it, guess what? You don’t and you will.

I know, I know. How does this explain the difference between a dragging workday and a Mach speed weekend? Believe it or not, the same number of hours exists in a Tuesday as in a Saturday. I’m beginning to suspect that managing time effectively has more to do with how aware I am in the present moment. Not an hour or a day or a week from now, but right now.

Tuesday drags because I’m thinking about the weekend past or the weekend future rather than about what I’m doing at the moment. Once I focus on a project, time resumes its normal course. Not only does the day end sooner, I finish a task I initially feared wouldn’t get done due to—duh—lack of time!

By the same token, Saturday seems a lot shorter when I spend it thinking about work on Monday. I’m amazed at what I can accomplish on a weekend when I focus on the weekend itself rather than the dwindling time within it.

So the next time you’re worried about the time you don’t have, flip it to your advantage. Pay attention to the moment and repeat after me:

“I have all the time I need.”

And you will!

With love,

Those 70s Shows

Nostalgia has figured prominently in my life of late. Apparently I am old enough to have nostalgia, which is in itself alarming, but on the other hand, it’s provided some great entertainment. Ter and I have done some serious bonding over the music we loved in our formative years, i.e., before we met, and at Coffee on the Wall last week, the conversation somehow found its way into the same decade: the 1970s. And here’s where I learned something that I’ve always known about my wee sister:

She loved police shows. Boy Sister gave us a list of the cop/detective series that were hip in the 70s (more than I’d imagined), and wee sis said she watched most of them. More than I did, for sure. I recall watching reruns of Emergency! with her after school, so perhaps it’s not so strange that her significant other happens to be a paramedic. Funnily enough, when BS asked us what our favourite 70s show was, without hesitation, we both said “Starsky & Hutch!”

“Do you want to borrow the DVDs?” I asked her. “I have the first two seasons.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I dunno, they’ll be pretty cheesy nowadays.”

She’s right, of course. Cheesy doesn’t begin to describe the hokey plots and ham acting that seemed so hip back in the day … though Starsky’s Torino is still pretty darned cool.

The sitcoms of the time seem less dated. Maybe humour is timeless? Sure, the costumes and sets are hideously pea green and polyester, and we get as much laughter out of the hair and makeup as we do the dialogue, but it’s less painful to sit through an episode of M*A*S*H  or Mary Tyler Moore as it is an episode of, well, any of the dramatic fare. Granted, some of the humour then was as blatantly stupid as much of the humour now, but laughter is truly ageless.

Rolling further back in time, the local TV station runs back-to-back episodes of Star Trek on Tuesday nights. Talk about cheeseball, but it’s the original series with the original crew, and that makes it mandatory viewing on “Trek Tuesday”. I look forward to it for the humour as much William Shatner’s wiggle—and I don’t necessarily mean the humour in the script. In the right mood, Ter and I can crack ourselves up during the show, turning a TV classic from drama to comedy with a single well-crafted quip.

We do the same thing with modern-day shows as well, though truth be told, we’re hard-pressed to find much worth watching. Give me the good old days—ironically, the days when folks in their mid-fifties lamented the lack of anything worth watching, deeming it all too crude or controversial.

Time really does move in circles.

Playday

Well, it’s been interesting. Back to work with fresh resolve, and did I write a word worth reading since my last post?

Nope.

Cleverly, I scheduled a four day workweek to ease myself back into the daily grind, and no matter how much I may enjoy my colleagues and parts of my job, it is most definitely a grind. I did, however, take a few minutes to draw a bunch of balloons on my 2016 bulletin board. Balloons appear to be a theme with me at present. They’re bright and cheerful – like ice cream and Duran Duran, they elicit an immediate smile. It’s hard to be crabby when I’m smiling.

Today is my day off, and I’m unsure precisely how to spend it. Reading? Writing? Colouring? All of the above? One thing is clear: after a few days in work mode, my creative self needs nurturing before it can create. It requires time, the way Blue Silver’s carburetor required time to warm up before I hit the road in winter.

Hey, good analogy, Ru!

So, the day will be spent quietly and probably in the Ocean Room, with tea, my books (colouring and otherwise) and the Downton Abbey soundtrack, until I have to leave for my chiro appointment this afternoon. If writing happens, I’ll go for it, but I’m not pushing the Muse. I’ll just let her know that I’m available and see if she wants to meet up sometime this weekend.

I was reminded of an important truth last week:

“The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play.”

Thank the gods for Mr. Spock.

With love,

Artificial Intelligence

For most of my life, I have been irrationally (really?) freaked out about robots. I can’t say when or how it started, but I am so anti-droid that:

I refuse to entertain the notion of investing in a robotic vacuum cleaner to make my former house elf’s life easier.

On meeting the new photocopier, I was immediately reminded of Star Trek’s M5 and vehemently warned our office’s tech advisor against unplugging it at source because “it’ll fry you where you stand!”

My favourite Alan Parsons Project album, I, Robot, tells the sorry tale of machines becoming our masters and, gee, who saw that coming?

Any Hollywood attempt to make androids our friends is less believable than any Hollywood attempt to make androids our enemies.

I don’t understand our obsession with making machines smarter than we are, with giving them personalities, or with trusting them to remember their place and to stay in it.

Ironically, a robot may have changed my mind about the inherent evil code-named “artificial intelligence”.

Type “Hitchbot” into any search engine and a plethora of pictures pops up, each of a funky little compilation of parts parked roadside in any number of locations. Developed in Canada and set loose to test the nature of humans when interacting with machines, Hitch travelled across the country, spent time in Europe, and started a journey across the USA which, sadly, ended last week in Philadelphia. In a thicker twist of irony, the amiable little droid was vandalized beyond hope of repair in the city of brotherly love.

Robophobia notwithstanding, I have problems with vandalism against any inanimate object—without the psychoanalysis, it’s a show of disrespect and does nothing to further the argument that humans are a superior species. Programmed though its personality was, Hitchbot was also harmless. Beating it to death was a show of bullying cowardice as much as it was an act of vandalism. Unfortunately, a violent end has—for the moment, at least—eclipsed all those good folks who drove it from town to town, pausing for photo ops with their kids in front of national landmarks. It’s kinda sad that I only learned about the ʼbot’s adventure when it was over, and sadder still that it was only news because it ended with an act of mindless savagery.

Intelligence? I’m pretty sure we’re the ones who are faking it.

Dumber Than My Phone

What with navigating around F***book (I’m still a bit … okay, a lot boggled) and surviving fiscal year end, I’ve not done much writing of late. I miss it, but that’s okay – I have a week’s vacation coming soon and a project in mind. That, however, is another post.

As part of my ongoing plan to become a social media savvy celebrity author, I turned in the old flip phone and bought a Smartphone last weekend. It’s a basic model compared to the iPhones and Samsung Galaxies floating around out there, but I have a pre-paid mobile account and didn’t want to commit (there’s that fear again) to a contract with my upgrade. So this little fellow is a Motorola E (or something), powered by Google Android, which freaks me out because the androids on Star Trek thought they were better than humans and, if not for JT Kirk and Co., would have taken over the world … I digress. Mr. Moto is less a phone than it is a tiny computer. Once I figure out how to drive it, it will check my email, keep my appointments, snap photos, upload said photos to FB, send and receive text messages, reflect my scintillating personality by way of varied ringtones and desktop wallpaper, stash any apps I accidentally download, and probably cost me way more than the thirty dollars per month I’ve budgeted for the privilege of ownership.

Yes, I’m totally lost. Well, not totally. Ter found the user’s guide online – via the big computer rather than the “mobile device” – so between us we deduced how to answer an incoming call after the first experiment failed. The device started ringing … actually, it started to play a boogie tune that had me grooving until I saw our landline number on the screen. Whoa, call display! How cool is that? But once startled into action, I couldn’t figure out how to connect to the call! So off it went to voice mail, and off I went to consult the manual.

Handy things, those manuals. Too bad hard copies don’t come with the product; switching from the computer screen to the phone screen can start a migraine faster than cheezies with a chocolate chaser. I’ve yet to delve much deeper into it than skimming the basics, but at least I can answer a call or choose to ignore it and then retrieve the voice mail. I was able to record an outgoing message by remembering which buttons to push once I call my own number; it helps to have a similar VM system at work. And the camera … let’s be truthful here. I bought it for the camera, for spontaneous pics and fast uploads; again, part of Ru’s cunning Media Savvy Plan. I adore my little digital Canon, but I don’t carry it with me every day and I have missed golden weekday photo ops, like the streetlamp lying on the boulevard. It looked like the eye of the Martian spaceship in the Gene Barry version of War of the Worlds and I would have taken a picture if only. So I guess I’ve really bought a camera that has a phone rather than a phone that has a camera, so does it matter if I can’t get Mr. Moto to play Darth Vader’s Imperial March when my father calls?

In this intellectual game of chicken with my phone, you bet it does.

Smarter Than the Average Bear

He may not be smarter, but he’s far cuter. Moon Pie decided to hold Ter’s reading glasses hostage the other day; we were running around getting ready for work—always a bit of a circus—and he pounced on her purse when our backs were turned.

His enthusiasm reminded me of being a kid and believing that work was better than school because you got paid for being there. Every kid plays at being a grown up. Conversely, too few grown ups play at being a kid. Moonie gets to stay home and play all day, but I guess that gets old after a while. I wish I could remember those days. I disliked school for the most part. Almost every report card from grade five to twelve features a teacher’s comment along the lines of “Ruth would do so much better if she would apply herself.” I was obviously rich with potential (aren’t we all?) and highly unmotivated—except in English, of course. I reckon I’d have done better if I’d been healthy and thus less preoccupied, but I could be wrong. I simply did less well in subjects that failed to appeal.

I regret some of that, now. Math will always inspire an Ugh!, but I must harbour a closet engineering gene because physics has become more fascinating as I’ve grown up. I can grasp concepts of space/time/energy etc. that have Ter gaping at me in astonishment, yet the most significant thing I recall from physics class is shooting light through a prism … and I’d likely have forgotten that little item if Pink Floyd had chosen different cover art for Dark Side of the Moon. Still, with naught but that tiny experiment to my credit, I understood the concept of trans-warp beaming as defined in the Star Trek movie from 2009. I couldn’t possibly write out the formula (which doesn't exist, by the way ... yet), but I totally saw how it could work. You aim for a set of coordinates at a point in space X number of parsecs or light years or whatever from where you are now, compensating for the speed at both departure and arrival points. The tricky bit is figuring out where the arrival site will be, given that it too is moving at warp and could change speed/direction en route. Firing a bullet at a moving target at breakneck speed while blindfolded was a good analogy as expressed by Montgomery Scott, but the entire thing made complete sense to me.

Easy.

I think.

Even math, when I get past the ugh, has become a test of skill. I’ve relied on my calculator for so many years that I’ve begun losing my ability to add three digit figures in my head. Panic ensued on that discovery, and now I’m adding my invoices by hand … then confirming with the calculator. After all, I work with taxpayer dollars so accuracy is key. It’s hardly the same as beaming Captain Kirk from the Romulan Narada to the Enterprise during a high speed space chase, but the fundamentals are pretty much the same.

I think.

The Captains Kirk

There’s an ongoing debate among Star Trek fans as to who was the best captain of the USS Enterprise. My stand has never changed. Hands down, it’s James Tiberius Kirk.

Nowadays, there’s a second level debate raging: who makes the better Kirk? My stand on this one is a bit less definite. Like my position in the case of Connery vs. Craig as the better Bond, it depends. In the 1960s 23^rd century, William Shatner was perfect. He made Kirk smart, sexy and self-assured, laying solid groundwork for Chris Pine to take over some 40 years later.

In the 21^st century’s 23^rd century, Kirk has by necessity become street-smart and somewhat wild-eyed, prone to decimating Starfleet’s rules rather than bending them to his purpose. The elements of Shatner’s Kirk are present and respected, but this kid Pine has propelled our hero to courageously crazy heights. His Kirk is caught in an alternate reality brilliantly devised by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci that has honoured the history of Trek while opening up a literal universe of possibilities for the captain and his crew. Tinkering with a cast of iconic characters could have been a disaster, but it’s proved to be genius. For me, it was Kirk who would make or break the reboot.

I was sold from the first moment in 2009. Yesterday, Ter and I saw Star Trek: Into Darkness. With no idea what to expect, I was blown away again. It all works so well, as well as or maybe better than the original series, but whether the vision is Gene Roddenberry’s or JJ Abrams’, it’s all about the Captain. (Sorry, Spock fans.)

So kudos to Chris Pine for doing proper homage to a character whom I have loved since I was a kid. His James Kirk is the perfect hero for our modern future, just as Shatner’s was perfect for it in the 60s.

Best of all, the rear view swagger is just as captivating now as it was then.