Twenty-Ten

The year is finally winding down, and I feel like I am too. Slowly relaxing all the tense muscles and allowing myself a few moments to breathe and have a mug of hot cocoa. Just a few more days until I have to start writing 2010 in my journal, on my checks, and of course there will be a learning curve there. It'll probably take me a couple weeks before I don't have to scribble out 2009. I'm going to call this next year twenty-ten. None of this uppity two-thousand-ten business. It's just much easier to say all shortened like that. Sometimes I wonder though, if our society does too much shortening, reminiscent of the book "1984". No getting around that year. Nineteen Eighty Four, that's it. Can you imagine someone calling it the year One thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty Four? Talk about long winded!

Twenty ten is supposed to be two years to the destruction of the world, right? According to the Mayan calendar, that is. I, for one, do not believe it. It's much the same as the y2k scare. Everyone thought that all the computers were going to crash on new years day 2000 and that would be the end of the world. What a bunch of balogne! I remember listening to the radio as a 12 year old kid thinking "you've got to be kidding me, right?" What a bunch of scared sheep we become. The world will not end when scientists, or mayans predict, because that knowledge is known by God alone. And so I am positive that the end of the world will be at a time when no one is looking for it, no one will be able to predict when it will be. All the more reason to be prepared. There sure are signs out there that say the time is coming. So this coming year of twenty-ten I am going to try harder to prepare myself spiritually and temporally for when that day finally comes. I am going to resolve to be better.

Just Watch Me

I have this theory about watches. The last time I wore a watch was in eighth grade when I got one for Christmas or my birthday...can't remember which. It was all sorts of colors, just a fun watch for a teenager. And then I got to thinking about watches and what the purpose was for wearing them. The obvious conclusion was to keep time, and to know what time it is whenever you're curious, to know how much time you've spent waiting in line at the customer service desk at Walmart to return some Christmas lights you didn't use. And somebody one day thought it would be wise to keep a small clock on their person instead of relying on clock towers and the like. Thus the era of wearing watches had begun. Fashionable and useful. But as my youthful mind thought about that little mechanism on my wrist, the more I wanted to toss it aside. It was like the ticking of a time bomb, sitting there with its innocent face telling me how many seconds of my life I was wasting, how many minutes I had spent in class. It was in fact, not counting up, but counting down. I felt that attaching a time keeper to my person I was in essence attaching myself to time; that I now was a prisoner of time and that somehow I would age faster, that time would move at a faster rate if I had this way of keeping track of it. This wrist band, like a hand cuff that symbolizes slavery and submission would force me to reckon with time, instead of it reckoning with me. My free-willed mind wasn't going to have it. I took off the watch and didn't wear one again...until this Christmas. My mother-in-law gave me a beautiful watch and I am wearing it now, though for how long I cannot tell. I don't know if there are any studies about my theory (probably not since it's not very scientific). I do know that there is a study that is aiming to prove that our perception of time can influence our opinion of how good a time we're having. The old saying "time flies when you're having fun." (the study states that if you are led to believe time is flying, then you believe you had more fun) Anyway, to the point...I know it's probably just my opinion and a personal superstition I should get over, but it's these little quarks that make us who we are, right?