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?