Snotting black

Below is an experiment of a risky nature. It’s a blog post I wrote while on my lunch break but still at my desk. I wrote it in an email to pretend like I was writing a “real” email, since blogging at work is discouraged.

I didn’t have a lot of time, so I thought to myself – why don’t I just leave it unedited, with my work showing and the less-than-perfect syntax and all of it, just to give you a taste of what things are really like before they’re published.

So here it is – it starts out as usual, me finding what I want to blog about, and then I find the thread and dive in. Welcome.

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Okay, so here’s the deal. This is not what it looks like. I promise you, it’s not what it looks like. It might look like I’m writing a business email very quickly, but that’s not it at all, that’s not it at all. It might look like I’m typing up notes from a meeting, but that’s not it at all, either. That’s really not what’s going on here. What’s going on here, and what I’m trying to tell you is this.

That I’m blogging on my lunch break, that I’m trying squeeze a quickie in in the next 15 minutes because every second of my day has been sold to someone else for something, so I’m trying to get it back, just for one second. One quick second.

I wolfed down a slice of pizza for lunch today, and that was great. I often find I gravitate towards the lunchtime things, the things I crave the most, the things that make time slow down for me. Maybe I should unpack one minute of thought, one minute of conversation for you and then move from there.

There are short minutes, and there are long minutes. There are the minutes that never really existed and the ones that seem to never end. There are minutes that are silly and excruciating. There are minutes you don’t notice until later, until much later. Sometimes those minutes come to mean more than you ever thought they would, and you dissect them until they seem to take up hours and they do take up hours, hours of your entire day.

And you piece them and interpret them and replay them over and over again, wondering what you would have done differently, marveling at what you did, thinking about what he said and what it could mean and what did he mean, what did he really mean? And the way the wind was blowing through the air, and how incredible that spaghetti tasted. Had spaghetti ever tasted like that before, really.

But there are the empty minutes, the ones where you look up and a day is over and you go home and go to bed and try to remember even a single thing you did that day that was worthwhile. Did I do any good today at all? Even a little bit?

I read recently that people remember the most moments, or have the most memories from between the ages of 18-26. 8 years that are full of new experiences, first loves, deaths of loved ones, study abroad trips, first time living away from home, first thanksgiving with a significant other, first big break-up, first time realizing the world is big – bigger than you could ever know – first time looking at the moon, then at the stars, and then down at a cigarette butt on the sidewalk and realizing how very small we are, how much closer we are in size to a cigarette butt than we are to the moon and how entirely big the universe is, first time realizing I don’t know anything, not even a single thing. And that the thing I thought I knew – I was so incredibly wrong. First time really hurting someone else. First time being really hurt.

So those years are packed and we remember them. I read that and became terrified. OMG I thought – time is running out. A couple more years and I’ll only have the memories I’m making right now. There’s no time. There’s no time.

Just another paranoia for another day. And the minutes continue rolling away. When I’m having fun, time flies, when I’m bored, time flies. Time flies. The difference is what I feel when looking back. The box is the same size, but sometimes it’s full of mementos – trinkets I picked up in Istanbul or train tickets from Slovenia. And then I’ll see that even though the days go by so fast – faster and faster – they’re not empty and they never have to be. It’s a choice I make, right?