Tuesday, March 8, 2011

I'm Really Old on Mercury

Well, yesterday was my birthday, another small milestone on my journey to decay. It turned out to be quite an enjoyable day thanks to the kindness of the staff at my favourite cafe. I'm very grateful because it is nice to have ones birthday celebrated.

Still I'm a little bit ambivalent on the whole birthday thing. In celebrating a birthday what you are basically doing is celebrating the approach of your own death. Each birthday is another line on the gaol cell wall of your life marking out the years served and bringing with it the anticipation of release. Of course it's possible not everyone sees it like that.

Birthdays aren't the only way we mark out time. We're forever finding ways of chopping it into smaller bits. I suspect that time in its entirety is just to big for us to grasp so we cut it into bite sized pieces and mark the beginning and end of each piece. Of course this filleting of time does have its advantages particularly if you charge by the hour. This is so much more convenient than charging for results and a lot more certain as well. Cutting time up like this also helps us be late.

Being late is an important social tool which can convey a whole range of meanings without the need for speech. Lateness can be used to indicate ones elevated social status, "I'm far too important to be on time for a meeting with mere you" or importance "so sorry I'm late but the entire universe would fall apart if I wasn't going around patching it up all the time" or simple disinterest "I would have been on time if spending time with you interested me in the slightest". Imagine how galling it would be for the person being late if the recipient of his lateness wasn't even aware of the fact. This is why we need to be able to measure time. There is nothing more irritating than turning up with a reason for lateness so impressive that you're just bursting to tell someone about it only to discover that the person you're meeting simply overslept.

So there are good reasons for carving time up into fun sized bits but possibly the most important is the one I touched on earlier. Time is so big and all encompassing that its just a little bit scary. If time was a blanket it could smother the world. Most of us can make plans for the next couple of hours or so but how on earth do you set a schedule for eternity?

Yet for something so vast our measurement of time is rather parochial. It all revolves around our planet; years, seasons, days. The whole measurement of time is pretty Earth-centric. Of course that makes a bit of sense as this planet was the easiest one to take measurements from at the time but since we do measure time like this it could make things difficult if we choose to go somewhere else. On Mercury for instance my age (42) would be meaningless since the years there are only eighty eight days long; and even that's meaningless because I'm referring to Earth days and Mercury doesn't have those (it has wicked cool Mercury days instead). That doesn't mean that if I go to Mercury I will suddenly become younger (damn) it just means that it will a lot more difficult to figure out how old I am (I think I am about a hundred and seventy three). No doubt a kindly parent will point out if I'm wrong.

Time, no matter how we measure it, will go on forever but we won't so perhaps it is important that we track it. Because the only time we can be certain of is "too late". In between one too late and the next it was my birthday and thanks to Ash and the Satellite crew my birthday was awesome.

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