One of my favorite topics to think/write about is the broad topic of Time. Cool. Um, what I mean by this is I like to think about how we perceive time and how it can be changed to fit different systems. I’ve always been into this type of thinking. Stages of life, calendars, blocks and chunks of time, etc,. I decided it would be fun to discuss some of my whacky time theories. Some of these have been brought up in my blog before and some have just been in the back of my brain not really put down on paper. So here is un with Time.
My favorite time post is called Calendar of Cards. This was one of my first posts here and one that has always stuck with me. A shockingly practical post all things considered. At some point in my life, I think around 2016/2012 I made the connection that there are 52 weeks in a year and 52 cards in a deck of cards. And that just triggered the weirdo alarm in my head. I thought, “what if I can construct a time keeping system that uses cards”. And yeah that’s effectively what I did. And somehow, I still use this method religiously.
The process here is simple: at the beginning of the year I assign each week with corresponding cards. So, the week with January first is the new week of the year. Tn 2020 the first week was December 30th to January 5th. That week was thus dubbed the “The Ace of Diamonds”. The next week was January 6th to January 12th “The Two of Diamonds”. So on and so forth.
Here is the rest of 2020 with the proper card designations (I may have purposefully made this post at the last week of the suit):
But this is the most successful of my ideas in this wheelhouse. I have had many dumb ideas around this same general idea. One stroke of idiocracy was “Hey...they are 24 hours in a day, and 12 months in a year. That means tere are 24 half months. What if each half month was an hour in a day of the year”. Dumb. So, for this one I had a journal where I recorded each 15 or so days and said what “happened” during that hour. So January 1-15 was 12:00 am, and 16-30 was 1:00am. And so on and so forth. It was silly.
And people who read this and think – “hold up, why do your weeks start on a Monday? Weeks start on Sunday’”, and the answer is because it’s 2020, and weeks should start on Mondays. What is the benefit to anyone to have a week start on Sunday? Sunday being the end of the week just makes so much more sense. Even the Bible, which I guess is the stem to the 7-day week, God stops on Sunday. The Sabbath is Saturday in Judiasm, why not the calendar? I don't know why Sunday suddenly became the beginning of the week but I think that mentality makes so little sense and needs to stop. But this is a side rant ( and to be honest it’s probably a real interesting story).
As you can infer the order for the suits are diamonds, spades, hearts, and clubs. These roughly correspond to winter, spring, summer, and fall. The reason I did this is because Diamonds are kinda like snowflakes, Spades are a tool used for digging, which happens in spring, “The summer of love” makes sense for hearts. And clubs was the leftover…
Now you may be thinking…hold up this is crazy. And you are right. But I actually have developed some utilitarian purposes with this method and do use it regularly:
1) It’s so much more fun to call weeks by cards compared to saying “uh the week of June 14th”. The statement, “yeah let’s hang out during the queen of spades” is just infinitely more entertaining.
2) As a big fan of being an organizer (I’m not organized but I love organizing), it’s a great way to keep track of time and for goal setting. At the beginning of every week I write “Goals for X-card”, or even just the card value. I break down the weeks in my journal via the card as a header (sometimes even gluing a spare card in the journal).
3) In labeling the weeks one can correspond certain events to different cards, both in looking forward to events and in recalling events. For example I know my birthday is the Jack of Diamonds, and I know I was in Boston last year during the 10-K of Spades. It gives more meaning to weeks rather than them just being a sting of continual numbers, further blocking of the year into fragments.
4) It makes the relative distance of weeks easier to comprehend. For example, I have a general idea between knowing about distance between the week of July 14th to the week of August 31st, but I know absolutely that there are 6 weeks between the 3 of hearts and the 9 of hearts.
And don’t get me wrong- I’m not intending on replacing the regular calendar with this system with this, they can exist alongside each other. The is no grand plan for calendrical domination. I think the reason that I do this is that it makes weeks seem more valuable and meaningful, they are not just strings of consecutive numb
ers but physical cards (sometimes with faces) that repeats every year. Blocking off the weeks like this is almost a form of meditation. You know when you think “I am going to do pushups every day in May” (or something like that), but then fail like May 9th? I get that weird start of a new time-block feeling every week…and I think that’s a good way to stay motivated. I keep a special deck of cards with me, and often have the card that week it is face up on my deck, just as a reminder.
But this is the most successful of my ideas in this wheelhouse. I have had many dumb ideas around this same general idea. One stroke of idiocracy was “Hey...they are 24 hours in a day, and 12 months in a year. That means there are 24 half months. What if each half month was an hour in a day of the year”. Dumb. So, for this one I had a journal where I recorded each 15 or so days and said what “happened” during that hour. So January 1-15 was 12:00 am, and 16-30 was 1:00am. And so on and so forth. It was silly.
Even less useful was something I called “College as a Workweek”. In a fit of shower math my Junior year in Uni, I calculated that there 120 hours in a 5 day span. And there also happens to be 120 weeks in a college career (assuming one does 15 weeks a semester for 4 years). And this struck me as profound. So, I then correlated each week of a college career to an hour in a Monday to Friday week. See below:
S = Semester W = Week Green = Freshman Year
Yellow = Sophomore Year Blue = Junior Year Red = Senior Year
The use of this? Little. I would be at parties and I would drunkenly ramble about this to unlucky people. Conversations looking something like:
“So yeah, this is the 8th week of my 6th semester, right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay so if all of college was a workweek...it would be Thursday morning. Relatively.”
“Yup”
“And you are a sophomore, so it’s only your 4th semester, meaning you are at, like…4 in the morning on Wednesday. How cool is that. Knowing you are in the middle of the night not even halfway done with the week?
“Pretty cool”
“SO like...think about it. It’s not even mid-day Thursday for me. I still have Thursday and Friday. Those are the best days of the week”
“Yup”
“Yeah...you know. It’s just cool to think about. Time. You know? And how you can look at it in different ways? Time’s so cool, you know?.”
“Absolutely”
So, I guess the point of this story is to show you how fun I was in college. If I had a whiteboard or something nearby I would even draw a diagram. It was horrible.
(In writing this imagined conversation I realized that I am doing this right now to you, reader.)
College reminds me of another one of my more “metaphysical” time ponderments: the 4 year cycle. This is kinda dumb as well, but whatever. At one point I was absolutely convinced this was brilliant. I believed that life moves in many 4-unit cycles. The smallest of these is the seasons (or suits if we are staying with the deck of card idea). Then 4 seasons make up a year, then 4 years make up a life chapter, and then those chapters make up a life phase. Typically one would have 5-6 life phases, depending on how long one lives
My proposed conversion table looks something like this:
4 Seasons = 1 Year
4 Year = 1 Life Chapter
4 LCs = 1 Life Phase
4 to 6 LP’s = 1 Lifetime
And since I’m doing charts and such here here’s what a lifetime broken down into phases may look like:
Life Phases
0-15 - Childhood
16-31 - Young Adulthood
32-47 - Adulthood
48-63 - Mid-life
64-79 - Senior Cit.
80 Up - Old Age
And yeah of these 16-year life phases had smaller 4 year phases inside of them. The idea of 4 year phases is appealing - high school, college, etc. 4 years after graduating colleges, 4 years with a SO. Stuff like that. Obviously I now recognize that this is such a privileged perspective because not all people graduate in 4 years or even go to college or people have tragedies in their lives that don’t allow them to make it to certain ages, and that life is much less patterned than this, etc.….but as someone who likes categorizing and doing stupid lil’ theories, when I came up with it, it appealed to me.
But regardless of the specifics of this one, I think that the whole life cycles within cycles was a rather nice prospect. I think a lot of people in my graduating class feared time and jumping into the void of “the rest of your life”, and perhaps this pseudo-chronology calmed this nerve for me a bit. So while the specifics of this “time fun” fell off, the underlying idea stayed and I think has been helpful for me in making decisions.
I realized, when writing this, a lot of the time theories were developed in college or around the time I was graduation. This was 2017. Once graduating people would always ask when did you graduate. And I would say “2017, I’m now freshman in life”. I’ve been keeping this up ever since.
Another earlier blog post I’ll reference is my Decades: Thought Experiment back from earlier this year. You can read it if you want but the tl;dr of it is “It’s fun to think about time in 10 year chunks: and “I ranked the years of 2010s worst to best”. I made a graph showing my yearly trajectory on how I felt about the years.
Hilarious that I did this pre-corona. Because I really hope that 2020 is the bottom year of the 2020 Decades ranked. I thought it was a fun way to look back on the decade and remember all that has happened in a 10 year time span. To quote myself:
“This graph, at least to me, represents some sense of resolution to the existential anxiety produced by paragraphs numbers one and two; Statement 1: Life Time is Tangible, Statement 2: But Long and Detailed. So, time is both long and short, chunky and flowy. Nothing too profound or unsaid, but it was fun at least, and I guess that’s what matters”
So these are some of the fun ideas I’ve had about time the past couple of years. Categorizing time is one of my top hobbies and I hope you enjoyed reading!
Time’s so cool, you know?
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