My Personal Assistant

Today's NaBloPoMo writing prompt is "If you had a personal assistant who would do your most dreaded tasks, which items from your to-do list would you assign out?"

Here's that list:

1. Feed all four cats at 5:30am and refresh their water.
2. Feed the dog and play fetch with him.
3. Prepare for my daughter: breakfast by 6:15am; a bagged lunch by 6:45am.
4. Put out my wife's medications for the day.
5. Scoop the litterboxes.
6. Prepare a bagged lunch for me.  (I'll take care of my own breakfast.)
7. Change the dressing on my wife's wound.
8. Make and receive all phone calls.
9. Pick up my daughter from school at 5:45pm.
10. Take my wife and daughter to all their appointments / functions.
11. Teach my daughter to drive.
12. Load the dishwasher properly.

I chose these tasks mostly because they either take place in the morning and require that I get up earlier than I'd like in order to do them myself, or they require being somewhere at a particular time or getting something done by a particular time.

My life would be so much better if I could get out of bed after dawn.  I'm sure I'd have more energy and effortlessly lose weight as a result.

I designed my career so that I could have a lifestyle in which I could ignore the clock.  I chose a lower-paying job in research, in which I could work odd hours, rather than in service, in which you'd tell someone what time you'd arrive and then actually arrive at that time^*.  I never went on vacations because I hate to fly and that's because you have to follow an airline schedule.  Likewise, I never went to the movies.

As a bachelor, I hardly ever needed to pay attention to the time.  Getting married, then, was a terrible mistake for someone like me.  My wife used something called an "alarm clock" that would suddenly make a loud noise at the same very early time each morning.  This was because she'd have to drive to her work place and arrive by 8am.  She'd also need me to tell her what time I'd get home from work and then get upset when I gave my usual answer ("I dunno") or failed to show up at whatever time I guessed I could make it home by.  Then there was the insistence that we go to Church, which meant paying attention to a clock on a Sunday!

Despite this wifely imposition of time, I did pretty well.  It wasn't until the Pregnancy that things got much more difficult.  There were more doctor visits for us during those nine months than I had my whole life.  And then after the birth, we were ruled by a living, screaming, excreting life form that you wouldn't dare ignore even if you were so sick that even your eyes hurt.  This is the same life form that, 17 years later, sends you racing to a place to pick her up or drop her off at a Certain Time, lest she show up embarrassingly late for a presentation, or be tempted to walk home alone in the dark in the sleeting rain wearing flip-flops.  That's way more responsibility than I ought to have.

I'm dreaming of my old life.  My daughter will have moved out.  My wife would be dead or living in Florida with her best friend.  If I was curious enough, the alarm clock could show me the time, but it certainly wouldn't make a sound ever again.  I'd probably not bother to switch between Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time.

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^* This is a quaint notion. Nowadays, someone in service will give you what's called a "window" which is essentially a free pass to show up at any time on a given day and still be considered punctual.

The Measure of Time

We measure large expanses of time with milestones.  You might have the time Before Graduation and the time After Graduation.  If you're married, you'll have Before Marriage and After Marriage.  Some of us refer to the time When My Parents Were Alive.  A few might recall events Before the Accident or Illness.

This gives us an experiential basis for remembering events.  It's how our species must've remembered events before inventing a device to divide time into various (and arbitrary) periodic intervals.

I've started to use milestones for shorter intervals of time, too.  I buy cat food approximately once per month (for dry food) or once every three weeks (for canned wet food).  So I might wonder how old a package of cheese is based on how many cans of unopened cat food are left in the cabinet.  I perform other activities monthly, such as paying bills.  But bill paying lacks the total change of setting that buying the cat food has, so it's of little use as a frame of reference.

Weekends are great milestones.  They represent a time when I do not go to work.  But they tend to blur together, so there are only two meaningful weekend intervals for me: Before Last Weekend and Since Last Weekend.

I've grown fond of an elegant (and free) Android app called Bodhi Timer, which was designed as a timer for meditation.  The idea is that you set it so that it chimes nicely at the end of your meditation.  But it also has a "restartable mode" enabling it to chime at intervals, too.  I like to use the timer to keep track of time during my morning routine.  I'll set it to chime at intervals of ten, fifteen or even twenty minutes.  Shorter times are good for those mornings when I'm especially distracted.  When I hear the chime, I reassess what I'm doing.  If I'm getting ready for work, that's good.  If I standing still listening to a radio program, well....

And another app that I keep running constantly is called Chime Time, which chimes like a grandfather clock hourly and once every half hour, too.  I seem to respond much better to auditory prompts than to visual ones, so this method of marking time suits me.  Chime Time is also free, but you can purchase alternate clock sounds as add-ons.

What are some milestones that you use to measure time?