Time Blurs

Perception of time.

It's different for everyone, and it really depends on the circumstances. As a teenager, the last five minutes of the last period of the day drags on until it seems eternal. But if you're having a blast with your friends, the hour of your curfew comes way too soon.

When I'm writing and I'm so far in the zone I'm living my heroine's life, it can feel like days have passed in a matter of hours. Or maybe I'm writing an intense stand-off before the protagonist and the antagonist in the book that takes a matter of minutes. I look up, shocked to find it's dark outside. Or more likely in my case, dawn has broken.

Normal, day-to-day living usually doesn't provide that odd feeling of time displacement. Or rather, it didn't used to.

With the pandemic entering it's third year and me having to isolate, the feeling of being temporally off from the rest of the world has intensified. If I think of calling or texting someone, I need to check a clock so I'm not waking them.

Genius Kid says he experiences something similar when he works night shift. He has to stop himself from calling us on his days, or rather nights, off. Though as DH pointed out, if GK calls before four a.m., I'm probably still up.

And I've given up on living everyone else's hours. It's just not working for me.

So I'm waking an hour or two before DH gets off work, and I deal with the administrative tasks of Angry Sheep. We have dinner, watch a little TV before he plays video games to relax while I do some writing sprints with a friend. We watch the first half of Stephen Colbert (if it's a first-run episode), and DH goes to bed. I jump into work--writing, editing, and/or online classes. Sometime, I do all three on a given night. Then I go to bed two-three hours before DH's alarm goes off.

Unless I have a medical appointment. I try to set those as early as I can so I stay awake for it, then go to bed when I get home. Or I sleep a few hours, go to the appointment, and crash on my recliner for the rest of my "night".

Time and our perception of it are such weird things.