Friday, August 1, 2008

August? ...yer kiddin', right?

(Okay, can you guess why they called me “Butterball?” That's me and Bro #1, back when parents thought fat = healthy.)

It's true, time goes by faster as you age. I don't understand it, but there's a lot about time I don't understand. I think of time as linear, but it's also circular, and probably parallel, too.

I remember my first trip to California: I had breakfast before I got on the plane, then I was served breakfast on the plane, and when I arrived, my cousins wanted to take me out to breakfast. So I'm pretty sure that if I could get on a plane and fly west at the same speed the earth rotates, I wouldn't age...right? It would always be the same time on that plane.

Gosh, when I was a little kid, it seemed like forever from one birthday to the next. All the aunts and uncles would fuss about how fast I was growing up, and I'd think, "Are you kidding? It's taken me a whole year to get here." And then one day, I was finally ten! It took me a very long time to get two digits old; a decade, as I recall.

Now time is doing this strange compression thing. It's New Year's Eve, and then suddenly it's my birthday (May), and then it's Thanksgiving, and the next day it's New Year's again. I'm getting the bends!

Time does go faster the older you get, but it shouldn't be at warp speed yet, for crying out loud. I mean, come on, I'm only... oh, lordy!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here's how that "time-speed" thing happens. The earth is a wheel. The farther you are away from the hub of that wheel (center of the earth), the faster the relative velocity as the wheel spins (or as the earth revolves)...think: spinning bicycle wheel. As we age, most of us grow taller and our heads (the center of rational thought and self-awareness, except for the beastie boys next door to Miss LaCootina) become farther away from that "hub." Therefore, since our heads grow farther away from the center of the earth, our brains experience a more rapid relative velocity and......voila....... time seems to pass more quickly because as far as our brains can tell, the earth is spinning more rapidly.

OK--if you have stopped growing, this wouldn't explain it, but it sure was fun hypothesizing.

La Cootina said...

Um... I think I'm gonna need a diagram...