What if...time is soup?

A collection of increasingly nonsensical metaphors

Hello!

I’ve been extensively researching the concept of focus lately. This means trying things like “the Pomodoro method” and an app where your phone grows a little tree if you don’t touch it and waking up at 6 am to meditate or whatever before I start giving my brain its daily poaching in internet hell. 

I’ve also been reading a lot of books because my hunch was that the call was not entirely coming from inside the house of my own self-control. Wishful thinking? Maybe, but also maybe not! I’m yet to find someone proposing a satisfying collective solution for what is indeed a collective problem, so if you’ve got anything, reply to this or drop it in the comments. 

All that being said, while I was waiting for my turn on How To Break Up With Your Phone (clown behavior) at the library, a book called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals came available. It slapped. I reviewed it here, but ultimately it fucked up the way I think about time and even the concept of “managing” time in the best possible way. 

To show you what I mean here’s a before and after:

I previously thought about time like…

• A hammer 

• Training a show dog (based strictly on assumptions)

• A game of Frogger 

• Attempting to move a large, already assembled piece of IKEA furniture

• A restrictive diet where you cannot eat “nightshades”

• Within my control

• A Verizon ringback tone

• At least two mosquitos in a bedroom at 2 a.m.

• A pendulum of morality

• Perpetual, low-grade panic

• A bullet journal on the first day of attempting to use a bullet journal

• That scene from Aladdin (1992) where Jafar traps Jasmine in a giant egg timer

• The 2007 movie The Bucket List, starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson

• The 1994 movie Speed, starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock

• Kitchen scissors inside the kind of vacuum-sealed plastic packaging that can only be opened with kitchen scissors (or a box cutter, but the house box cutter is MIA)

• The Presidential Physical Fitness Test, circa 1998

• Carrying a too-full cup and saucer of scalding coffee to your faraway table in a crowded cafe

I’m working to think about time like…

• Gentle wind

• Flavor-agnostic soup

• Any game played with someone under the age of eight

• Air that sometimes smells like eucalyptus in the shower and sometimes smells like gym socks

• Black cherry jello

• Tough love

• Cirrus clouds

• The amount of saliva that’s normal for your specific mouth

• Getting a postcard from a friend who’s already back from vacation

• A flock of birds

• Sand between fingers, but not in a bad way

• Pink noise

• A small, nameless creek

• Laying on the ground in the “planetarium” of my middle school, which has since been torn down

• Amorphous slime 

• Petting a neighborhood cat

• A “magic flip wallet,” purchased on eBay

• Just kind of, there

That’s it for now. If you’ve read this book and want to talk about it, feel free to just reply!

This series of nonsense was brought to you by a good book with an awful title, Ocean Vuong, an uncolored rough-cut screener for the new Bravo show Real Girlfriends in Paris, an egg sandwich on a Bays English muffin.