Wherein I Misunderstand Physics

I'm not sure at what point I became subject to time compression, but I know I'm not a fan. What this means about my rate of acceleration relative to objects around me or my aspect relationship to celestial bodies large enough to effect a distortion of spacetime I'm not really sure. And unless they cover it soon on an episode of Mythbusters, I can tell you I'm certain to never know for sure. I studied the humanities. Science is one of those things that happened to other people when I was in college, like marijuana and sex. But I've always had a soft spot for science. Every time I thought about it and the driven, dedicated people who studied it, I always felt a little better about the world, a little more secure. Mostly because in college that meant I knew there were other people out there not getting laid either. This was what I called my self-esteem theory of special relativity.

Ha, I kid the science people! I'm sure there was all kinds of gettin' squishy going on in the emergency hosedown shower at the Chemical Sciences Building late at night. One pull on that chain and it's like a sexy Flashdance waterfall exploding off your taut, pale, pock-marked skin, but freezing cold and traveling at the speed calibrated to be most effective at getting mineral acids off your body before they eat through to the bone. Why's your skin all red, baby? Is it the full-body flush of sexual ecstasy or is it a reaction to the strip-mining strength of the PSI of the water attempting to cold-flay you alive? Or did someone bring an almond into the building with their lunch and you're about to be in a bad way without an epinephrine shot? And why is it the people most prone to make a living handling the most dangerous substances on earth are also crippled by a dazzling array of allergy sensitivities? It's almost like evolution is trying to thwart science.

All I know is I'm trapped in the cycle of accelerating time, which is a tumbling, nauseating, impermeable prison made of nostalgia and cliche. I don't want to be the guy going "My God, is it Christmas again already?" because I understand how the progression of time and the cycle of seasons function. I've seen a calendar. More than one, in fact. Enough even to have developed a reasonable understanding of how to operate the thing, this despite my un-science-d background.

I'm finding that every year I get older, the problem, cruelly, is becoming progressively worse. Not only am I genuinely surprised by the transition from fall to holidays to winter, within that temporal avalanche I'm subjected to these compounding self-contained mini-cascades of time shock. It's a weird trick of experience that it's the 6th day of December and I have all of my days of the rest of this month accounted for, so the entire thing is already, effectively, gone before it started. My children, of course, are cut with a thousand needlepoint stabs of boredom and desire from every crawling, porcupine second as it labors, shuffling, past them; slowly bleeding to death from anticipation and want trying and failing to project themselves forward to the utopian, unseeable and un-considerable promise of presents and school break.

There's a tipping point somewhere in a life where that 51% of expectation tips a couple of points onto what was the 49% of obligation, but I'm not sure where it is. I'd say it had to do with when one procreates, but I know plenty of childless adults for whom the holidays are just as much of a Dickensian ordeal. But without the happy cripple kid at the end because the Ghost of Christmas Future showed them their grave and, you know what, it didn't really seem that bad. Unloved and unmourned like poor Scrooge, sure maybe, but that guy was superstitious coward afflicted with a lack of vision. That first goose you buy out of the kindness of your three-sizes-larger Baby Jesus-addled heart is just a gateway fowl to turkeys, then hams, then all the side dishes and dessert pies and next thing you know, it's pitch black on Thanksgiving night and you're behind a police barricade in a freezing cold Best Buy parking lot, sizing up everyone in front of you trying to judge whose knee would give with the right kick if they get between you and the 60% off Blu-Ray with onboard wifi.

And the world is a spinning miasma of acquisition and strategy, with no space of savor or feel, all sips and no long pulls. Because who has time? The event of your own birth is a gravity well unto itself, like a little atom-smashing star, and the farther we travel from it, the faster the clocks tick.

That was one for the science people. It's the least I could do. Their debilitating social awkwardness was a gift to me I will never be able to truly repay.