Time flies except when it stands still
Her Perspective By Liz Biggs
They say time flies when you’re having fun. But dang, it sure stands still when you’re not. Lately, I’ve been noticing this a lot more. Like when you have a good night of sleep — you close your eyes and poof, like magic — you wake up hours later as if no time has passed. But a restless, sleepless night seems to last forever — the cat keeps meowing, you hear strange noises, you think of all the things you forgot to do … and the clock just keeps ticking away slowly. Tick tock. Sleep has never been a struggle for me, but some nights are like England Dan & John Ford Coley’s yacht rock hit, “Nights Are Forever.”
Driving home the other night, I heard an annoying song on the radio. I didn’t change the station because I thought it would only last about 4 minutes, like an average pop song. It lasted 8 minutes and 37 seconds. I’m pretty sure if I loved the song, I would not have been watching the clock, lol. Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead and Australian psychedelic bands are allowed to have 8-minute songs, but up-and-coming acoustic balladeers with repetitive lyrics should know better. I know I sound like Oscar the Grouch, but I’d rather hear thrash metal than a young dude crooning the same sappy lyrics for over 8 minutes. Yawn. Even a good drummer and a bass player couldn’t save that song.
The same curse applies to sports. If your team is winning, the game flies by. But if your team is losing, it seems to take forever. A one-hour yoga class feels like two hours to me. But in my favorite Barre class at the Y (shoutout to Fabienne), I never look at the clock. I’m always surprised when the class is over. Poof, like magic.
Besides being in jail or being tortured, long flights and long drives are probably the worst watch-the-clock activities. Time really seems to stand still when you are in an economy middle seat on an international flight. Believe me, I know this to be true. (Glad that I can’t report on the jail or torture experience, though.)
I’m not a natural-born writer. It takes me more time than I’m willing to admit to write a feature story about someone, especially if I really like that person and want to get it right. Sometimes I’m so filled with dread about getting it wrong that I put off starting until my deadline looms scarily close. But here’s the thing I recently discovered: I must really like writing. Because time flies when I do it. When the ideas and words start flowing, I lose all sense of time and place. I can blink my eyes and 6 hours have passed. And if I feel like I’ve told the story the way they wanted — really captured them — it gives me great joy.
Sometimes I feel like I’m not employed for my writing skills. Plenty of people are better writers than I am. I can labor over the choice of one word — hmm, should I use unmistakable or undeniable — let me look up both definitions and then look up all the synonyms to see if a better word exists. Ooh, I like unequivocal better. But no, my readers may not relate to that word. (I decided upon undeniable, but I still have doubt and may change it on the fourth draft.)
I fear I may be employed for my ability to find interesting people, places and things to write about. And I am pretty good at asking the right questions in an interview — getting people to trust me with their story and paying attention to details. Someday I’m going to get better at the writing part. Practice makes perfect.
(Forgive me, but I’ve always wanted to start and end a column with a trite cliché, so now I can check that off my bucket list.)
