Killing time

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”

― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

I decided to go through my email draft folder this afternoon. I had about 60 drafts in it, and I didn't have the foggiest idea what most of them were. I tend to send myself emails of things I like or want to remember - recipes, quotes, Craigslist postings - and I found lots of random stuff in my unsent drafts.

One of the treasures I unearthed was the quote at the beginning of the post. It reminds me a little too much of the rare workday in which very little happens, and how much I dislike those days. I experience the loss of time more keenly now than I did when I was younger, and I do my best not to let moments slip by when I could be doing more. This is not to say that I multitask - I try very hard not to, though it's a difficult habit to break - but if I have a spare moment I'll try to combine things that don't cancel each other out.

I used to use my email draft system and a lot of notebooks filled with scribbles and sticky notes. I've since gravitated towards Evernote to store everything from grocery lists to potential blog post topics. I miss notebooks to some degree, but in general I feel like this is the time period I've been waiting for all my life: Tablet computers, programs that save to the cloud, social networks that let you keep up with people you otherwise might have lost touch with between reunions, and technology that allows you to be portable without completely disconnecting from everything. There's so much to fill our time with. I guess the challenge is to keep from oversaturating ourselves to the point where we don't mind watching time die.