Time and Lifestyle Revision

Making an entry just before, during, or shortly after the Spring Equinox rolls around has become an annual habit for me. However, I have nothing exceptionally notable to speak of about it though, because winter continues to domineer, pushing spring out of the picture. The only significant thing going on with me since my last entry is adapting to new rigours and cycles of a full-time position line. New freedoms, gains, and openings for opportunities are countered with just as many new restrictions, disadvantages, and losses. The positives and negatives have been balancing themselves out to a zero sum after putting weight to them. I can't get too comfortable with this because it seems that things are in the works where I'll have to make more re-adjustments to my life on account of a new schedule coming to play. Any previous plans and changes I made to organize my own calendar for the rest of the year have all been in vain. I'm stuck now with the dilemma of trying to decide which new line would best suit me, and what I'll have to book off just for the sake of bargaining in the near future. I'm not going to comment anymore about it. My comments and criticisms about my job stay at my job. I can only say that I'm trying my best to not allow what is bad to become worse. My writing time here is for honing my lexical sword; to clear my head and escape from work related stuff rather than get more absorbed in it.

I drift now to being thankful for any schedule stability, and to the subject of "time" in general. I reflect on how hellishly complicated it was back in the day of tracking of my part-time/casual activity: to formulate and re-formulate equations that calculate time for automating the schedules in a spreadsheet, and how lucky I am for not to get swamped with dealing with that situation again. Even with a substantial set of intricate pre-formatted functions to use in Excel, it still is tricky business that totally warps the mind, with all the multi-variable base unit/numeral conversions, fourth and fifth degree nested conditionals, and other weird and sloppy things involving Boolean algebra that I formulated, all for the sake of it having some veneer of something customized that looks outwardly "simple". I confess, I've had several brushes of coming close to buying a one way ticket to Loonyville while trying to program such a thing. It was like the modern equivalent of handling that legendary ancient book of secrets in alchemy which supposedly drives a person irreversibly crazy if one attempts to read more than one page of it at one sitting while trying to pursue such intellectual prowess.

One remnant of eccentric appreciation I gained after doing such a feat was thinking about alternative ways to measure time. Working at unconventional hours already prompts me to think about time in stranger metrics by default, but messing around with various time calculations accentuated it. I worked in a scheduling office, where I was responsible for overseeing multiple streams of time. I frequently ponder time-related thought experiments perhaps more than most: some realistic, some nonsensical, involving time zones, especially while I travel on long trips. Time travel science fiction intrigues me. Although I rarely choose to wear a watch, I've become an amateur virtual horologist: a mental collector of watches*. I developed a fancy for those with unique dials, settings, complications, and readouts. Maybe it stems from an inherited taste for such things, as one of my Dad's hobbies is making clocks. However, he just prefers to work on the casings rather than dealing with the instrumentation. My own obsession with time has been further provoked with the will to start running again, and with my own recent trial of fixing my own battered sports watch by cannibalizing pieces from another of the same make. ** I'm also one of those weirdos who has an instinctual practical understanding of how the tachymeter dial actually works on the bezel of a high end timepiece, beyond it just being decorative. Of course, such a feature is rendered now obsolete with GPS-equipped cellphones and sports watches. Given that digital chronometric precision is getting cheaper, and with the functionality and multi-tasking of what a wristwatch, like the new Apple watch, can do today, it makes opting to wear an analog watch seem as anachronistic as wearing a top hat and spats.***

But I still love classic watches. It's the only fashion accessory/jewelry I would bother with wearing****. I remember how getting a watch for my twelfth birthday made me feel a little more manly and mature, because it felt like I had to be more responsible with minding the time: something that a kid doesn't normally have to do. And given that I've been quite preoccupied with the subject of time as of late, I thought I would share at least one example of a watch that is in my mental inventory that I would indeed consider getting in material form; one of them that is perhaps an honest reflection of my character in both form and function. Is it a Rolex? An Omega, or a Cartier? Nope, far from it. Those ones I mentioned are nice and elegant, but I don't believe in putting on airs to display some sort of pretentious bullshit elitism. Is it the equivalent of a Swiss Army knife in terms of number of functions? Again, nope. My watch of choice is more like the AK-47 assault rifle of wrist watches*****. It is a Russian model, or to be more accurate, a Soviet model. The watch I'm talking about at first seems rather plain, but yet it is incredibly unique in looks and function. It is surprisingly very low-tech in comparison, and yet durable enough to endure the ends of the Earth . . . literally, in two different meanings.
 


A model with cities as time zone
markers. Luckily, I can read Cyrillic.

The timepiece I'm mentioning was initially especially designed for submariners, and for enduring scientific expeditions in the Arctic/Antarctic. It is unique in that the dial is a representation of the actual 24 hour day. It isn't powered by any fancy-schmancy long-life batteries, or a solar cell, or eco-drive technology. You have to physically wind it like an old time pocket watch. It sounds stupidly primitive, but it comes to be truly practical when you're stranded in a remote polar region, or stuck in a metal tube undersea for months: environments with little or no light for a solar cell. Whether you're under the ocean depths, or near one of the poles of the world, thousands of kilometers away from a convenient place to shop for a replacement battery for a more modern/digital/smart watch, this feature is seems pretty sensible. The other practical, yet ominous, advantage about having a wind-up watch, is that as a submarine crewman: someone who is responsible for either delivering, or being a target of, some big bad nuclear boom-booms, is that a battery powered watch becomes useless once it's struck by the electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) from an atomic blast, while a hand wound one doesn't. If a watch is designed to survive and work through Armageddon, it might be able to endure the rigours I can put a watch through. The unconventional 24 hour dial face also has advantages. It makes calculating differences in time zones easier to do at a glance. When one has to be responsible for tracking military activity and communications of a nation that spans across 11 time zones, or computing targets in an entire hemisphere, it's kind of an important feature to have. The polar advantage is that you don't have to pull off mitts to press buttons to get such a reading. If you are wandering around somewhere remote and then get lost, the watch can also serve as a crude compass, at least during daytime. It is conveniently configured such that the hour hand follows the sun, so point the hour hand towards there and then the 24 hour mark on the dial points to the north (the 12 noon mark points south). Given what I already said, this is exactly the kind of watch you'd want to have if you are enduring a zombie apocalypse or something.



The Submariner Model

I'm certainly not appreciative, or waxing nostalgic, about the time when Communism was a dominant force in this world and a real threat to be reckoned with; me liking this watch this isn't at all an endorsement of that. However, I am appreciative of the ways where low-tech stuff has a practical use and a place, and I'm respectful of common sense and the power of how far one can go by taking a seemingly counter-intuitive action by designing for simplicity in response to some things. Sometimes we get too caught up in the pissing contest of over-developing technology to do simple things, and to be over-reliant on it can come to the point where it becomes almost shameful and embarrassing. For example, back in the days of the space race, the Americans spent a hefty sum and used a lot of engineering manpower to develop a pen that could write in zero gravity. The Russians used their own approach to solving this writing implement problem . . . it was called, "using a pencil".

*- Watches have a short live span whenever I wear them. The one actual, non-sports watch that I do have is 14 years old and I've replaced the band on it four times already. I see no need to put them through abuse unnecessarily, and it would just be wasteful and covetous to keep hoarding them as material things. It is enough that I have a large inventory of the ones I like in my mind alone.
**- I was unsuccessful. I neither the tools, nor keen eyesight, nor steady hands for such a repair. An eleven dollar purchase from Amazon may help with this. It beats getting another $170.00 plus smart watch. Frugality rules!
***-My apologies to those who like Mr. Peanut and Scrooge McDuck.
****- Watch Pulp Fiction again to understand how important the sentimentally of a watch is for some men.
*****- A related entry, The Thing That's Too Well Built..