Monday, September 24, 2012

Time Marks

By the Julian calendar, I was born near the end of the calendar year. If my culture were to maintain the arbitrary designation of holidays and keep Christmas Day at the end of the year, I likely would've been one of those unfortunate kids whose extended family gave him one present and attached the condolence, "This is for both your birthday and for Christmas." It's funny how people's consolidation of gift events, to say nothing of their penny-pinching, proves how meaningless our special days are. If it's that much of a hassle to observe two instead of one, why do it at all?

I would have been born in 1980 instead of 1981 (I think, although I'm not going to get into the variance of assigning a number to our years). When I was a kid, I always imagined my friends born in 1980 as perpetually larger than me, more mature. Cooler, even. I felt like I'd just missed some inexplicable opportunity to have belonged to an elite class of human beings. 1981 felt like a tag-along. Someone picked for a team after all the better players had been selected. The passenger instead of the driver. The appendix dangling from the large intestine. It's foolish now, but back then I was never the first to arrive anywhere; the 1980 kids had already gotten there before me and I felt cheated of my chance for discovery.

This self-applied hierarchy didn't apply to my friends born in 1979, although I did carry with me a quiet judgment on the immaturity of those friends born in 1982; or, rather, I maintained I was forever ahead of them in the maturity race.

In the end, it wouldn't have mattered. I'd still be the same age as I am now. The marks of months and important dates are the calandrical equivalent of those puzzle boards where you must slide around one tile at a time in order to assemble the complete picture. Finished or unsolved, there's always one empty slot leftover. Room for revision. Or, an option for the bold who feel like Picasso-ing the intended picture. People seem to need the complete expected image, though. I did. I tethered the quality of my existence to it. I don't anymore, but that's because my chronological abscess has deepened. I'm fool enough now to commit to the Proustian idleness of wondering where all the years have gone and alternately ignoring or dreading the years ahead.

None of this thought-wandering ultimately matters. I actually suspect it's a mechanism of my depression, an Ouroboros exercise that provides the sensation of moving without ever getting anywhere. Whether the world would be a remarkably changed place had we used one calendar over another, had I been born in 1980 instead of 1981, it's an amusing meditation for my morning but it doesn't matter. Just as the uncles and aunts who cheap out and combine two nearby calendar events so as to only buy one gift, all the meaning ascribed to time is what we have created or not created.

That said, I do really look forward to my mom baking my favorite cake for my birthday every year.