September 14, 2010
(Future note: The following Thoughts papers are not actually Thoughts papers. They are articles I included in my blog Brian Explains Life. I explain many things in these articles, but this Blog Intro describes them best.)
Brian Explains Life: Blog Intro
All right, you are here. I don’t know where you came from or how you heard about this Blog, but you are here. There is no turning back now.
Why would I have a Blog that claims to explain something as complex as life? Why not? I have nothing better to do. We all have questions, but how many of us have answers? I got your answers right here. (It helps if you read this with a New York accent.)
This Blog will include videos, text entries, pictures, and life lessons. Enjoy the crap that I have to share.
(Future note: I really planned on including videos, but I never had time to film them, let alone edit them. They were my thoughts on various subjects that I collected over many years. My opinions have changed about some of them, but I’ll try to resist changing them to my current views on life. Mainly, they are just excuses to let my weird thoughts be known. This introduction is too short for a whole article, so I’ll include the first of the articles about time.)
January 14, 2011
Brian Explains: Time
I have a never-ending series of weird and scary things that I do. One of my abilities is to wake up seconds before my alarm clock goes off. I go hours without looking at the clock and I have timed it perfectly a chilling number of times in my life. My internal clock works overtime even when I am sleeping (reason 1389 why I have a hard time sleeping at night). I play and write music, which might have something to do with my connection to time. My good timing came partially from playing music. I don’t usually lose track of time. I own time and it does my bidding. Time is my bitch.
When I was a kid, my cousin could not tell time on an analog clock. In case you are in the same club as my cousin, an analog clock is a clock with hands and a face. A grandfather clock and Big Ben are analog clocks. Digital clocks (the only clocks my cousin ever knew) just tell you the time in digital numbers. I prefer an analog clock mainly for doing time math. If something is 6 hours away, it is on the opposite side of the clock. Count up or down from 6 hours and you can count just about any length of time by 3 hour increments. I prefer carrying a cellphone rather than wearing a wristwatch because I don’t need to stare at a clock every few minutes. I look at clocks quite often, but I at least get a rest when I am walking from place to place where I can just rely on my inner clock.
Military time is another helpful mathematical time tracker. 17 minus 8 hours shows that an 8 to 5 day is actually 9 hours out of your life that you will never get back. I don’t always agree with the military (especially their love of early morning hours), but a 24-hour clock makes sense considering there are 24 hours in a day. To convert military time to regular time, you simply subtract 12 hours. I usually think of the time as 2 hours and go to the hour that makes sense. To go from regular time to military time, you add 12 hours (or 2 hours). Consider this paragraph your invitation to be drafted into the armed forces. Before you head off to Canada to avoid the military time draft, just move on to the next paragraph.
My wife and I have been to Europe twice in our lives. Just as I find it hard to sleep much of the time at home, I could not sleep on the plane to Europe or the plane back. We both experienced the jet-lag when we arrived in Europe and when we arrived home. Because of the jet-lag, my concept of time was off from my normal timing. I had bad timing like you would not believe. The change in time sent our whole routine into shambles. When time is thrown into chaos, your life is thrown into chaos. Eventually, your timing regulates. The moment you get used to European time, it is time to return to your home time.
I thought it would be appropriate in this last paragraph to discuss late timing. It is one thing to be late for things on your own time, but it is another to be later for things involving someone else. Lateness is an insult to those around you. You are saying whatever you were supposed to remember was not important enough to involve planning for it. Unless you are five years old, you know how long you take to prepare for going somewhere. Plan and be on time. Before I am late in putting out this article, I will just say that time is easy to master, but hard to control. It gets on my nerves and is the greatest thing I crave (next to money). Learn how to deal with time and you will learn how to deal with life. After all, timing is everything.
Thoughts from Life 
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