Keystone Light

My ire for Time and Space can only be expressed through horrible Photoshop projects.

Every year I worry that maybe I’ve overburdened myself schedule-wise and will be forced to miss out on all the truly great moments of my youth because I’m sitting inside doing homework. This has never happened, because I habitually take easy classes, shirk responsibilities, and mooch off of my study partners in order to reduce the total amount of work I have to do. Furthermore, I never really do anything truly “great” with all the free time I make for myself anyway – if I’m not playing a video game or aimlessly wandering the Internet, I’m probably sitting next to Mike in an editing room, engaged in our unending game of “Find A New And Interesting Way To Imply That The Other Guy Is Into Dudes”.* Still, that’s the sort of time I value, and so ordinarily I take steps to preserve it.

*By the way, Mike: Oreck called – you know, the company that makes the vacuums? Yeah, they want you to come down to their factory and, like, give a seminar on sucking. Because you’re so good at it. The only problem is that your area of expertise is cocks, and, well, why build a vacuum to suck cocks when it’s much cheaper to just call you?

As you may remember, I really feel as though I actually did overburden myself this term. Taking a bunch of classes is one thing – in general, the school has measures in place to ensure that you don’t bite off more academically than you can chew. But when you throw in various extracurricular activities like band, a newspaper column, and a public access TV masterpiece, each with its own demands, things change a lot. The University won’t ever say “Hey, you – too many extracurricular activities!”; at least, not until they send you a grade report full of Fs thanks to your poor time management skills. So going into this term, I wasn’t so much worried about having homework as I was worried about whether my schedule was actually possible given the physical constraints of our dimension. Has anyone ever written, co-produced, and starred in a TV show while also playing in a marching band and building conversational Spanish skills? Andy Griffith was too cool for band and too down-to-Earth to meddle with the innumerable conjugations of gustar. Seriously, there’s literally hundreds of them.

We’ve finished principal photography on Writers, which, if you’re not up with the current public access TV lingo, means that we’re done making people act stupid and read trite dialogue in front of cameras and have now moved on to the part where we sit in a cramped room and edit the stupidity and triteness together while swilling Red Bull and Gummy Frogs.* This was initially a cause for celebration in my eyes, because I’d seen Writers as the biggest timesink out of all the stuff I was doing this term. It was pretty stressful at times, but in the end I made it through the process mostly unscathed without having weathered any major disasters or failed any midterms. My assumption was that life post-Writers would be a walk in the park – albeit a stressful walk, like a walk in a park in a sketchy part of town after dark, but a walk in the park all the same.

*Gummy Frogs are essential to the creation of television. Andy Griffith, in his prime, would just stick a funnel in his mouth and have Ron Howard shovel Gummy Frogs into it. My hand to God – you can Wiki that shit.

What I’ve found after nearly 20 years of being me is that as soon as I start assuming anything will happen, fate will bend over backwards to see that it doesn’t just so I can be wrong. Thus, it is for the good of all mankind that I make a point of being surprised to see the sun rise each morning. The past week since the completion of Writers has not been quite the delicious relaxing pie I had hoped it would be.

Last Sunday I, like all other non-Arizonans, set my clocks back an hour for Daylight Savings. Traditionally, this gives me something of an advantage over my old nemeses, Time and his good for nothing cohort, Space. I’ve spent most of my life running to beat the clock and whatever symbolic piece of imagery represents Space, but for a few days after the start of Daylight Savings Time, I always feel a touch ahead, and had been looking forward to it this past week. No such luck – while I set my clock one hour back, Time and Space had clearly set their clocks two hours ahead, because I spent most of the week scrambling to catch up to my schedule with all the flustered desperation of an overweight tourist running to make his connecting flight to Cleveland. I was late to classes, caught completely off guard for two Spanish pruebitas (“small test” or “destroyer of worlds”), and yesterday almost missed our call time for the football game due to a combination of sleeping through my alarm, missing two different buses, and discovering that several articles of clothing I needed for the day were inexplicably locked in the laundry room. Time made me late while Space came in at the last second with the locked laundry room finishing move – their Saturday combo attack was a Fatality of sorts to my mixed up, hectic week.

All of this stress occurred in a week without Writers. At first I was confused as to how what was supposed to be an easy, more relaxing week turned into such a nightmare, but after reexamining things I think I get it: Writers was my keystone – the one stone in the arch that held all the other ones together (thanks to some physics property I don’t understand). When I had Writers to worry about, I naturally assumed that I would never have an ounce of spare time, and thus I constantly budgeted my time well and refused to procrastinate. In a Writers-less world, I tend to assume “Hey, I can do it tomorrow – after all, I don’t have to worry about Writers anymore!” And then, when things inevitably go differently from how I assume they will, Time and Space have a jolly good laugh at my expense.

Although Truman Capps does believe that two fundamental forces of the Universe are out to get him, he doesn’t consider that a bad attitude.