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It's an either/or choice. Either the calendar was too short and my to-do list was too long, or I looked for and found any excuse of procrastination to not do all those things that didn't get done. I doubt that I'm alone in this, and although many of the to-do's in 2007 Like when a nameless someone used the toilet for a wastebasket for a mysterious object, stuffing it up and creating a second great flood as I was on my way to clean out the garage. At least the bathroom floor got washed...the walls, too. Tick! Tick! Tick! I heard the imaginary pendulum of a giant clock swinging over my head repeating "time is flying. You're running out of time and you have a million things you were going to do before the 2007 clock runs out." Time ran out. The calendar flipped from last year to this, and with it I flopped all the undones over to this year. It's a theme repeated every year when Father Time hobbles out the door as Baby New Year comes prancing in. I can never believe another year has flown by, or how many years it's been since X, Y or Z happened. Since I hear so people say "do you believe it's been that long since...?", it must be that our minds are not wired for time concept. My time, your time, everybody's time got frittered away and I began thinking about our perceptions of time instead of all the things that I and probably you, didn't get around to doing. Lacking a sense of time -- how long it's been since something happened -- seems to not have been wired into our brains, probably because it wasn't wired into the brains of our animal ancestors either. Animals, like us, have built in body clocks. They know night from day and when feeding time is. When they live with us for long enough, our schedules become wired into their psyches; they can tell the difference between a work or school day and a weekend day when we're home. Try this experiment to test your dog's sense of time elapsed. Step out the front door and pretend like you're leaving. Walk far enough away from the door so Rexx can no longer hear or smell you, then come back in the house a minute later. He'll greet you with the same slobbering excitement he does when you've been gone all day. He has no concept of the length of time you've been gone. Don't bother trying it on a pet cat, they don't give a crap whether you're home or not. As Einstein said, it's all relative. Five minutes in the dentist's chair feels like an hour, and conversely, a hour of fun at a party seems like five minutes.
Sandy Sand began her writing career while raising three children and doing public relations work for Women's American ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation through Training). That led to a job as a reporter for the San Fernando Valley Chronicle, a weekly publication in Canoga Park, California. In conjunction with the Chronicle, she broadcast a tri-weekly, ten minuted newscast for KGOE AM. Following the closure of the Chronicle, Sand became the editor of the Tolucan Times and Canyon Crier newspapers in Burbank. She is currently a guest columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News and contributor to ronkayela.com
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