Time is speeding up. It's a fact of life, which scientists could prove -- if only they had more time.
I can still remember taking the last bite of cornbread stuffing on Thanksgiving. . . and then a mere two seconds later, with a big whoosh, it feels like I've time travelled, and now I'm on the cusp of January. I wouldn't mind so much if there was something memorable about December, but all I can recollect is grumbling at how freaking cold it was, and wasn't it just a couple days ago (i.e., July) that I was happily wearing my shades and flip flops, complaining about how freaking hot it was?
Of course time does have a bendable quality to it. When you're in a hurry and need MORE of it, it goes faster and faster to the point where it feels like it's being subtracted from your 24-hour allotment. This is what "publishing time" is like in NYC, or when you're trying to finish a scene/chapter/book for a particular deadline. Everyone in those situations wishes for just a few more days to be sneaked into the month when no one is looking. Or if someone could figure out how to get some rollover minutes sprinkled throughout the day, there would be cause for celebration.
When you're NOT in a hurry, or when you're waiting. . .oh boy does time play tricks. Not those "Wow, how did they do that?" kind of tricks, but those "Hey! That's not fair!" kind of tricks. Time sloooooooows down when you're waiting to hear about a manuscript, just like it did when it was Christmas Eve and you were sure you would DIE before it was Christmas morning, and then your sister would get to have all the presents Santa left. . .except, well, she was dying from waiting too.
So now, even though I'm not in a hurry for any particular reason. . .time has pulled another fast one. It decided to zoom through all of December without my really noticing it. And if it weren't for those annoying end-of-year recaps, I would have forgotten it's time to do one of those even-more-annoying end-of-decade recaps.
Yikes. I feel ten years older all of a sudden.
While this year has zipped by without my permission, I can see how I could have possibly squeezed MORE out of the alloted time -- well, not really. I would have had to figure out how to overcome the time-space continuum, and I was just too busy for that kind of research, so I scratched it off the To Do list pretty fast.
Anyway, I don't do New Year's Resolutions, but I do like to see where I've been. This year has been tumultuous, which may be why the time overlords decided to speed through the last part of it so we could get a headstart on a brand spankin' new year.
Even so, there are some parts of 2009 that I really enjoyed: two contest wins, and two more contest finals, with two different books. (No wonder two has always been my favorite number!)
For the first time in my life, I've also had TIME to devote to writing, and that has been a treat. Before this year, writing had to wait its turn, and it's been very patient. This year writing got to be first on the list. And I think it's going to be that way in this new decade. I've got a lot of ideas and plans for 2010 (two thousand ten -- I'm not really sure about that twenty ten phraseology).
Hopefully this new decade will last longer than the previous one. I don't really have time to do "well, there's goes ANOTHER decade" post.
