the feeling of timelessness.

 

to someone at the subliminal areas of the world, this happening is probably twice a year, and he or she would probably have slept through it all. and also sleep through it all this year.

 

yet for someone who never goes through these rituals every year, it may seem a big event. especially for the romantic souls like me, who see this as a period in time where there's a virtual timelessness, or an extra hour of time in a day. i guess i'm not exactly romantic, but i've always been so busy in singapore that i've always craved for an extra hour of time in a day.

 

it's almost like a dream come true.

 

it happens at 2am today, and the clocks are turned back to 1am, so that we go through 1 to 2am all over again. i'd think that the respective governments fix this weird ungodly hour so that normal lives won't get messed up. i've been thinking about people making plans to meet the next day, and being late for the meeting because they'd forgotten to retune their clocks.

 

and also about the shift worker doing the graveyard one: an extra hour of work? will i need to retune my laptop clock which is synchronised to the internet? clubs, usually closing at 2am in the UK, will open for another hour to the 2nd 2am? so many questions that i want to ask, yet will sound incredibly infantile if i ask them out aloud.

 

it's almost like travelling between time zones, yet it's different in that you travel between time zones by staying still in the same country.

 

i know what i'll be doing in that extra hour. making full use of it, either by playing a couple of games of warcraft, or by doing some studying. or maybe asleep (probably not).

 

interesting.

 

dejectium out

31 october 2004

0115hrs gmt (the first one)

 

i realised I had more thoughts as I continued to do my stuff. the moment I switched my watch and clocks back an hour, I thought: I was playing warcraft an hour ago, but time has stood still. I get to do again what I didn’t manage to do in the past hour; I get another chance. then I suddenly realise, too, that the very concept of time itself is man-made. i used to think and believe in the cliché that time and tide waits for no man, but apparently time does (tides don’t still). time is constructed to offer pattern to our lives, and just like how I’ve always wondered why dividing time into 60s makes it so perfect (who thought of it in the first place?), would it be different if that someone had divided the day into 10 hours, with 100 seconds in a minute, and 100 minutes in an hour? or something along those lines?

 

would we still be looking at 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night, or rather 5 hours of day and night each? these ifs are very big, and we’ll probably never find out, nor want to find out. because the current fixed patterns of time have grown ingrained deep, deep into our consciousness.

 

this seemingly uneventful moment has revealed in me many wonders, and I again appreciate more in my life now: time included. just as time is a man-made construct, the management of time is very within our grasps. hopefully you’ll never catch me lamenting the lack of time anymore from now on.

 

dejectium out

31 october 2004

0145hrs gmt (the second one)

 I typed this entry 90 minutes after the first one, but on the clock it’s just 30 minutes.

 

p/s: I’ll have a mini-eulogy for my friend julius here, who was tragically killed in a car accident in america. even though we haven’t talked for years, I remember him as someone I got along well with in college. indeed, time wouldn’t have stayed still for him, and even if the man-made construct of time was turned back, he’ll still not be back with us. but life still has to go on, nature still has to carry on its work. hope that you’re in a much better place now, julius. rest in peace.

 

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