Awesome.

-Awesome- replied one of my 10 year olds today to my, by now must be growing stale, greeting of -Hi! how are you?- Cool! I thought: I must be teaching them something after all, it’s only taken 6 months for a kid to a) reply to me, and, b) use the word “awesome.”

And awesome’s how I felt today. It’s how I responded this morning to the same question when I was buying olives and feta cheese at El Raco de Ferri, a booth at the central market run by an exceedingly friendly Greek guy with really frizzy hair. -Estoy muy bien, pues…un poco resacado, pero de buen humor. - Translation: -I´m Awesome, but I´ve got a bit of a hangover. I am, however, in very good humour.

Yeah, I had a great night last night. Having a half-empty bottle of wine, I felt obliged to “echarme una copa...o dos” and “terminarla.” I did so in a very civilized manner, while watching the fifth instalment of El Quixote... Then I got drunk and cleaned the house. Had a wonderful time. My rationale for cleaning the house in this moment, if you´ll believe it, was this: since I´m drunk I may as well clean because I sure can´t study Spanish in this condition, moreover, I may even enjoy the cleaning, and then tomorrow, when I´m sobre, I won´t have to waste time cleaning and I can study. The mirror-image of this thinking would, of course, be the one habitually invoked by my mother: “sure I might as well be drunk as I am.”

This kind of fundamentally economic thinking has characterized my decisions more and more of late, especially when it comes to time management. Referred to as “opportunity cost” by economists, it implies the necessary surrender of one choice in return for another. If, for example, I´m reading a book, or speaking in english, I´m not reading or speaking in Spanish; If I spend money on lunch, I won´t eat dinner, and so on. Which brings us back to cleaning the house with a bottle of wine: aside from representing what, at the time, was the best allocation of my resources, it sure is a nice surprise to wake up and find your toilet´s sparkling clean, and you can´t even quite remember why…

Soooooo slow

76€/month for phone and internet is unacceptable: now that I´m semi-retired that´s like 1/6th of my income, so I don´t regret cutting my internet connection at all, but I sure do miss it. Casa Americana´s computers are dying a slow, stress-inducing death, which has stolen at least 1 and a half of my halfly-written blog entries and attempts to upload cool photos.

Not that I don´t have time to post: I´m not terrribly busy here: my days aren´t exactly full, but they sure do fill-up pretty quickly, to the point that they seem to gather a momentum of their own. In fact, I think it´s taking me longer to do stuff now - that, or stuff is taking longer to do. For example, I tried to bake some cookies and make some dinner one day after work and freaked out when I ran out of time. Somehow in the 2 hours between 8pm, when my class finished, and 10pm, I managed to not make cookies - that is, I tried and failed. I mean, not that I tried and they sucked, rather, I failed to organize myself sufficiently into a state of cookie-making preparadeness.

Let me explain myself: the supermarket closes at 9:15pm, which shouldn´t be a problem because I live beside the supermarket. So, I biked home, which takes 10min, opened the fridge, realized I needed chocolate, went to Mercadona and bought chocolate. Fine up until here. Return home, start mixing, and, Fuck! Eggs! The supermarket has now closed, so I head down the street to the Consum, which closes at 9:30pm, fifteen precious minutes later, but do I make it on time?... Nope. Great. What now? Aha! the 24hr supermarket/gas station! Off I go, but do they have eggs? Nope. What time is it? 10pm...Screwed yet again. All this is to say...what the fuck?!!

2 questions immediately present themselves: 1) Owen, what the fuck is wrong with you*, why don´t you just chill out and buy the cookie mix pre-made like the rest of the male heterosexual world? 2) Where the fuck did the time go?

*Ed. note: Erin, my ex-girlfriend, once asked me a very simple yet significant question. She was pretty mad at me and somewhat frustrated with what she viewed as my inability to organize and restructure myself into a smooth and well-functioning, punctual, glitch-free make myself a sandwhich, tie my shoelaces, remember my keys (oh yeah, it must have been the keys) machine. She asked quite simply and incredulously: ¨How do you get through a day?" i.e. You seem to be a perfectly functioning human being on the surface, but, (oh shock!) you forget your keys!? Thus, how do you, on a daily basis, manage to get from point A to B while completing all the little steps that make the trip possible? The answer, of course, is to go through the back door, or leave an extra key in the mailbox, or whatever. I didn´t know what do say though, I mean, how much of a fucking achievement is it to get through a day? What´s to it? So I´m apt to lose a few things along the way, I may have to return home once or twice to forget something I left there, I occassionally replace the milk in the cupboard and the cereal in the fridge, but, what´s the worst that could happen? I´m not going to explode, at least, not unless someone else were to blow me up. Anyway, I found this question quite humourous, both because it conveys a certain truth about my shoddy organizational skills and general absentmindedness, and because it seems to define her version of a successful day as some sort of a well-organized and productive journey that only ultra-capable people achieve. In retrospect, it also hints that days can be pretty damn hard to get through sometimes, I´ll give her that (but we were talking about normal, privileged, attend classes and feed yourself days).

This is one of a few recent incidents (we´re back talking about the cookies now) that have left me anywhere from confused, late, indignant and even incensed. Time just seems to go faster now. But this incident and another similar one that I have since forgotten made me think: they say that ¨time flies when you´re having fun.¨ Could it be possible, I asked myself, that this saying, which I have always taken to be a metaphorical comment about our perception of time passing, actually contains a literal truth? Could it be that it takes longer to do some things than others? Could it be that time moves at different speeds during some activities? For example, when attempting to arrive home, buy eggs and chocolate, (admittedly in two trips), and make cookies, than it does when, say, driving from Toronto to Waterloo, ON (150 odd - the last 5 or so especially, we always get lost - kilometres) where my cousins live? It sounds strange, but I am becoming more and more convinced that this is the case.

I think the phenomenon could have something to do with productivity differences between Canada and, say, Spain. I think it also explains how my days have managed to fill themselves up. You see, when you block off short bits of time in a strange and slow-moving country, you actually speed those hours up, which, as any worth his weight in soya sauce mathematican can tell, means you do less... Thus, an 8hour Canadian 9-5 workday followed by a 6hour post-work freedom/recovery period actually moves faster, yet manages, at the same time, so to speak, to accomplish more than an 8hr Spanish workday that begins at 9, breaks for 2hours between 2 and 4, and returns to work till 7ish. There are practical explinations for this, such as the time-erasive effects of driving in 2 rush hours/day. For me, personally, it seems to come down to a complete inability to divide time into productive chunks. Blocking-off time just doesn´t work for me.

Firstly, I can´t concentrate enough in a 2hr block of time to do 2hrs of work (I´m talking about intellectual work here, reading, studying, thinking). I need to be in the zone, and that means that I need spaces in between my blocks, big spaces, otherwise I´m thinking about the next block and everything falls to pieces, I forget the eggs and I burn the cookies.

Secondly, if I have 2hrs to, for example, do the shopping, I end up in a hurry, flustered, and caught in one of these wierd time warps I´ve been talking about. So, that´s why I feel like my days have a nasty tendency of filling themselves up so easily without properly compensating in that satisfying, you´ve done a shit load of work today feeling. And that´s why after my, I have to admit, almost pathologically relaxing day of a) 9am wakeup, yoga on the roof, brief halting run through the building sites north of my house, breakfast, or b) an hour or so of studying Spanish, then Spanish class till 2pm, 2hrs to prepare and eat lunch (don´t ask me how, but it always takes at least 2hrs - the sandwich has a lot to be said for it, but they eat those for dinner here, or for el almuerzo (snack)), I end up trying to squeeze writing a post into the space between my evening classes - and that brings me back to the slow computers, and that´s when ...the fucking computer crashes! Deep breath. The world will not end if you don´t publish your post, but you´ve just sucked an hour an a half of time out of the day. So that´s why I haven´t posted yet in April. I´ve also been in Sweden for two weeks having an awesome time.

Ah well, the barbarians are once again knocking at the gates, and I´ve got to run to class, but I´ll fill in the rest of the details tomorrow or the next day, or the day after that. For now, I´ll leave you with this wonderful image of me eating a mashed potato-wrapdog in Sweden. Dig it.