Time

Funny thing that has happened to me - or rather my memory - is that the joke about how Einstein's theory of relativity is explained (that tired one abt how it flies quickly when you ae with a beautiful woman as against how it drags when-faced-with-your-pet-peeve. Sorry don't know any new jokes) is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Things have gotten a little more complicated than just that.

I tried asking Z. if she had felt the same - that time seemed both compressed and distended. She came back with the usual way that people would interpret it (For details refer joke above. For a full version of the joke, ask anybody). I was, to put it mildly, a tad disappointed, and more than a little worried. Was I the only one who felt this way? Am I, ahem, going slightly cuckoo ;-)

Well, to explain what I'd meant, I promised that I'll write about it. And this post is just for that. And also in the hope that someone out there will affirm that he/she has felt it too (and hopefully they aren't locked up in a padded cell somewhere).

To start with, the way I relate to time has changed. In my mind I sometimes get confused about when certain things happened. Not really important earth shattering events. Not even events that were central to my life. But important things all the same. A friend had moved to his new apartment nearly 2 years back. I'd even been there soon after he'd moved. But yet I didn't remember it as being that far back. I even asked him if it has been more than a year. He looked shocked. Looked at me rather strangely and said that it's been close to two. Oops. Tried to get away mumbling the usual lines about how-time-flies-and-how-we-all-keep-getting-older and all that sort of rot. But neither of us could shake off that disquietening feeling that something was odd. Very odd.

I can recall certain moments or even days which seem like they happened just a few months back. And there are things that happened last week or last month and it seems to me that it must surely have happened much earlier than that.

Now that is one part of it. The other being the slightly less disconcerting more usual thing about remembering certain moments with greater clarity than others. After all our memories are vast undulating deserts with a few oases (which may be good memories or bad) and a few mirages (colored recollections that conveniently gloss over the reality of then with the nostalgia of now).

ubergeek, the