Present time passing

When [that] I was but a little tiny girl, back in the dim dead days of middle school, I was extremely fond of a series of bad but entertaining sword-and-sorcery books featuring a consumptive mage, a muscle-bound warrior, a half-elf, a collection of comic-relief characters, and a vividly depicted world full of dragons and magic and drama. At one point the mage creates (at great cost to himself) an object called the Globe of Present Time Passing, which he gives to the world's chronicler and historian Astinus in exchange for certain information. The Globe is an extraordinarily useful object which allows Astinus to see what is going on, now, all over the world, as it happens: in other fiction genres it would be some sort of technobabble-based faster-than-light communications or spying device, or perhaps just a metaphor. It's also an image that comes to mind more and more often these days, as time flashes past me faster and faster, as I age.

Everybody's saying things like 'the semester has flown by,' 'the month has flown by,' 'the year has flown by.' I can't really argue: each week seems to flicker past in a matter of hours, not days, structured by classes and the demands of work and homework. I keep reminding myself to think of the time as it passes, to be aware of what I'm doing and how I'm using my time, and constantly I get distracted by the need to complete some task or find some answer. It's so difficult to believe the term is nearly over when it honestly does seem that only last week I was wandering around Charles Street in sequined flats taking photographs for our first project in Creativity.

I know that the time has passed because I'm on the far side of it now according to the calendars: but it seems as if I can barely remember all the days and nights that have gone by since the last time I paused and took stock of things. Worst of all, I'm stalling on the work for my final projects with only a few days to go, relying on the unstructured space of the weekend to get me through, and this at least reminds me very much of undergrad classes. I could use a device that would show me present time passing, I think: if nothing else, it would be an excellent passive-aggressive motivational tool, since every time I looked into it I would be reminded that at that moment I wasn't getting any actual work done. Procrastination and palantirs are incompatible.