Green Things, Part II

It is 8:16 PM. At this time I was originally expecting Daisy to have arrived, and we would be turning around by 9 or so to head back north.

Instead, in classic Daisy fashion, she just now left the house half an hour ago.

I cannot tell you folks how much this frustrates me. I can't even put it into words.

Daisy really has no concept of time other than that it passes at a constant rate. In this sense, she seems to care as much about time as my cats do. I've written about this before, as recently as this morning, referring to the concept of Daisy Standard Time. Daisy Standard Time consists of her being almost completely unable to keep a schedule or be punctual for anything unless she's absolutely forced to be (read: if someone told her to be somewhere at a certain time, you'd almost have to tie her up and drag her there yourself if you wanted her to be there on time). I think part of it is an unconscious sense of entitlement, whether she sees it that way or not -- she doesn't have to follow the rules of punctuality because "her sense of time differs from other people." Well no, that's a fallacy -- even if her "sense of time" differs from everyone else's, that doesn't mean the rules don't apply equally to her too. We all live in the same world, after all. It's akin to killing someone with a knife and saying that the charges of murder don't apply to you because you have a different concept of murder compared to everyone else -- whatever that concept may be.

Look, I may sound frustrated here, and it's because I am. I'm not trying to proverbially "shit all over Daisy" or anything like that, so don't get that impression -- I love her, very much, and I wouldn't be marrying her if I didn't or if this was something that was an "absolute dealbreaker" for me. However, I am biased, because I am an incredibly punctual person for absolutely everything I do. I'm the guy who shows up at the movie theater 45 minutes early, at least, to get popcorn, go pee, and get the first/best seats in the actual theater before the trailers start -- even if it means I sit there for twenty minutes before they do start. I'm the guy who can't leave the house without a watch on or my entire day is ruined. I set my alarm at 5AM even when I don't teach until 9:15 because I have to be able to sacrifice a bit of sleeping time in order to be able to be awake enough to take care of the responsibilities expected of me. If I have an engagement I have to be at by a certain time, I'm there twenty minutes early at least. I've gone to class -- whether I was teaching or attending -- late only once or twice in my entire seven-year academic career as a student. I've never shown up late to a class I'm teaching, for the record. I'm either there twenty minutes early or right as the class is supposed to begin, but never late. I often tell my students that my time is as valuable as theirs is, so I won't waste it. Logically, I believe everyone (and everything) in the world should operate this way.

Daisy's concept of time is drastically different. Even for appointments and evenings out with her friends when they're all meeting at the same place, she'll show up an hour late and act like that's normal or to be expected of her. She won't keep a clock in her room -- not even an alarm clock -- because she doesn't want to know what time it is. The only alarm clock she uses is her phone, and half the time she'll still get up an hour late. It's not just about her perception of time, of course, but everyone she may or may not be inconveniencing by it -- which she is either oblivious to or she will occasionally brush off by saying that set times are just "suggestions" or that "people need to stop taking everything so seriously."

Yes, I agree that some people should stop taking everything so seriously, but I think we can all agree that's not how the real world works. Suppose, for example, I started doing the same thing to Daisy that she does to me and everyone else in regard to time, and just, say, decided to show up to our wedding three hours late. She wouldn't be happy, would she? In fact, she'd probably be in hysterics, thinking I'd been kidnapped, murdered, my car had blown up on the side of the road, I'd been killed in a car accident, etc. It would inconvenience not only her, but everyone who had taken their own time out of their own schedules to attend our wedding, and when I finally did saunter in there on my own time, I'm guessing that most people there wouldn't be too happy with me, now would they?

Let's bring this down to a much smaller scale and discuss my trip to Omaha this week.

Daisy works night shifts, as you know. When she comes down here, she sleeps first, for usually a shorter amount of time than she normally would, as a "nap" of sorts so that she can still be able to turn her schedule around and sleep again at night once we arrive back in Omaha. While I'm sure this isn't incredibly easy for her, it's not unprecedented and not even out of the ordinary -- she'll frequently get up in the middle of the day after a few hours' sleep to go hang out with friends, spend time with her family if her sister(s) is/are in town, go shopping, work on stuff for the wedding, cook, etc. This is, actually, fairly normal for her, despite the fact that I tell her that she needs to get much more sleep than she does.

Of course, today she gets it at the worst possible time, but I digress.

That's always the plan for our trips, anyway -- Daisy gets off work, sleeps for several hours to rest, gets up, and then comes down here. Meanwhile, during the day that I'm usually awake and waiting on her, I try to nap and get the last of my tasks done around the house before she arrives, especially when we're planning to go back the same night (as we are tonight). I try to nap myself primarily because 2/3 of the drive back, I'm the one driving -- as she could use the downtime and rest. Most of the time, during my drive back, she falls asleep in the seat next to me. We make a stop at York to stretch our legs and use the bathroom if necessary (tonight I'll have to pick up cigarettes and a few other little things, more than likely, as well) before she once more drives for the last leg of the trip into Omaha proper, since I hate the highways and city streets there, and they confuse the shit out of me. Once we get back to the house, we go to bed and get up in the morning ready to start the day anew.

If she had left at 3PM as she'd said she was going to, she could've slept from 9 until 3 (a six-hour nap, when I don't even get six hours of sleep most nights), arrived here a little after 8, and we could've been back on the road by 9PM, arriving in Omaha a little after 2 and sleeping the rest of the night until around 9 or 10AM, ready to start the day and take care of all of our tasks on the docket.

She overslept until 4 because her phone died and the alarm didn't go off (which I can't/don't blame her for, of course), got up and decided to clean things (even though she knows I couldn't care less about the cleanliness status of the house) instead of leave when she already knew she was really late and behind schedule, and didn't leave the house until shortly before 8PM. This shifts everything else on that schedule back by a little more than five hours. She now won't arrive here until after 1, it'll be after 6 (or even 7, depending on how long we stop in York) before we get back to Omaha, and if we go to bed then, it'll more than likely be at least 1 or 2 in the afternoon tomorrow before we wake up, and at least another hour or two later before we're both awake and alert enough to be able to do anything outside the house. That throws a huge wrench into a lot of our plans for tomorrow, but it's even more stressful and strenuous on me, as it requires me to be up all night long to drive 2/3 of the way back there when I wasn't planning to be. I napped for about 90 minutes, but couldn't sleep any longer than that. I didn't want to sleep any longer than that, as I wouldn't have been able to go to sleep when we got to Omaha at the original time expected of around/shortly after 2AM.

Needless to say, I was really pissed off. And this happens almost every time we plan a trip. It shouldn't surprise or anger me at this point...except that we've talked about it. We've discussed it rationally. At length. I trust Daisy with absolutely everything else in the known universe, and I would (and do) trust her with my life...but I cannot ever take any of her timeframes or schedules seriously. Ever. A few nights ago when she said she'd Skype with me in ten minutes, and I waited here at my computer for over an hour before she actually did, I asked her if she planned to be an hour or more late to our own wedding, too, since everything else she says involving time you'll have to add an hour or more to if you want a more accurate representation of when she'll actually be somewhere or will do something.

"No, of course not," she said.

"So you do have the ability to do things on a set schedule at a set place and time, and be on time for certain things that you deem important, but most of the time for everything else, you choose actively to throw that concept to the wayside?"

In my mind, it's all equal. If you say you're going to be somewhere or do something at a certain time, you're there or you do it. If something comes up or there's an issue, you let the parties who will be affected by said issue know, and you get there or do what you said you'd do ASAP once that issue or problem is dealt with. In my mind there's no difference between a Skype call, the wedding, or the timeframe of a trip down here and back -- they're all equally important because your word is on the line, and because it's being honorable and keeping up your end of the bargain. I take great pains to never inconvenience anyone I don't absolutely have to in any way, shape, or form -- even to my own detriment. If I were to miss the shuttle bus back up to the parking lot where I park on main campus, I wouldn't call a friend and bug them to give me a ride up there -- I'd just suck it up and walk the three miles or so before I'd put anyone out.

Perhaps I'm harping on this too much, and that's not my intention. My overall intention, the over-reaching umbrella point I'm trying to make, is that most of the time in this world, your decisions and choices don't just affect you, but people around you who interact with you -- whether that interaction lasts a minute or two or a lifetime. Your actions have consequences that you may not consider, or, in some cases, be able to foresee. Ramifications and all that, etc. As a professor, I deal with this a lot, mainly in the form of sob stories from students using slippery-slope logic, even if that logic, to them, is sound. I'm doing so badly in your class. If I fail this paper, then I fail the class, and if I fail the class, I lose my financial aid. If I lose my financial aid, I'll have to drop out of college! Do you want me to drop out of college?

While all of those things may be true, and while that chain reaction may occur for that particular student, my response to these sorts of sob stories are usually along the lines of "Well, you'd better not fail that paper then, right?"

The point being that if I choose to fail that paper, it's not because I want to ruin the student's life -- it would be because it's a failing paper that the student didn't work hard enough on to pass. I'm not responsible for the consequences of said student's actions, that student is. I'll again repeat the best piece of teaching advice I ever heard, and I heard it on the first day of orientation as a GTA in 2010: "You don't fail your students; they fail themselves." That logic applies to many things in life. Would my action in giving a paper a failing grade affect that student's life? Well yes, it would, but I wouldn't be the cause. He or she fully earned that failing grade.

Anyway. I'm getting fairly off track.

Daisy doesn't necessarily have an easy life; she has debt and bills just like I do. She still lives with her parents, works long hours on a shitty schedule, and she's trying to plan a wedding and focus on our future and our survivability, which is incredibly commendable and much more than many other women would do in her situation -- and she and I so very rarely fight or have any disagreements about anything. But, the whole time thing is where we differ greatly, as her concept of time is so much different than mine, and when she chooses to ignore or shrug off the concepts of time or set schedules, it can and does affect me big time, especially if I'm part of those set schedules...hence why I'm drinking as much coffee as I can right now so that I can be awake enough to drive several hours through the night back north to Omaha due to her delay. Just because I love her doesn't mean I love everything she does or all of her little habits/quirks any more than she loves that I smoke and bite my nails. I don't love them, necessarily, but I do have to accept them to a certain extent, in much the way we both accept one another's choices or moral decisions, like how I accept and embrace her veganism and she accepts my smoking (though she doesn't embrace it, obviously).

The time thing has, however, remained the one constant that no matter how I try to push it aside and let it go, it keeps driving me up the wall whenever I have to deal with it. I can't help that as a person it is ingrained deep in my personality that time is very, very important, and it connects to and/or controls every major aspect of my life, like a big web with many strands in different directions. To come across someone for whom that is not necessarily the case, and who doesn't seem to be affected by the concept of time nearly at all is...well, it's baffling to me. I can't really wrap my mind around it. That part of Daisy's personality is somewhat alien to me. Do I wish I could flutter through life without worrying about keeping track of all of my responsibilities metered out one by one based on the time it would and does take to do them, not worrying about anyone else's interactions with time either? I don't know. I'm, again, not sure I could imagine that. I understand almost everything else there is to understand about Daisy. I know her personality and her mannerisms inside and out, and she knows mine just the same, but her concept (and perception) of time may be the one thing that I never fully understand about that woman.


On that note, I have to finish readying to leave the house. I've already taken care of all of the cat stuff and making sure everything's closed up/locked down, etc, so now I'm just waiting on her to show up. When she does, we'll go. I had to take sinus/pain pills because my allergies are bothering me, and because I have a headache from not only congestion but from forcing myself to stay awake much longer than I was originally expecting to do so.

Anyway. Off I go.