Time to make the bagels
And other varieties of time
As I wrote about before, I finally gave up on finding good bagels in our corner of the world and started making my own. The recipe makes a dozen bagels. Assuming my husband and I both eat one each morning, they last six days. My husband sometimes only has half a bagel, which means we can stretch to seven days sometimes. Nonetheless, I always feel surprised to look in the freezer and find there’s only one bagel left, signaling it’s time, yet again, to make the bagels. How can that be? Didn’t I make the bagels just yesterday? And now I have to make them again?
It all made me think of that commercial from the 1980s with the beleaguered man mumbling, “Time to make the donuts.” Until I looked the commercial up, I couldn’t remember what product the commercial was for. Dunkin Donuts made sense, but was watching a man tortured by the repetitiveness of his job supposed to make me want to eat their donuts? Yes, apparently it was. The point was the freshness and not the torturous nature of making donuts over and over again. Okay. Couldn’t they have made it look like he liked making the donuts or we were all just more honest about how much we hated our jobs back then?
Like the man in the commercial, the recurring task of making the bagels sometimes feel like drudgery. I don’t have to make the bagels. No one’s making me. It’s not my job. But when I don’t have a bagel, figuring out what to make for breakfast becomes a whole complicated thing, often involving many dishes. I could I fry an egg, but flipping it for over-easy is so fraught. The yolk breaks and my whole day is ruined.
So I make the bagels, a two-day process that seems to make time contract. I am always making the bagels. Time passes too quickly between each batch.
Of course, I try to remind myself that I’ve only got so many times to make bagels left in my life. Like everything, it’s a finite endeavor. That’s just how it goes, so I might as well enjoy it. That’s easier some days than other. But mostly, bagel time got me thinking about other varieties of time and how they move.
Healing time
Is this the slowest time by far? Several people in my life are currently recovering from knee replacement surgeries. Another friend hurt her wrist. I can feel from all of them a deep impatience—why isn’t this going faster? Why isn’t the pain gone yet? Why aren’t I better?
Healing always takes longer than we think it should. Pain warps time, pinning you in the present moment in all its unpleasantness. Time slows down when you’re wondering, will this ever end? Will it ever be better?
Nothing about having my tooth removed really hurt that much. My mouth was never terribly swollen. But it seemed to take so long for all the swelling to go away. It took so long not to feel like the inside of my cheek was always brushing against the sharp edges of the gap in my teeth in an unpleasant way. I’d resigned myself to maybe just living with that grating feeling forever. I gave up. And then one day, it went away. It wasn’t there. No fanfare. Just a fading away. You look up one day and you’re better. The moment passes and we don’t even see it.
My favorite tarot practitioner, Lindsay Mack, understands The Moon card to be all about our impatience with healing. When we draw The Moon, it’s telling us to be patient. It’s telling us to surrender to the space that is necessary for healing. It will take the time it will take. Accept that. But, wow, that’s such a hard thing to do. To surrender to the sacred time that healing takes.
Grading time
Also some of the slowest time on the fucking planet. I have no idea why. Because it’s so unpleasant? I mean, it doesn’t literally hurt to grade, but sometimes it feels that way. Part of my grading time includes stopping after each paper to count how many more are left, which obviously slows me down.
I’ve tried to create assignments that make this process more pleasant. Sometimes it works. When I do un-essay assignments, I get YouTube videos and cartoons and poems and that is less odious. I have to confess, it’s still not what I’d like to be doing.
Part of what makes grading so unpleasant is the emotional labor involved. When I get the paper that’s been written by AI, I am pissed off. When a good student clearly dials it in with their final, I’m a little disappointed.
Obviously, students mostly don’t like writing the papers any more than I like grading them. Which begs the question, why are we doing this if it’s making all of us miserable? I’m not sure. I do a modified version of un-grading in my classes, which means I’m mostly giving them a 1 or a 0. That helps. The most odious part of grading is trying to explain to a student the difference between an A and an A-. I mean, is there a difference? And if there is, who even cares? Grading is the ultimate example of Goodhart’s Law—a measure that has become a target. Maybe we all hate grading so much because we know how very stupid it is.
Massage time
If you want to make time move at light speed, get a good massage. Or cranio-sacral therapy. Or a pedicure. If it’s very, very enjoyable, it goes entirely too fast. A 60-minute massage is never enough. So then I book a 90-minute massage, but it flies by, too. Last week, I was lying on the table getting cranio-sacral therapy. I had a lavender cloth on my face, which smelled delicious. It was quiet and dark. My friend was moving around the room, doing what she does. I wanted to lie on the table forever, but then it was over way too soon.
Vacation/break time
See massage time. Break time specifically, as in the breaks in the academic calendar, feel like they are slipping through your fingers as soon as they begin. Well, at first you feel like you’ve jumped off a speeding train and you’re tumbling along the hard ground at fifty-five miles per hour. Then by the time that sensation ends, the break is almost over.
Reading time
When I’m reading a good book, time doesn’t stop. It doesn’t speed up. It disappears altogether. This is beautiful. I guess it’s what people describe as flow state. I like to think of it as a portal to another world opening up and me stepping through.
For the longest time, I thought I never really entered a flow state. I guess it happens when I’m writing every now and then. But not quite the way it does when I’m reading. Give me a good book (or two or three) and I can pass the whole day inside those pages and not even notice. Reading time is the best time because it ceases to be time at all. It feels like I have stepped off the stop and start, slow and fast treadmill. I have escaped time altogether.
I’d love to hear what varieties of time you’ve all experienced. What speeds time up? What slows it down? What allows you to step outside of time altogether?
Hey, check out this awesome interview at David J. Brown’s blog, More To Come, all about my piece in the Playing Authors Anthology from Old Iron Press. Perfect present for the bookish/literary person in your life!
Also, Indiana folks, I’ll be at the amazing Viewpoint Books in Columbus, Indiana, on Sunday, December 17th, from 1-4, for Cider Sunday. Come see me and these other great children’s authors.
Looking for a gift for the sporty, feminist, queer people in your lives? I have some ideas!
I’ve noticed that it takes much longer to go somewhere than to come back from said place. Bizarro I think, but true just about every time.
Robyn, thanks for this great piece on time. I, too, love to get a massage and the 90-minutes just flies by! Funny how that works. Also, many, many thanks for linking to our interview on "More to Come" - it was a treat to talk with you about your story in "Playing Authors."