The Time/Money paradox

Time is the most valuable thing there can be, in this world or any other. It's the most exhaustible resource that exists. It is priceless. You can never buy more time.

Time is the only thing we come into this world with. We can waste it, barter it, or use it to build and grow. It's the thing of great value that we can offer in this world before we have anything else. I'll trade my time for knowledge, and then, when I've added that knowledge to some more time, I can get a job out of the deal.

Then I can add that job and my knowledge to yet more time, and get money out of it. Then that money, with some more time, may someday buy me a home.

You'd think that by this point, I'd be exhausted. It's surprising how much of our time we like to keep for ourselves, to hoard away. It is, after all, our most precious resource.

What is the best was to spend this precious, priceless thing? Some must be given to get an education, to make money, to eat and to live. Where might the precious left-overs be spent, that they might not be wasted? Should we get more sleep, or while the time away in fantasy, or invest it in our television?

Perhaps. Enjoying something brought to you by someone else's well spent time is a worthy expenditure, is it not? I'm fairly certain that Van Gogh's Starry Night took much time. Just as I'm certain that Joss Wheden took time when he came up with his brilliant shows, and every great author took hours and days and months, and sometimes years to give us their glorious fantasies.

We could enjoy theirs, or do the same with our own. Of course, one of the best ways to spend something so valuable is with someone we value. I will give my time to my family, a significant other someday, my children, in the far future.

Take the time to create, to grow, to love. Surely it's worth it.

I dreamed a dream in times gone by...

Dreams have always been a larger part of my life than they really ought to be. At least that's how it seems. Perhaps everyone's fantasy life is as active as mine. But I doubt it.

When I was a little girl, no one liked me. I wasn't the made-fun of underdog with one best friend who would stand behind me no matter what. No one would have rooted for me if they made a movie about my elementary years. I was stupid. Not intellectually (I was actually a very bright student) but socially.

Because of my painfully obvious lack of real friends or play mates, I made my own. I would create worlds inside my head and have fantastic adventures with a boy I thought up. He started off resembling a boy I had a bit of a crush on in my class. Each time there was a new crush, the boy I'd made inside my head would change a little. Essentially he grew up with me.

He started out blonde and blue eyed, just like that boy in the first grade. In the sixth grade he got brown hair and a name. I shan't tell you the name since it was sort of like the name of my middle school crush (and I'd have to kill you the moment you knew). But he also got very tall, because I had more than just one crush that first year of middle school.

Eventually he ended up tall, dark and handsome, like most grown girls' fantasies. But I doubt every girl's dream man grew from her imaginary friend. Then again, maybe I'm wrong and that's how it always works. He's intelligent, attractive and strong , but not overly buff (I'm sorry gentlemen, but wrestlers and body builders are some of the ugliest creatures to have walked this earth, in my opinion).

We still have fantastic adventures. Of course now there are other friends in my imaginary world, gal pals, suitors I've denied (it's okay, I've dreamed them up the perfect soul mates), and even an imaginary family full of siblings and ridiculous uncles and grand parents and great grand parents that never manage to age.

But there are friends outside of the realm of the imagined now. I have real friends. We don't have adventures nearly so great as the ones inside my head, but they're worth much more, the little, mild adventures that we do have, because they are real. I worry that I should have out-grown my fantasy world.

I suppose this dream addiction has more merit than I've let on. I am a fantastic writer. I think up strange and original stories and my characters are well developed, like the people in my dreams. How can I forsake my dreaming when such beautiful worlds as the ones in my head have yet to be put to paper?

And I haven't even told you about the dreams I dream at night.

Ah, the good old Dark Ages...

As I sat through a droll college algebra class in the dark hours of the early morning I drifted in and out of the edge of consciousness. In one of my weaker, conscious moments, I heard my instructor spit out another one of those math teacher classics, a "real life" application.

Any math teacher worth his salt has used one. It must be some secret cardinal rule that every math instructor should come up with ridiculous, far fetched ways for his students to apply what they learn in the class room in real life. Sometimes an exponential something or another equation can help you to find out what rate your coffee cools at in a cold room. That's ridiculous. Drink it while it's hot. That's all you need to know.

Really, there's hundreds of applicable but ridiculous and time consuming uses for math for the not-mathematically-motivated people of the world, like myself. I'm going to college for a fine arts degree and an english degree. I don't need a whole lot of math. I think the highest level of math required for a college student in a non-scientific degree should be geometry and algebra 2.

For some reason or another, the application my teacher told us in my brief moment of consciousness struck me as particularly funny. We could use what we were learning today to find the trajectory if we fired a missile. If I fired a missile? Sure, it happens all the time! I smiled a little bit, into the face of this cruel irony. Why in all of God's green earth would I be allowed to or even want to fire a missile?

The most I'm going to use the little math I need to know is to budget my paycheck in order to have enough for groceries after I pay my bills. And that budget is laughably small (being a starving artist and all). I certainly don't need higher math to figure it out.

Math may be behind the whole of the physical universe. I will still regard it as magic, and the mathe-magicians should be glad we don't still burn them at the stake, like they did in the good old dark ages.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past...

Time is an illusive thing. Now you have it. Now it's gone. They say that time is money. I think they're right.

What has greater value than time? Think about it. What are the most precious moments and memories of our lives? The time spent with the ones we love. Our life's work, which we spend hours, days, months or maybe years on, be it for a functional project, or just to show it off and be proud that we did it. The precious items we hold dear? If it is an heirloom, then it shows the time that someone else spent earning it, just to end up giving it to you. If it's something special, made by your own hand or purchased from a store, it is by your own time well spent that it is yours.

Someday in the future, when I'm a rich genius, I'll invent some funky gadget that can give one person's time to someone else. Imagine what some people would pay for a few extra hours of time! I could charge a hundred bucks an hour and take just forty percent for myself, and sixty for the man who has time to spare. While other people's work days drag by like a snail chained to a rock crossing a tar pit, it would be over instantly for the employee. He'd arrive at nine in the morning, bottle up eight hours or so, and walk right back out only what seemed to him like five minutes later, at five. Side affects may include but are not limited to longer life span for employees and slightly accelerated aging for buyers. (obviously there are some flaws, but then again they'd only be shortening their life spans by eight hours at a time)

Actually, maybe it'd be funner to be an employee, rather than own the business. Then my career wouldn't wear away at my life until it killed me, as so many other people's careers do to them. I would never be tired after work ever again. Of course at times I might find myself wishing I could have some of my time back... but then again I'd barely have to work at all, considering what time probably sells for.

Time is money. It's true! But it is part of everything else, too. It's what we buy and sell, it's who we love, it's what we do.

Nothing is worth anything if it doesn't take time.