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Mantime World Posting Date: Oct 1 2007 11:02PM Einstein, and you can look this up, famously postulated that time is relative. He used mathematics to show that time, despite the best efforts of Rolex and cuckoos, expands and contracts depending on things like speed and perspective. Albert was thinking specifically of phenomena like travel near the speed of light when he drafted his little theory, so its application to daily life is somewhat limited. Time, however, is still very much a relative concept.
Just find a man and a woman and ask them.
If a man has a two-hour block of time, usually between television shows, it is a significant opportunity to get things done. In two hours, a man can take a shower, get dressed, put gas in the car, drive to a store to purchase a coffee table, purchase the coffee table, order a pizza on his cell phone, and get home in time to mow the front lawn before the pizza arrives. By the time he hands over the tip, he should have time to wash his hands before plunking down on the couch with a remote control and three slices of double-cheese meatlover’s.
To a woman, two hours is far too small of a block of time to even consider shopping for anything, much less a coffee table.
It works the other way too. Let’s say our pizza-eating friend is watching a football game and he has promised his beloved that he will mow the backyard as soon as the game ends. About three hours later, concerned that things seem to be taking a long time for a simple game involving an oblong ball and homoerotic pants, his beloved asks how much time is left. “Two minutes,” says our friend, and his beloved leaves, secure in the knowledge that she will soon hear the sound of a John Deere in action.
Fifty minutes later, the grass is still growing, for it is a well-known fact among men that the game isn’t over until all the time-outs have been called, the post-game interviews are done and the highlights have been analyzed, usually by thick-necked men wearing expensive suits. It’s like a law.
Time, therefore, is completely relative. In my single days, my existence was governed by Mantime, for better and for worse. It was a system where stuff happens quickly or not at all. Pleasant tasks, like eating meat, take up large amounts of time and unpleasant tasks, like cleaning toilets, happen infrequently and at warp speed. These are just a few of the rules of Mantime; I knew them well and lived by them strictly.
Then I married into Womantime and suddenly, I could no longer do my Christmas shopping in forty-six minutes. The time set aside for dinner now includes preparation, conversation and clean-up, when before there was the opening-the-package part and the eating part and usually I could do both of those while accomplishing something else, like practicing my golf swing or rearranging my Star Wars figurines.
Of course, my wife has found herself entangled in Mantime like an unsuspecting fish in a deadly sea anemone. Almost every time we go somewhere, I unwittingly make her wait by the door until we hit the last possible moment of departure – that’s the way Mantime works. Under Womantime, we would have been on the highway fifteen minutes ago. Running on Womantime means anticipating problems and allowing the time to react appropriately. Running on Mantime means leaving no margin for error whatsoever. It’s the closest most of us men get to running through a den of lions wearing meatloaf jock straps. That type of reckless time management is the adrenaline rush that rocks the world of Mantime. Womantime runs instead on chamomile tea. It’s a calmer, gentler and more worried place designed to deliver safety, comfort and well-thought-out purchases.
Marriage, as it turns out, is the best and worst of both worlds and I’m slowly learning that Mantime and Womantime have tangled themselves into the miracle of Marriagetime, and as soon as I figure it out, that will be a whole new column. |
