Time, For a Change

In youth the days are short and the years are long; in old age the years are short and the days long. ~Nikita Ivanovich Panin

And in-between, the days are short and the years are too. ~ Gyrfalc

Time is on my mind a lot these days, because quite frankly, I don't have any, and I don't understand why.  There seems to be some principle of physics - relativity, perhaps - at work here; one which our professors conveniently never mentioned back in school, probably because they were old and didn't have time.  Yes, I get the part about if I'm on a train and I throw a ball and there's an observer on the ground and all that, by why the hell didn't didn't they tell us that as we got older, time would compress in some sort of aging doppler effect?  

For the benefit of society, I have turned my scientific attention to the matter, and have calculated  a new universal constant - feel free to call it "Gyrfalc's Constant" in any article celebrating my achievement - which is the ratio of actual time elapsed to percieved time elapsed as one reaches, er, middle agish.  And that number is... 1.6.   

Allow me to illustrate.  I work with a young couple who recently had a baby boy, their first.  I recall that the baby shower was, seemingly, just a few months ago.  If pressed, if forced to lay down good money, I would have said that their child was maybe 12 months old, tops.  So, the other day the proud father calls me over to admire the latest photo of his son, who is, as it turns out, 19 months old.  And 19 months divided by 12 months is a ratio of 1.6, approximately.   

This is not a singular example; the same time compression seems to pervade everything I do these days.  Come back from lunch at 1:00, work for an hour, and discover that it's 2:36 pm.  Go to a one-hour meeting, and you're in there an hour and a half, although in this case, some sort of dark anti-matter force that emanates from managerial types can reverse the effect and make it feel like three hours.

So, while younger folk are enjoying a full 24 hour day, mine is compressed to a mere 15 hours by the aging doppler effect.  Granted, the scientific jury is out as to whether this effect applies while sleeping, so for the sake of argument, we could say that in a 16 hour waking day, I have 10 usable hours: 8 for work, and 2 for fixing whatever disaster arose while I was away from home.

I'd love to say more, but I gotta run and get the dishes done while I still have time.