Time has come today

I've been on this strange kick tonight watching time lapse videos, perhaps because I slept about three hours last night and woke up at the (for me, at least) ungodly hour of 7 a.m.

Since I'm still essentially living a college lifestyle - one filled with late nights and post-noon risings - doing the whole "early to rise" thing always leaves me exhausted but with a sense of fulfillment at having had a full day, and seeing a skyscraper erected before my eyes in 20 seconds or watching 24 hours pass over some pristine lake in a minute's time seemed tonight like a fine way to celebrate that.

While doing this, I also realized (while half-watching Comedy Central, for added effect) that as of mid-March, I will have been at The Gardner News for a grand total of 30 months, or a full 2 1/2 years. That revelation, needless to say, provoked a complex reaction in me - parts astonished, depressed, terrified, liberated - and perhaps in an effort to sort out those disparate emotions I threw myself deeper into YouTube's collection of compressed segments of time in hope of spiritual guidance.

The Web, of course, is home to virtually any and all media that anyone could ever want, and its selection in terms of time lapse video did not disappoint. Here's a pretty solid one of the Northern Lights, which makes for a good starting point:



This one's my favorite, at least in terms of what I found during my ::ahem:: "research." This dude displayed some definite dedication in order to bring aimless internet trolls like myself two minutes worth of entertainment, and for that, I salute him.


(Note: I'm not sure if the music makes the video more or less strange.)

This next one was billed as "powerful," and I'd tend to agree. Really well done, with some cool locations and some real heartbreaking strings to accompany the visuals. Plus, it feels like it should be a promo for "OK Computer," and I can't really turn that down.



I won't keep going on ... I mean, there's thousands of these damned thing on the 'Tube, I'll leave it up to you to keep perusing if you're interested.

So did I find the spiritual guidance I was seeking? Hard to say. Being able to see the illusion of time unveiled in a 60-second digital video clip is pretty anticlimactic in a sense, but the point - the stunning ambiguity of it all - gets across just fine.

The lesson, or the message, of seeing time for what it is can't be truly explained - it resonates on a very basic level, too basic to understand or convey effectively with language or other conscious expression. Chasing it any further than that, I think, simply gets in the way of appreciating it.

My aim tonight is to dream that I win the lottery, buy the Celtics, solve the energy crisis and spend my spare time gallivanting across the globe with supermodels. I also hope to get some quality sleep so I'm not a total zombie come the weekend.

That's my kind of time travel.

godspeed,
dk

p.s.
Check out The Sky in Motion