getting songs stuck in your head on a Sunday afternoon (time is a scam)

we had a musical review at the theatre where i work over the weekend, and between all the singing and dancing and quick changes and repetition, i managed to get songs stuck in my head running the gamut from George Gershwin to the Four Tops:



it's true, but this is beside the point.

the point is that i talked with my dad last night, and somehow the conversation worked itself around to time – or, more precisely, our perception of its passing. our question was simple enough, and one i've asked myself innumerable times before:

why does time pass more quickly the older we get?

possible answers, with contexts:

1) in high school, my roommate and i tackled this very question. he believed that it was simply a matter of mathematics. to a five-year-old, one year represents 20% of his entire existence, whereas to twenty-year-old this is only 5% of her existence. by the time one reaches fifty, a year is a measly 2% of one's time on the planet, and this trend continues until the moment of death, at which point the neatly algebraic construction of this theory presumably breaks down. perhaps unsurprisingly, this old roommate is currently finishing his doctorate at MIT.

2) last night, my dad suggested that the novelty of youth is responsible for this phenomenon. he said that, as a child, everything is new and exciting, which leads him or her to tremendous anticipation of future events. as one gains life experience this anticipation is tempered somewhat because we become familiar with the baffling complexities of life and establish routines that shelter us from the onslaught of newness. i had never even considered this idea before, and thoughts like these are one of the reasons i enjoy talking to my dad so much.


possible conclusions, without context:

every clock i know is a degenerate liar. time cannot be measured in hours or minutes or days or weeks, and these arbitrary units are best understood as a side effect of the mind's fracturing of this singular moment into past, present, and future.

in some ways, this evokes the über-gods of India, with Brahma (the creator) indicating past-ness, Vishnu (the sustainer) giving rise to the present, and Shiva (the destroyer) representing the future. for the Occidental-minded reader, these same ideas could be attributed respectively to the Father, the Holy Ghost, and to the Son as Messiah.

regardless of which trinity one prefers, the fact remains:

Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory"

time is a scam.