time, numbers, units, measurements
.. related: questioning the importance of "monthly"
Yesterday I got an email:
I have been receiving emails like this for maybe twelve years.
Dale S is kind of a folk hero in Calgary. He is famous for approaching women and asking for their names, birthdays, and email addresses. He may also offer to show you some zoo pictures (don’t accept the offer unless you have at least 20 minutes). If you’ve met before, he may recount the date, time, location, and topic of conversation of the previous encounter. If you ask him what he’s been studying recently, he will probably say astronomy or physics. He’s usually on a bicycle and is often wearing a sunhat. He’s a straight shooter, pointedly disinterested in frivolities and conventional social graces.
Despite their abruptness, encounters with Dale S are strokes of good luck. He doesn’t want anything more than some basic information to note on a tattered piece of lined paper. It may violate your stranger danger instinct, but you should help him help you. You will be blessed for many years with occasional emails on numerically significant days of your life. You will not regret it.
It’s interesting to me how much gravity we (I?) attach to units of measurement as they apply to our lives and bodies. My long, fraught history of height- and weight-consciousness is generally associated with specific units; you can only hurt my feelings in pounds. I know what a kilogram is, but in association with a human body it’s totally meaningless.
this movie gave me brain damage ^^
I was a gigantic self-loathing child; everything my body did horrified me. Kids my age were up to my shoulder. Sometimes they would see me from behind and think I was a teacher. Adults would constantly say things like, “I can’t believe how big you are.” They would often enthusiastically and incorrectly predict that I would grow to be over six feet tall. I was terrified of the “6;” imagining my dopey bespectacled head looming over everyone else’s as if on display was more than I could bear.
(I admire and envy tall girls JSYK!!!)
In December I turned thirty, totally under duress. The milestone felt like a condemnation, salting a streak of my own shitty luck and highlighting an atmosphere of political, ecological, and economical chaos (it’s still getting worse???). Everything has gone to shit, and then on top of it all, my sacred twenties are over.
Years are aggressive. They feel palpably shorter as we get older, inexorably attached to cruel hallmarks of aging. Apparently at age 30 years, we begin to lose bone density. Sometimes when signing forms I forget what year it is and write “2021” or something insane like that. I feel the rest of my life collapsing in front of me under the hydraulic, metronomic force of years.
Dale S marks the passage of time less reductively. The emails are reliable, but always unexpected, and at uneven intervals. I look forward to another one in 111 days. My age in days feels more serendipitous than empirical, like I’m in on a magic secret. It’s the same thrill as watching an odometer roll over to a round number. And there are no dogmatic associations with days of life. What onslaught should we expect around day 11,000 aside from normalcy?
Dale’s ritual is such a blessing, I’m so lucky to be a part of it. It’s something I can count on. I hope another Calgary girl who shares this experience might read this and weigh in.
My parents bought me the CD with this song for Christmas whenever it came out (2006?).
the music video is….different than I remember (the guy with the stereo on his shoulder i literally cannot lmao) but my love for this song will never die.
Anyways that’s it for right now.