15 May 2010

time

Last fall, I finally destroyed my watch. I destroyed it by slamming it against the knob on a door, if you must know, and the crystal, which I'm sure was not a real crystal, shattered. It had actually been cracked since about three weeks after I bought it, two years earlier, and it had periodically gotten more cracked when I slammed it against various things. (Clumsy is a trait of mine.) This was just the final shattering. It broke into a whole lot of hazardous little slivers of glass, which I of course put into a ziploc bag and carried around for weeks in a pocket of my bag, until the little slivers of glass started to work their way out of the ziploc and into the bottom of the pocket and every time I stuck my hand in there I got stabbed.

I finally took the ziploc out of my bag and put it, uh, on the counter, where it remains to this day, I think. I thought vaguely about buying a new watch, and I looked at a couple of stores when I was in the mall anyway, but then I decided to try going watch-less. I could be one of those people who doesn't care what time it is! I could be one of those carefree people!

Unfortunately, you either are one of those people or you aren't. I get along fine without a watch most of the time, but only because I check my phone incessantly for the time. It worked, for a while, but I ran through the battery on my phone a whole lot faster. And then I started traveling: to Vietnam, to Michigan, to Honduras. And, I don't know about anyone else, but I find being on a plane with no idea how long you have been flying is just utterly infuriating. I started leaving my phone on, in airplane mode.

And yeah, I know, they tell you that airplane mode is not good enough and it has to be all the way off until you are over 10,000 feet and blah, blah, blah, but I have flown in Africa, where pilots are texting while they fly and where mobile phones routinely ring and are answered as you are lifting off, so I wasn't that worried about airplane mode. Anyway, if you turn your phone all the way off and then turn it back on in airplane mode, it has no idea what time it is. It isn't communicating with whatever magical thing it communicates with to tell you the time, because the entire point of airplane mode is that your phone will not communicate with anything so that it does not "interfere with airplane navigation systems." The only way the phone will continue to know the time is if you leave it on. So, YES, I broke the FAA rules. And my planes were fine.

But, at last, one day, a week and a half ago, my coworker mentioned that she has seen lots of nice watches at M@cy's, and I went over there on my lunch break. I came within dangerous seconds of buying a $200 Citizen watch (because they last! forever!) and then pulled myself back from the brink and had the guy point me to the cheaper watches (he sort sniffed as he directed me to "Fashion Watches" - so much for lack of snobbery at stores in Gone West, huh?).

In Fashion Watches, I finally found a watch that meets all of my exacting criteria:
  1. Silver and only silver band (I do not like the silver/gold combination).
  2. No fake bling. Ugh.
  3. No white face. I prefer blue, silver, or black.
  4. A round face.
  5. Not too small and wimpy.
I bought the watch (this particular one has a black face, and I love it)* and part of the thought in the back of my mind was that I would soon have to fly to Michigan, again, for my Oma's funeral.

This morning, my momma called me at 5 am to tell me that my Oma died. (The journalist types call that burying the lead. Seven paragraphs in.) Tonight, I am getting on a flight to Michigan. I've thought a lot of things in the hours since five am, but one of them is that I have been getting ready for this for a while, we all knew it was coming, and that buying the watch for the flight home was one way that I was preparing myself. It's impossible to be prepared. But at least, when I fly overnight to Detroit, unable to sleep on a flight taking me home to my family, I won't have to wonder how much longer? How much longer?

I will never make it as a watchless person, and I've accepted that. I like to know what time it is. It grounds me. And having a watch saves me a whole lot of cell phone battery.

* A friend of a friend said, as I was showing my friend the watch the day I bought it, "That is the watch version of a boring executive in the Midwest." Apparently my idea of classic is another person's idea of boring. He can have the obnoxious fake bling, then, on his watch.

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