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Ding Dongs, daydreams and advent of exams

I survey the coffeehouse with impotent impatience. The 28 minutes before my exam are rapidly vanishing like the days before my graduation. My foot taps the wooden floor, mocking me with the lost time it marks. The blood that rushes down my leg to move those muscles boils like the coffee in the polystyrene cup in my right hand. The excess java splashes over the too-full brim and slips through my fingers. There is too much here for one cup.

I think Kerckhoff coffeehouse has a way of laughing at you when you're stressed out. Maybe it's the music, the way it says: Don't you wish you were somewhere else? Or maybe it's the fact that you can never find a seat. Whatever it is, I am feeling it.

This could be the last time I'll actually reckon for a seat at Kerckhoff. Every time I do something this quarter, I think it'll be the last time I do blank at UCLA. I get this pervading sense of uncertainty mixed with a sentimental relief that colors everything I do. Like stress about a midterm. Twenty-three minutes, I haven't cracked a book and I'm standing here with a cup of rapidly chilling coffee. The room chuckles.

I see a seat open up near the window and rush to it casually, as if I am the flight attendant calmly walking up the aisle of a flaming DC-10 telling passengers to get into crash position.

I open my notes and stare. It's all a big blur. I know the words are there but I can't seem to focus my head on them. There are too many things to do now and I can feel the stress ball in my stomach. It's the same with graduation. I'm so close to it I can't even grasp its shape or nature. Graduating is the kind of thing you look forward to for so long you don't notice it getting any closer until it's actually here. Like this test. Why is it that time seems so elusive except when the shit is going down? Why do I feel time bearing down on me so hard? I want to stand up and yell something like, "Ai-Ai-Ai-Lippy-Lu-Lippy-Lu!!!" That would make me feel better, but even that fantasy doesn't linger long ­ it's forced out of my frontal lobe because the clock is ticking.

How often do we feel time as a positive presence in our lives? It seems like time is always in short supply. Sometimes I think if only I didn't have to sleep, I could really do everything I want. Thinking of time as days, hours and minutes makes me feel like I'm constantly losing it, like I can never catch up. Why is this idea so stuck in my psyche?

Isn't time just a human construct, a way to organize our universe? Watches and clocks are inventions just the same, artifacts of this mechanical time. Minutes and seconds replaced the passage of the sun through the sky, days and months eclipsed the lunar cycle. Natural time was replaced by Timex, Rolex and Casio. And here's the good part: minutes and seconds don't really exist! We invented them!

In this rigid conception, when can our day slow down to the point where we can sit on the couch in front of Ricki Lake with a big can of Olympia? When can it speed up with the excitement of evading the Westwood parking police while our friends go to the ATM?

I think my problems in the coffeehouse began at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when someone figured out that time is money and we really made the jump to light speed. And like money, we began counting time as if we were all auditioning for the starring role in a Dickens Christmas play. This pernicious concept has since run amuck through history like a snowball down the side of Mount Everest. We've constructed time to be rigid, when in actuality it's flexible. The problem comes when we try to fit our lives into neat little blocks of time, when in fact they're filled with races and siestas, doldrums and daydreams.

It is only when we lose all sense of time that life is really experienced. That's why we say things like: "Time flies when you're having fun" or "I lost all track of time." Or why is it that when something is timeless it becomes valuable? A timeless book or LP (Neil Diamond's Hot August Nights for example), a timeless place or person? Good times transcend the counting.

Like that afternoon I spent lying on the grass with Maybell. What may have been three hours to someone else was to me an infinite moment where I did not waste time, spend time or kill it. Time lost its grip on us entirely and we had lazy fun. We got itchy and watched squirrels mate. Which brings me to my point. When I think about good times, it's not, "Wow, I had a good time for three hours yesterday!" That is because good times are not measured on the clock, but by the depth of the experience.

So why do people say there is never enough time? Physics makes it impossible to squeeze any more hours into the day (unless we find a way to alter the rotational velocity of this cosmic dirt clod). What we really need is a new perspective, not new science. How do we use the time we have toward the ends we desire most? Didn't Tycho Brahe have the same number of hours in his day as he charted the stars? (That's a lot of math.) Didn't Roald Dahl have the same number of days in his week when he wrote "James and the Giant Peach?" How did they experience time? And do we see it in the same way?

To change your ideas about time, change your perspective. Do expected things at unexpected times. Eat breakfast cereal (preferably Cap'n Crunch) really late at night. Go to school on a Saturday and just hang (see how it feels to be there without having to be anywhere). Have sex in the middle of the day. Swim at night (clothing optional). Most of all, sleep in. These are things that transcend minutes and seconds. Time is not so much about the amount we have, but how well we use it.

Speaking of using time, this Friday is the big one: my 25th birthday. And maybe that's the reason I've got my head wrapped around this time idea with the hormonal abandon of a Duran Duran groupie. Isn't it all downhill from here? Shouldn't I be whining about the evaporation of my misspent youth? Isn't 25 too old to rock? I'm not so sure. I think getting old is all in your point of view. Time is on my side because I'm not counting the minutes and seconds. Time is really lifetime: flexible, bendable and measured in experience.

So while I'm sucking on hot dogs with extra mustard, taking cuts in the line for the keg and blowing out the candles on my 25 Hostess Ding Dongs, I'll be thinking that this is a good time, that I have no idea what time it is.

* * *

Two minutes left until the exam. I cram everything back into my bag, notes, napkins and big ideas about the little seconds that slip by. I am overcome by a weird sense of calm. Maybe it's like a resolution about what is important in life. I may fail this test. I may stress on graduating, but time is on my side.

Kaizen is a senior majoring in ethnomusicology. His columns appear on alternate Mondays. Send birthday wishes via e-mail to LSMFT0 (that's a zero). @ AOL. com.

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