feste_sylvain

Today, at approximately 2:40pm (or possibly earlier), my watch battery ran down. It may have run down earlier, because it lurched forward for a few minutes some time later, then stopped again, then lurched forward again, but hasn't since.

I believe that I've looked at my wrist about thirty-seven times since then. And the last fourteen of those were after I took my watch off.

At the 3pm meeting (which I almost missed), I mentioned that my watch had stalled, and this immediately kicked off a generational observation: virtually nobody under 30 wears a watch at work. "I just look at my phone."

I almost snarked "I'm sorry your life is so bland that you never travel out of cell range", but instead I decided to mull my mortality, and view yet another anachronism (irony!), another facet of everyday life which was fading into irrelevance.

I posted something to that effect to Facebook, where I was suddenly inundated with "Oh yeah, I never wear a watch" from all sorts of people. It made me wonder whether I should even bother replacing the watch battery. I've been thinking about upgrading my cell phone this year to get the internet in my pocket; is this the time to join this century?

"Fuck 'em," summarized tamidon. "You like your watch."

And it's true. I do.

[ETA:] I do not have an internal sense of time. Time flies when I'm having fun, or obsessing about some piece of software, or reading a good book, or dreaming. One reason why I like wearing a watch is that, when I wake up, I can quickly tell whether I should get up or whether I can go back to sleep, without retrieving my glasses. But far too frequently, I'll get a call at work from tamidon, and it's because I got into something at work and it's more than an hour later than I thought it was.

I wear two gold rings, a sapphire in my right ear, a silver pentacle necklace, and a Fossil steel watch.

My left arm feels unbalanced without it.

It'll be back. And I'm back already.