Let's Do the Time Warp Again

A friend of mine just sent me this plaintive cry from a seminary student. It reminded me of when I was in Bible college, and the theory of relativity took on new meaning as one second in a certain prof's class lasted 1,527 times longer than an equal amount of time talking to my fiancé.

"I’ve recently fallen into a paradoxical blip in the time-space continuum. That is, to me, each day lasts for one week (7 days; 168 hours; 10,080 minutes; 604,800 seconds) while each week is as short as a single day (24 hours; 1440 minutes; 86,400 seconds). Wrap your firing synapses around that one. Believe me; I’m just as bewildered as you are. As far as I can tell, for the rest of humanity, time crawls by second-by-second, minute-by-minute, hour-by hour, and so on. For me, however, the past two months—I mean years, no, minutes—have been the slowest, fastest months I’ve ever encountered. Imagine: in the same amount of time (I struggle to use that term with a straight face) it takes the earth to make one 360° rotation, I’ve aged a full week. Yet, after the same earth has completed the same 360° rotation seven times, I’ve only experienced one 24-hour period. At this rate, I will have aged approximately sixty years in the next ten; but I won’t celebrate my 24th birthday until the year 2014, 25th until 2021, and so on. This doesn’t compute.With all of my extra free time (that I keep running out of) I have been trying to pinpoint the exact moment this paradox began. I ate some stale cheese a while back. I knew it wasn’t healthy, but extreme hunger (just like extreme boredom, lust, fatigue, obsession, and temperatures) cause one to do things outside of one’s character. I figured the worst that would happen to me is an upset stomach, a doctor’s visit, or a stomach pump—nothing too serious. How was I to know that some green cheese was would cause a catastrophic lapse in time? I doubt that was the cause."