Cup O’ Joe: Time is on my side

Time. There is quite possibly no other word in the English language that has so many different uses and meanings. Look it up in Webster’s Dictionary, and you will see an amazing description featuring no less than 14 different possible explanations for what time is.
Time is a relative thing. For some, it is something we never have enough of or it passes way too quickly. For others, time never seems to go by fast enough. Others still like to kill time by doing absolutely nothing.
    Personally, I’m in all three camps. I never seem to have enough time to get all of the work I need to get done at the newspaper. At home, there is never enough time to get to all the things done on my “honey do” chore list.
While sitting at some school board or town council meetings, time can occasionally be at a standstill for me. And I never seem to have enough free time or family time for all the fun time activities that we would like to do as a family.
I also have no trouble killing time by playing video games, watching a movie or enjoying naptime. This is not to be confused with wasting time, because that infers you are not doing someting productive.
Sometimes, people have too much time on their hands, which can only lead to mischief.
Time plays a large role in the jobs we perform on a daily basis. There are time cards, time sheets and time clocks in many businesses. Time is also how we get paid, whether it be straight time, overtime, double time or time-and-a half.
There are time capsules, time bombs, time warps and time machines. Time stamps can be found on photographs and videos so we can look back at them to remember what time it was when they were shot.
Only in sports are we able to stop time through the use of timeouts. We can, however, divide time through the use of time-share vacation properties.
We have time zones so that a football game at 1 p.m. on the East Coast can be aired at 10 a.m. on the West Coast. How strange would it be to turn on the Patriots game at 10 a.m. on Sunday? I suppose it would give some people an excuse to get out of church time.
There are time-released medications in our medicine cabinets to last 24 hours, because apparently it is too time consuming to take a pill every four hours.
We have time-honored traditions of celebrating the Fourth of July with parades and fireworks.
In our household, we have a number of time rules. There’s television time; homework time; time to take out the recycling/garbage; and time to go to bed of course. My wife, Charity, is particularly fond of using time as a measure of how long our children have to get out of bed, get in to bed, brush their teeth or finish their meals.
“You have two seconds to (fill in the blank for whatever it is the children are supposed to be doing),” is a phrase that commonly echoes through our house. Why exactly my wife settled on two seconds and not something more manageable like 10 seconds is a mystery to me. I mean who really can get anything accomplished in two seconds?
Many use the “five second” rule for when it comes to dropping food on the floor because apparently germs and dirt are incapable of attaching themselves to food items in less than five seconds.
And now, I am out of time finishing this column.
Joseph Cyr is a staff writer for the Houlton Pioneer Times. He can be reached at pioneertimes@nepublish.com or 532-2281.