Molly's diary: _____________ **if this file appears cut off on the right hand side, try setting your fonts "smaller" in your browser preferences** _____________________________________ I stared through the glass like an expectant parent at the window of a hospital's nursery. The Alpha Omega Fine Watches Store & Museum in Harvard Square proudly displays its new creations in glass cases; each perfect wristwatch lay nestled in tissue and resting comfortably on velvet shelves. I moved cautiously toward the window where the Swatch watches winked and blinked. These watches were markedly bigger and more colorful than the other timepieces, and promised to be full of noise and light. I stole away, tiptoeing past other prospective watch wearers. My delivery date was still a few days away. The Swatch® .beat Aluminium watch arrived on my doorstep in Cambridge, Massachusetts, placed there by a stork of the DHL Worldwide Express delivery service. Tearing away the wrappings of cardboard and bubbles, I exposed my watch, lying enclosed in a clear plastic basinet. I massaged the plastic, fumbling over four blue plastic tabs that when pinched gently released my watch from its container. My watch was gargantuan, black strap with aluminum casing, carbon band, bulbous black buttons, and an aluminum buckle. When I pressed the baby button at the watchcase's bottom, the face lit up, glowing blue and moving animatedly. I put it carefully back into its basinet, and carried it around protected for the new few days, taking it out once in a while to trumpet its size and boisterousness, satisfying the curiosity of my family and friends. One friend thought it was a cellular phone, which tickled the both of us, for I was no more frequently seen with a cell phone than I was normally spotted wearing a watch. Before this, I had always bragged about my freedom from the constraints and responsibility of a watch. Now I discarded the basinet casing, and boldly strapped the watch to my wrist. Because the watch was so huge, I knew I would not forget that I was wearing it, and my left wrist muscle would soon grow strong from the effort of bearing its weight. As a new mother must be mindful of her baby strapped to her back in a Snugli, I must be aware of my watch's presence on my wrist. For ten days, I would track my life with this new watch guiding my every move. This watch told time not just in seconds but also in what Swatch innovators called "beats." And the beating of my watch would change my entire understanding of time. In Brisbane, Australia, another new watch parent opened his own package, sent to him as it had been sent to me, from the headquarters of Swatch in Biel, Switzerland. Aussie Bill Collins is a metric time specialist with whom I began an email correspondence over a year ago when I found his website on metric time; an idea which I had likewise pondered: What would happen if we lived with 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, and 100 seconds in a minute? We decided to try it somehow, and so Bill and I set about finding someone to make us watches that could display this new timescale. Our research led us to discover that Swatch makes a watch that keeps alternative time. Bruno Grande, Director of Internet Time at Swatch endorsed us, and so we were each gifted with our new timekeepers. www.swatch.com greets the web surfer with a wave of multimedia declaring "Good morning, Earthlings." The .beat alu pages are geared toward the space age, and it occurs to me now that my watch's basinet was supposed to resemble a time capsule - very clever. Swatch has created a new universal time. There are no time zones or geographical borders to consider. Their slogan: "One world, one time." Here's how it works: 24 hours of a day are divided into 1000 beats: 1 beat equals 1 minute 26.4 seconds. Internet time is displayed by @ and three digits, which range from @000 to @999. The Internet day starts at midnight in Biel, Switzerland, the home of Swatch, during Central European Wintertime. If you happened to be out for a stroll along Jakob-Staempfli Street in Biel, you would see a meridian on the side of the Swatch International Headquarters building. This is the mark of Biel Mean Time, which is an alternate to Greenwich Mean Time. The meridian was inaugurated on October 23, 1998, and, if happened to be midnight at the precise moment of the official unveiling, then the time would have been @000 Swatch beats. ******************** So, I'm living on beat time now, with the biggest watch in the world strapped to my wrist. At @000 Swatch beats, it was midnight - 12am on Wednesday, September 13, 2000 in Biel, Switzerland. I began the experiment on Tuesday night, September 12, 2000 at 7pm U.S. Eastern Standard Time (but also at @000 Swatch beats), while Bill, who is 14 hours ahead of me, began on Wednesday morning, September 13, 2000 at 9am Queensland Standard Time (but also at @000 Swatch beats). Now Bill and I are indeed united: one world, one time. I know approximately what standard time is, because when I started this @000 was 7pm; at @250 it is 1am; at @500 it is 7am; at @750 it is 1pm; and then after @999 it rolls over to 7pm again - one full universal day. Last night I went to sleep at @188 and woke up this morning at @523. I turned off or hid all the clocks in my house, and I have decided not to listen to the radio or watch television because I don't want to know what the standard time is if it can be prevented. This is a paradox - here I am, living on the cutting edge of technology with a new time system, yet it may as well be 150 years ago - I have to get my news from newspapers; not from radio, television, or the Internet, because they all constantly tell me what time it is: "At the tone, the time will be exactly eleven o'clock" or "It's coming up on two o'clock, and So-and-So will be here for the next three hours playing reggae - Jah, Mon - taking us all the way to So-and-So who will bring us "Live at Five," and traffic reports every 20 minutes." It is interesting to note that the wired media keeps us all such slaves to our clocks. ******************** This is the tiniest bit insane. My answering machine is jumbled - my sister scrambled the time so that I won't know exactly when someone has left me a message, since this would give away standard time. A two-millimeter strip of correction tape covers the clock in the lower right hand corner of my laptop screen. When I check email every few hours, I have to scroll quickly down each message so I don't see what time the message was sent, and I concealed the column that also reminds me the time it was received to my inbox. Already I've "cheated:" a mere two hours after the experiment began, I walked into the kitchen and saw 9:26 glowing red on the microwave oven's LCD. It is now blanketed by white paper, as is the clock in my living room. Later, when I get in my Subaru to drive to the Cambridge Public Library, I'll have to obscure the car's digital display, too. Why am I doing this? Because Bill and I decided that we would keep track of time using Swatch Beats for ten universal days - a period of time substantial enough to learn to think only in terms of Beats. First we would naturally be converting each Beat time to standard time in our heads, but hopefully by the end of ten days we would be able to mentally replace standard time with Beat time. During day two I discovered something quite unusual - the days start at night - at @000 it is 7pm. But is this really unusual? I have always thought it strange that the clock day begins at 12am, in the dead of the night. It used to begin at noon, until the International Meridian Conference convened in Washington D.C. in 1884. In addition to adopting the Greenwich Meridian as a standard time measure, delegates from twenty-seven nations refined the official universal day so that it would begin at midnight. Tonight (just before the new day "dawned"), I went to watch my sister's adult league soccer semi-final and final games. I knew her first game started at 6:30pm, so I tried to get there around @975, since I knew @000 was 7pm. I knew her games lasted for fifty minutes. I knew they played a twenty-five-minute half, broke for a few minutes, and then played the second half. I knew that if they emerged victorious, there would be a one-hour break between that game and the final match. In short, I knew too much. I knew what time it was in standard time for over three standard hours, particularly with this knowledge and because these athletes played without their watches. A plethora of sport watches kept me company on the sidelines. As soon as I noticed them, I set them facedown, but as soon as players caught new wind, they reached for the time, turning the faces over to see how much more oxygen they would need to finish the game. During those times, I touched my own watch, and turned the Swatch face blue hoping to be blinded by the Beats and trying to ignore the excited blather: "We still have ten minutes!" or "Come on, come on, we only have to hold on for two more minutes!" It was only after the games, when we all crowded into the neighborhood bar for a few celebratory beers and to relive championship moments, that I could again lose track of standard time, and heed only the Beats of my own timepiece. Strange to note that no one else consulted their watches for most of the rest of the night, but at those moments when they seemed to remember to do so, a look of seriousness and sometimes dread crossed their faces. Several barflys, looking elsewhere for conversation, spied me looking at my watch. "Hey Turbo Time Girl!" one guy bellowed, "What's that on your wrist, a wonder woman activate button? That thing is HUUUUGE!" This was no superhero toy, I explained; it was a watch that tells time differently. Some folks wanted me to tell them more about it, some issued challenges to what I was saying, and others just wanted to play with my watch. I now understood why Swatch had made it so large - it was most certainly a hot topic and drew attention as surely as if I had been wearing a dress of hot pink sequins instead of cargo pants and a t-shirt. Placing my Swatch gently beside me on the nightstand that night, I was reassured to see it was @267, and then alarmed when I realized how late that was in standard time. After one full day, I am far from my goal of being fully Beat-aware, but I am enjoying the reactions of others to what I am doing, and already becoming more aware of how much clock time predicts and directs all of our actions and thoughts. ******************** Tonight I went to see B.B. King, Buddy Guy, and Koko Taylor put on a blues show that I have been anticipating for a long time. B.B. King himself is a model of timelessness, since two days before his seventy-fifth birthday, he still belted out the blues. Singing tunes like "The Thrill is Gone," and "Three O'Clock Blues," B.B. sent chills down my back, and I only noticed his age because he talked about it a lot, and played from a chair, only getting up to take the stage and to leave it. The concert was supposed to start at 6pm, or approximately @960, maybe, and my sister and I drove through Boston rush hour to meet our parents there. Because of rush hour, I kept an eye on my watch, and soon realized that we would be arriving later than expected. The funny thing is, that my sister was getting more anxious as she looked at her watch, than I was when looking at mine. This may well have been because she was driving - and therefore she shouldered more of the responsibility for our timeliness - or it may have been because I was in the throes of an enriching experiment, but I really think I was less anxious because the Beat is slower than the minute, and so it seemed to take longer for us to be late. The venue was outdoors, and I couldn't help watching the sun set and full moon rise without being aware that while these great sky time trackers indicated day passing into night, they did not tell me what time it was in exact hours, minutes, or seconds. I did know, with some sadness, that the sun was setting earlier now as we head into autumn, and it occurred to me that Bill must be noticing the opposite, because Australia is heading into spring. The concert lasted late into the night, but I was reminded of the time as I emerged from the subway tunnel and a girl whined to her black-clad friend, "It's only 11:42 and you know all the clubs are closing. Boston sucks! I gotta move back to New York." I wanted so badly to turn to her and say, "Well get going, Honey, time's a-wasting!" She annoyed me intensely, as I often am bothered to a milder degree when people complain about the grass being greener somewhere else, until I realized it was really that she had just given away standard time. When I got home, my housemate was watching Jay Leno, further giving away standard time. I felt so hostile toward my friend that it embarrassed me. I wanted to be left alone with my Beats for a while. ******************** At @560 I woke up to the sound of rain pummeling the windowpanes. The sky was dark gray. At @629 the sky was the same color, and the friend who had been watching Leno late last night bounded down the stairs while I was trying to leave a message for someone - I couldn't convert the time quickly enough. It was late for her to be leaving for work, I thought; it must be the weather. At @735 I went downstairs and around the corner of my house to the local deli and convenience store, owned by a Cuban- American family with whom I had grown particularly close. They all seemed tired today, and sad. When I asked them about it, they blamed the weather. The sky was still the same shade of slate gray. It felt like it may have been six in the morning, or six at night. It was really quite off-putting. Could it be that when the sunlight hits the bricks of the same patch of sidewalk, we notice it subconsciously, and from it we derive a real sense of time? And so, on sunless days such as this rainy gray one when there are no shadows marking the passing of time, we feel particularly down because we are lost without this sense? A very dear friend of mine recently contracted an illness that wiped out much of his memory. He feels lost in the world because even with clocks and calendars posted everywhere - he had one clock on each wall of his hospital room - stated time means nothing to him. He cannot fully conceptualize that it is the year 2000; he does not remember the events of 1999. All of this makes me wonder whether we all consult our clocks more often on rainy days, searching for the concrete sense of reality time gives us, even if it is superficial knowledge since we cannot experience time passing as physically as when the sun is out. I have already consulted my watch much more often today than I did yesterday; a brilliantly sunshiny day. I am experiencing a sense of pride in my ability to live without knowing standard time. This sense is stronger than my delight in being able to live on Beat time. I like knowing that I am not watch-bound. I have always tried to live without being strapped to clock-time. I can't help but look at those around me whose lives seem controlled by schedules as silly, pathetic, and less enlightened human beings. Recently I ordered a transcript of a show about time, produced by Wisconsin Public Radio. Robert Levine, author of A Geography of Time, spoke about how we should think about time. "Everything that I've seen indicates that no matter how differently people approach time, everybody, once they begin thinking about time, realizes that time is the single entity in their lives that's irreplaceable. If that's the case, then let's approach the way we use our time seriously and try to take control of our time as best we can. As to how one takes control of their time, that's a very personal matter. Do you choose to live on a schedule and to work like crazy? If I told you your life was gonna end in one year, would that be a wake-up call to say "Stop and smell the roses; let me get out of my job and really live my life," or is that a wake-up call to the fact that I only have one year to complete all the tasks that I want to complete?" Levine makes some delicious points, and also makes me aware that I am one kind of person, who chooses not too get constrained by time, especially by being so aware of it, but that there are other people, especially Type A folks, who thrive on measuring progress in their lives by how much they can accomplish given a specific amount of time. Back to Beats: It's @754 and I'm off to get some lunch. My stomach told me so first. ******************** I'm really getting used to this now; both living by the Beat and also being aware of the time displayed around me. Yesterday afternoon I went to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. It was the first game of a double header and Pedro Martinez was pitching, so I hoped we'd be there by the first few notes of the National Anthem. I'd been to enough games to know that afternoon games started at 1pm. One pm, I knew, was @750 Beats. This was really too easy, but that's how it should be. Sports are predictable that way, and I love sports, perhaps in part because they are as reliable as the changing seasons (and, in fact, they change with the seasons: In the summer, I watch baseball; in the autumn, it's football; in the winter, hockey and basketball; and in the spring, lacrosse). They start at predictable times - as in this Fenway game, or Monday Night Football at 9pm EST - even if they don't always end that way - and instead I sit at the edge of my seat during overtime play, or outwait a rain delay and increase my enthusiasm by thinking about how much the game really means. Yes, I like the unpredictability of it all, too. The same might be said for how we regard the changing seasons and our temporal existence. We like the consistent pattern of spring, summer, fall, and winter; but we are also glad when one season does change to another, and we delight in an "Indian summer" in October, or an unexpected cold front in July that brings an end to the then normal cycle of humidity. As for our watches, we like keeping our lives in order by scheduling things in neat columns of hourly engagements; but we are overjoyed when we take enough vacation or leisure time so that one day blends into another until we lose control over knowing what time it is, and we don't care. ******************** Well, apparently it is impossible to travel without being bombarded, in the nicest possible way, by standard time. Local time in Philly, my destination on Delta flight 6255, is 11:37am, announces the flight attendant. walking swiftly down the airport terminal corridor past the gates, I know clocks are everywhere. I need to catch the Septa train to Southwest Philly, so I can't help but raise my eyes to a helpful digital signpost. The sign displays the train direction, sandwiched between local time, 11:51, and next train's arrival time: 12:09. Arriving at the platform, a speaker greets me: "The next Septa R1 train will be arriving at Terminal E in (pause, crackle) four minutes." Sure, it's good to be informed, but I can't help but wonder, if they're going to pound the schedule into our heads, shouldn't the actual time match the schedule time? To give the timetable a break, we did leave the station at 12:09, and now I'll certainly get to my grandparents' house in time for lunch, and I'm famished! Two other things I've noticed: last night I got worried about missing my plane, and I decided I had to set an alarm. I set my Swatch to 7, since I was already well aware that 7 was @500, and since I couldn't set the Beat time in alarm mode--something I would have to discuss later with Bill and Bruno. The alarm was quite pretty, like a Tweety bird waking, and this was the first time I had heard my Swatch speak. The second thing was that I am having a bear of a time converting from one time to the other. Until now, I have been converting from the Beats I see to the standard time I imagine matches the corresponding Beats. During my travels--subway, plane and train--I am chased by the standard time clock, so I figured I'd make the most of it and try to guess at the corresponding Beats. When I look at my Swatch, I discover that I am always wrong; and usually entirely wrong. I'll have to work on this, I guess, although it seems that it hasn't mattered. ******************** If the world was truly on Beat time, then the Olympic games would be a lot easier to broadcast For instance, if I really wanted to watch the Men's 400-meter relay swim race, and so did some guy in Austria, and so did some old bat in South Africa, it would be easier to just tell us that the race would be at @600 Beats, say, than to have to figure out all that time zone stuff. Futhermore, because it is so hard for us to figure it out, I couldn't watch any of the Olympic coverage on NBC, MSNBC, or CNBC without also seeing U.S. local time and Australia local time on the screen at all times. And, I couldn't watch the summary shows (ie. the Today Show on NBC) without seeing the time in the corner. It was nice, however, to notice that Swatch sponsors the Games and probably donated all of the timekeepers. These are so important--it's interesting to think of how important precise time is during the Olympics--tenths and even hundredths of seconds do matter, and these are metric units. So our greatest time units--millennia, centuries, and decades--and our smallest time units--tenths, hundredths, and thousandths of a second--are metric. Now if we could only fix the stuff in the middle! My grandparents had great fun figuring out Beats, and I wrote Aba's pill schedule on the refrigerator so we could play around. That had me converting quite a bit, which I needed practice in anyway, and I went to www.swatch.com to help me do it. There I saw that Swatch had reconfigured their site to cater to their Olympic watchers. My aunt Janet got interested in teaching her sixth grade math class about metric time, because she is teaching them about units and measures now anyway, and she saw that this would get them thinking about time in general and how it is measured. Cool. She and Dale have radically different definitions of time--Dale is a farmer, Janet is a teacher. Janet is on clock time, Dale is on Earth-farm-chore time. This is a difficulty in their partnership for sure, they both admitted. ******************** This is my last day on Internet time. I am now fully used to living by Beats. And, you know what? It's easy. And yet, I'm excited to go back to clock life. Why? It's been hard to ignore the rest of the world around me. It seems we are living in a clock-based society, and when all is said and done, as it will be in @088 Beats, I enjoy being a part of it. I am surprised to learn how much clocks are present in my world, particularly as I am not a watch wearer. I will be glad to be unstrapped yet again, but I can't help but think I will miss the huge watch.