This blog is your blog

There’s an oft-forwarded email that beseeches us to take charge of our time–”Ask the cancer patient what a year means; ask the commuter what a minute means,” and with various time increments in between.  There is also the song from Rent, which, incidentally, is how I know the number of minutes in a year.  Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes.  How do you measure a year in a life?  I remember a fifth-grade classmate singing “Seasons of Love,” but I never placed it in context until the film came out in 2005.

Time is forefront in my mind these days.  I celebrated my 21st birthday last week–all week.  It is now, in my senior year of college, that I wonder how I’ll mark my time when I’m no longer in school.  I want to go to grad school for genetics/genomics, but what kind of program and for how long is still up in the air.  Regardless, I will no longer have a pat answer for, “What year are you?”  Tomorrow, I’ll be taking the GRE.  Time pressures are often a concern for standardized tests.  In addition, I’ve heard the GRE described as the bastard step-child of the standardized tests; will I come out of the GRE/grad school application process feeling as though it was a four-hour waste of my time?

Yesterday, I watched the Chicago Bears play the Atlanta Falcons.  The Falcons were leading in the fourth quarter when the Bears scored a touchdown!  Hurray!  (I usually like Chicago when Cleveland isn’t involved.)  It looked like the clock would work in Chicago’s favor, as there wasn’t much time left in the game; unfortunately, Atlanta then had enough time to score a field goal.  Now, the clock worked against Chicago, because it had wasted too many seconds in trying to keep Atlanta from having the chance to score.  Sportscasters love to talk about teams that can control the clock; it is particularly salient just how manipulative they can be when we consider how long a professional football game actually lasts, given that each quarter is fifteen minutes long.  From charged time-outs to running out-of-bounds, we mark time very differently in a football game from, say, the GRE.

Your time is precious; as is mine.  I need to do some last minute studying, but more importantly, I’m watching the Browns play the Giants right now.  GO CLEVELAND!