Time is on nobody's side.

I always liked The Beatles more--they never lied about time taking sides.

I feel like I am running against the clock. It is a feeling one often gets when one is in school, as I am. You have all these deadlines and all this seemingly free time to use for working on whatever needs to be worked on. "Free" time which is in fact, empty time. Those of us who do not deal well with emptiness in our own lives--those of us who, sometimes, with or without reason, feel some sort of "emptiness," should not be given loads of empty time. It kills us. It drives us mad. Empty time is slow and dense and gray, even when it sometimes is light and airy and smells of freshness. It slows us down, it makes us write internet blogs or watch bad tv or Think, with a capital T, of things that are, or should be, minuscule. And then it happens: we have filled this empty time with the easiest thing at hand--sleep, Thoughts, bad tv, itunes organization, doing other people's work, helping somebody else out, chores that could've waited, good tv, internet searches--and its emptiness is coming to and end. The stupid hourglass' empty side is only a reminder that there is now a full one: now there is no more time and we need it desperately.

I must finish this week--today is Thursday!--the introductory chapter of my dissertation. I did no work for 6 days. Some of those hours in which I did not work, I could not have worked. Alejandro was here, a mini-vacation on account of the Spanish Constitution and the Immaculate Conception. We had to cook, eat, we had to entertain him, we had to help him with his homework. We had to visit the grandparents. Other hours were wasted hours. Yesterday was all lost, for no reason. Now I'm on today, and that's that. Now the emptiness of time given is smiling at me scornfully, and I am ill at ease.

Now I must turn to the blank page--more emptiness, in a life that is emptiness-impaired!--and fill it with words. Words that I have not taken the time to construct.

-y