Don't forget your towel...

 This has been the busiest semester of my life so far. Maybe it's because I'm working and going to school, but I've done that before, so I'm not sure what the reason is. I'm only taking 15.5 credits and I'm always running around like crazy with so much to do. It's been hard to prioritize. Do I skip a meal here and there? Skip sleep? Skip showers? Neglect friends? Let the grades suffer? How can I possibly do it all? I think it'll be interesting to go straight from this busy crazy semester to Mexico, where (as far as I understand it) life goes at a much slower pace. They take time to enjoy life in each moment, and aren't always focusing on squeezing as much into their schedules as humanly or inhumanly possible. But until then, I have to survive these next two or three weeks. It's times like these that I wish I had a time machine. And then this morning when I chose to not skip the shower, I realized that I have one. I've had it all along. Are you sitting down? I'm about to share my most treasured and significant secret. The shower is a time machine. Think about it! You get into it, and when you get back out again, 5-20 minutes have gone by. Now, I figure that the special dials that you would expect to see in a time machine are labeled "H" and "C", which are most definitely abbreviations in a foreign or maybe even extra-terrestrial language. The farther you turn the "H" dial, the farther in the future you'll go. I usually turn this dial some, but not all the way. This is why when I leave the bathroom again, I've only gone 10ish minutes into the future and not months or years. I assume the "C" dial takes you into the past, but I wouldn't know... I've never tried it. You may be skeptical, but hear me out (or read me through, rather). In our culture, the richer you are, the more bathrooms you have in your house. The time machines get fancier, with all kinds of extra features, and even seats for comfort if the journey is long. And with more time machines, more people can experience this phenomenon at the same time. And yet, no one has realized the power of it. We gripe about how things were in the good ol' days, or how we wish we could be graduated, married, and happy with a family and a boat already, but we never think that it could be as simple as taking a shower. Despite his brilliance, there is one thing that the inventor of this extraordinary machine didn't quite think through. If I ever succeeded in getting into another time dimension, I'd be naked and too embarrassed to get out.

First published 2 April 2009