Memo 15: Lost Time
I know I’ve been going in and out of posting on here with consistency, so I’ll make a fantastic pledge: I will write a couple more Jouissances throughout December¹, and then in the new year it’ll be back to some regularly scheduled programming! Plus maybe adding some new parts to this shindig, who knows.
One recent wintertime event that has instilled some sense of consistency was the Spotify Wrapped, released at the beginning of the month. Like every year, my mix was particularly embarrassing; my top song was a jazz standard², my 5th song was “Say So” by Doja Cat, and I was in the top .5% listeners for Roy Orbison. The real joy of this reveal comes when everyone posts about their results online, prompted or not. During a usual year, it’s a fun small talk starting point, but at the end of this year, it feels like getting a warm hug from a childhood friend.
In the midst of me bemoaning how I ended up with American Standards as one of my top 5 genres — again! — an astute question was brought up: if these numbers start tracking in January and are released at the beginning of December, when does Spotify cut off listening habits for its yearly ritual? It turns out that Wrapped stops on October 31st, leaving November and December each year as a black hole of time on the Spotify books. The possibility of exploitation and guilty listening is definitely there.
When I found this out, my mind went right to other lost periods in time, as humans have given time a fun position of existing and not existing simultaneously before this year. The whole calendar system is, historically, a mess³; even when not messy, it’s hard to get down pat, and so hiccups have accumulated over time. What first popped into mind was the Egyptian calendar, a throwback to a fact learned in a GE long ago.
The Egyptian calendar had 30 days for every intercalary month of theirs; this is a nice, orderly and neat number, especially with it being over 12 months, but time is not so neat. So starting in 4000 B.C., they added another intercalary month that occurred outside of the regular calendar year and only lasted 5 days, to account for all the actual days. They wanted time to be one way but the actual year ran its own schedule, so the Egyptians got a little creative to cope with this. Sound familiar?
Talking about time from so long ago seems a bit odd at first — if this year felt like a decade, how much could years from actually decades ago relate to us? — but you’ll be surprised. According to some people⁴, the Mayan prediction from 2012 — remember that one? — was correct after all because of how the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582, dropped 11 days from the previously-used Julian calendar. These 11 days add up quickly, causing us to be in 2012 by Julian calendar standards… or, the Mayan prediction to be in 2020 instead of 2012. It’s a silly example⁵, but effective at showing how gaps in time do not go away; instead, they add up and up until changes our way of life much more than before.
A more recent example of that pattern is one of my favorite artworks: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) from 1991. Shortly after Gonzalez-Torres’s partner was diagnosed with AIDS, he set these clocks — of the same model, to the same time — as they will eventually fall out of sync or stop entirely. When one of the clocks stops or breaks, they can both be reset, thereby resuming perfect synchrony. It’s a beautiful work that has stuck with me from the first time I saw it years back.
Those examples give lost time a grim taste to it, the elements of loss and death heightened above all. And those parts are definitely still key to lost time — mourning what we can’t grasp, unable to escape the intangible. But, like every complex thing in life, there are brighter perspectives as well. The reason that I thought of the Egyptian calendar first was because of how those last 5 days of the year were not a dark, punishing time; instead, it was a joyous one. Those 5 days were meant to represent the god’s birthdays and Egyptians were not expected to work during this time. This, to me, is a sweet approach to time: instead of being apprehensive and fearful from the inability to control time, reveling in the lack of sense can unify people.
What place does December have in 2020? To me, it’s the lost time period of 2020. It’s easy, very easy to argue that most — if not all — of 2020 was lost time. But December sticks out to me as being in its own class. The consciousness and awareness in the beginning, the uprising and shock sinking in during the summer, and the political frenzy in the fall all felt like different shades of oscillating between being present and unpresent. Decemeber, however, doesn’t have that inescapable dread feeling; my mind-calendar went straight from the election to Jan 2021. December, the last month needed to complete 2020 even though it feels like an add-on to the stress of the last 8 months, is lost time. And all we can do is revel in it.
And because there is always more to consume, here are some LINKS from this past week:
We Asked Psychologists About the 'Siblings or Dating' Instagram Account. It feels like this account has been around forever, but it’s only been around for 6 months. Now Vice, who we all know for its fact-based investigative journalism, wrote about it and their write-up on it is pretty disappointing. But it’s fun to be disappointed by Vice!
The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand, something that I bicker about yet never do any research on. This article is the perfect salve for that, as it does its own research and shows that it’s a (semi-)moot point to do so in our current stage of things.
They Found Community, and Then Love, in Online Games, which is exactly like it sounds. Reading this uses the perfect amount of brain cells — every couple story is short and almost always relates back to World of Warcraft.
The Number of Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells Is on The Verge of Exploding. What Happens Now? Another good keeping-up-with-the-messy-side-effects-of-human-creation article, this one a little more optimistic as there are some good-intentioned Okies at the core.
Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical Streaming Concert to Benefit The Actors Fund. For those of you that are unaware, there has been a growing subgroup on Tiktok for the past couple of months made up of people writing, directing, drawing, singing and performing homemade songs for a Ratatouille musical. It’s equally enjoyable and depressing, as many of the submissions are high-quality and that’s because many talented people in Broadway are in financial freefall now, but forget that — it’s being picked up now(?)!
The New Post-NBA Career? Streetwear Designer, rock on baby. I knew minimal information about both topics and less about how they are connected, so the article is very satisfying. Viewing it as the next step in NBA player agency instead of just a hypebeast coincidence makes the article a lot more interesting.
Not so much near Christmas and New Years’, because I am no madman.
If you must know, it’s this song. As I was looking at different versions of it on Youtube (and this is the best version), apparently it was in the Tom and Jerry Nintendo DS game at some point — would have never guessed, but can totally see it.
I did not get into it that much here because I could write a whole other Jouissance post on it alone. I just might.
As in near-tabloid-level publications, so you’ve been warned.
Silly, but hell it would make a lot of sense for 2020…