Tag: time

Doing one thing at the same time

You might remember a song from the ’90s called “Lucky Night,” by Björk’s unserious pre-solo band, the Sugarcubes. It starts, “I’ve tried a lot, and most things excite me; but what tops it all is doing two things at a time.” Björk and Einar then take turns listing possible pairings that she describes as “charming.”

Einar just sing-songs pairs of nouns:

Life and death, Glass and water
Rock and roll, wash and dirty
Christ and Jesus, time and hours… 

But Björk describes activities. You think maybe she is going to say something sexy and transgressive, but actually it’s very normal activities that apparently thrill her: 

To drive a car and listen to music.
To read a book and ride a train…

Sugarcubes’ songs are not designed to be analyzed, so I won’t do that. But for some reason, this one stuck in my head, and I can’t help thinking about how it wouldn’t just be a trifling little song today; it would be nonsensical. I never do only one thing at a time. It is always something—plus a phone. 

To drive a car and be on your phone
To listen to music and be on your phone
To ride a train and be on your phone
To fall in love and be on your phone
To not sleep and and be on your phone
To watch TV and be on your phone
To cuddle and be on your phone

Or in Einar’s mode:

Watch and phone
God and phone
Hammer and phone
Babies and phone

It is not something I try to do so as to make one plus one equal three, as the song promises; it is just how it is. I have my phone with me in the bathroom, in the car, while I’m cooking, while I’m eating, while I’m cleaning, when I’m working, while I am allegedly sleeping. When I am at church, I do turn my phone’s ringer off, but I sure don’t leave it at home. I would never.

Obviously, my phone isn’t all bad. I use it to listen to music, to identify birds and flowers, to be in touch with my kids in an emergency, to chat with my friends and my husband, to find recipes and instructions and helpful advice, and to take photos and videos of wonderful things that other people enjoy seeing. But overall, “Life and Phone” has not been an improvement, to put it mildly.

My phone’s omnipresence sucks the life out of whatever else I am doing. It always drains something from the other thing, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. It is like a needy infant that requires constant heightened attention, even when it is asleep; but unlike an infant, it never stops being hungry, and unlike an infant, it offers so very little compared to what it snatches away. 

That is what my phone does to me, a middle-aged mom from New England who is at least trying to be good and not waste my life. We don’t have to imagine what it does to foolish young men who are hungry for meaning, hungry for praise, hungry for clout, and who have their phones with them all the time, pouring poison into their faces morning, noon and night, sucking away their power to see humanity. We know what young men plus phones adds up to, more and more often. There is no non-dramatic way to put it: It tells them to kill, and to etch little phrases from memes on the bullet casings. Expect to see more of this.

Sometimes the secret ingredient is time

It’s one of my favorite stories, so I’m glad it’s apparently true. The Vienna Beef company makes a certain kind of hot dog that is bright red, and it has a particular smoky flavor and a particular snap when you bite into it. It was very popular, so they made it in exactly the same way year after year, decade after decade.

Eventually the company became successful enough to upgrade to a new facility, where everything was streamlined and efficient and top of the line. But they knew better than to mess with success: The hot dog recipe stayed the same.

Except it didn’t. The hot dogs produced in the new facility weren’t as good. The color was off, the texture was feeble, and the taste just wasn’t the same; and nobody could figure out why. They hadn’t changed anything—not the ingredients, not the process, not the order of operations. It was a hot dog mystery.

They finally solved it by painstakingly recreating how they had done it in the old factory—and it turned out that, at one point, the processed ground meat was slowly trucked from one part of the factory to another, through several rooms, around corridors, and on an elevator. It seems that this arduous process, which everyone assumed was nothing but an inconvenience that ought to be streamlined away, was an essential step. The meat got warmed slowly as it went, gradually steeping in the smoke and moisture of the rooms that it travelled through. When they made the production more efficient, they eliminated this part of the process. And that ruined the hot dogs.

The secret ingredient, it turned out, was time. I thought of this story as I sat chatting with an old friend, someone I’ve known online for over two decades, and we only met in person for the first time last week. When we first got to know each other, we were in the thick of having babies and wrangling toddlers, both fairly starry-eyed about the possibilities of how to build a Catholic marriage and raise a holy family.

Now we both have several adult children, and our “babies” are almost as tall as we are. We talked about what we expected our lives to look like, what we were so sure about, and how differently things have turned out. We talked about our struggles and also our successes, and how we seem to know less and less as time goes on.

And we talked about how sometimes, the secret ingredient is time…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Photo by ArtHouse Studio