My Watch Has an Existential Crisis

Here for you enjoyment, is a classic rant (or journal entry as we used to call 'em) from September, 2001. I've only edited a few tangents out, but bear in mind that I was much younger then....

My Watch has an Existential Crisis – September 21, 2001

My watch is having an existential crisis. It’s the only way I can describe it. I noticed the time was off; it was slow, so I figured – hey, new battery. I took it to the repair shop, “We change watch batteries, all kinds, $5 cash only”. The man took my precious watch into the back room and proceeded to look inside. A few minutes later, he came out and said “It’s not the battery. The battery’s fine, it’s the watch. When you’re not looking, it stops ticking.” What? So my watch only works when I watch it.

So I watch my watch, and sure enough it keeps perfect time. I stop looking but I listen for its ticks. Tick tick tick. It still works. I perceive my watch. It is working. I turn to something else for a while. I look back at the watch. It’s ticking – but it’s slow. So I thought about what to do. I could watch it all the time, but I can’t do that. I could tape record the ticking and listen to it later, that way I can trick the watch into being perceived. The logistics of this, however, are beyond me. So I give up and wear no watch.

A pause in my story to think about perception. What is perception? Does the outside world exist when I’m not aware of it? I know the world exists, but I thought I knew my watch existed. Which it doesn’t, obviously. It only exists in my perception. When I cease to be aware of it, it ceases to exist, qua a timepiece. It’s still an object, I assume. It still has a leather band, and a metal case with a glass front and numbers painted on it. It still has dials and springs; it still has a mark on the third hole of the band, where I usually wear it. But does it keep time? No. And that my dear, is the essence of a watch – it must be portable, and it must keep time. Take away any one of these two qualifications and it becomes either a clock or an expensive bracelet.

Now, I’m not an easy going person. I’m obsessive, and I’m punctual, and I need to be aware of the time twenty-four hours a day. I wear my watch constantly. I keep a clock in every room of my home. I position myself in classes so that I can watch the clock on the wall and check every five minutes or so to make sure that the clock and my watch are perfectly synchronized. They used to be. What does this tell you about me? I need a sense of time – but I don’t possess one internally. My body does not know when it’s 8:05 or 12:00 or 4:30 and time for class. I rely on external objects to tell me what the time really is.

My old roommate had an internal clock. She wore no watches, had no alarm clock, and yet rose at exactly seven each morning (eight daylight savings) and was never late. So does she possess a sense of time which I don’t? An internal perception that time is passing, a clock in her breaths, in her heartbeat, in her lungs? I’m lost without my watch. I stare at my naked wrist and frown. Is time a creation of ours? Do we need time? I do.

But time is an external creation. It’s made of hours and minutes, a sesquidecimal system of base sixty. Why sixty? The Babylonians. We don’t use their system anymore, but the idea of a base sixty time system with a ludicrous 24 hour day seems normal to us. So basic that when the French revolution tried to bring is a metric base 10 system, it failed utterly. Odd, isn’t it? The metric system of measurement took off quite nicely, yet try to mess with time, and you get burned.

I’m now walking around without time. It’s oddly comforting, I was half an hour early for class today. And everybody laughs at my watch story. Poor thing doesn’t even know that it exists. I know it exists; it’s the watch that doesn’t. I exist, I know that. The outside world exists, I know this, I read Descartes, and trust mw, Descartes came from outside of me. I did not think that stuff up, I’m not that smart – ergo there must be an outside world.

I’m cursed when it comes to appliances and electronics. I tried to talk gently to my watch. I tried to convince it that it existed in the material, phenomenal world of objects and sense perception. It heard the false tones in my voice. Gadgets always hear falseness, they’re good that way. I lost trust in my watch. It knows. It’s like my stereo – skipped, skipped, skipped. I begged, I pleaded, I threatened, but to no avail. Skip, skip, skip. So I smacked it, just once. It stopped skipping. The next day, again, skip, skip, skip. I raised my hand, said: “You know I’m serious.” Smooth playing. My phone stopped dialing `2’. It never healed.

Maybe I live in an odd universe where objects have perception and feet and get up and walk away. A world where my camera mended its cracked light meter through gentle words and a soft new case. A world where my discman is soothed only by one particular album (Zeppelin IV). I live in a strange little world. I guess that makes me a strange little person.

So I’m getting a new watch.