Here's how I used to keep track of time
Dec. 19th, 2010 04:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dmxratedIn response to this morning's regular entry, Marie linked to some article from a comment she left on Brian's Facebook, after inferring that I have something in common with the woman being discussed.
http://gothamist.com/2010/12/17/upper_west_side_woman_remembers_eve.php
So, Mom asked me not too long ago how I could remember things so well back then. I told her it was complicated to explain, and also that Nickelodeon had something to do with how it all started. In any case, it's probably gonna need its own post, so, here goes:
Well, it all started when Nick announced thirteen new episodes of Rugrats to air on SNICK (its Saturday night block at the time; don't know or care about nowadays) at 8:00 PM, starting on August 23, 1997. It fizzled out three years later, right after I had finished 8th grade.
So, at first, I would keep track of exact dates in my head, in relation to each airing of a given episode. However, that all fizzled out, but I was still able to remember clearly what happened on any given date in relation to another date.
More than a year after it started, I found some kind of pattern:
The Tuesday before Mother's Day of 1998, Mom got mad at me for something I wrote in Writing Lab, which talked about a murder that happened a year earlier, and ended saying how "funny" it was.
Six weeks later, the Tuesday before Father's Day, I got in trouble with Dad for mooning and flashing Marie and her then-friends Lauren and Nicole, giving them the finger, and probably cursing at them too. Mom and Dad let me off the hook the following day, though, after I got a good grade on some kind of test.
Six weeks after that, the first week that summer camp started that year, I got in trouble with Mom for giving our camp counselor Corinne the finger when she made us sing If You're Happy And You Know It. Brian also got in trouble about whining about various things (never knew what exactly the deal was with him, although yeah, Corinne sure did piss all of us off the first couple of days at camp).
Each event happened exactly six weeks apart, on a Tuesday. However, six weeks before the aforementioned murder excerpt incident is much more notable, spanning for nearly the whole week:
Sunday, isolated from the rest of what happened, I was being rude to the rest of my folks while we were at the library and coming home. Wednesday is where it really started, though: The previous day, she found out that I had been giving the finger to some kid on the bus next to mine, who had also been giving me the finger, and both of us (or at least I did) meant it as a joke. However, Mom insisted that I write an apology to the busdriver, while I insisted on just apologizing to her verbally. She sent me outside, and when I came back in, I found that all my "doodads" (keychains of various kinds) were missing on my backpack. She took them off and hid them somewhere in response to my attitude, so I then took to causing various kinds of trouble on Masem Court, which ended with knocking lids off of mailboxes with a stick. When I got to the Weidners' house all the way from the dead end, their mailbox lid neither fell off nor bounced back shut, so I kept hitting at it as chips fell off, until Lauren shouted "STOP IT!" from the front door. The next day, Dad escorted me to each house missing a mailbox lid to apologize for it, and he and Mom had me spend most of Saturday doing various chores to make up for it all.
Six weeks before that whole deal... actually, nothing bad had happened at all.
Meanwhile, six weeks after the summer camp incident, comes this Co7G entry, where I had thrown a small screwdriver at Brian, setting him off in tears, on (you guessed it) Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday would also count, as would an unwritten part of Sunday where I used the word "damn" while we were at someone's house, and Dad told me to sit in the car.
Six weeks yet later, the only bad things that happened was that fight I got into with Ryan on... Thursday, and that dispute I had with Dad on Saturday night, and even those weren't too big of a big deal as any of the above mentioned incidents. However, Saturday of that week was the day I contemplated all this (particularly the three incidents that happened before Mother's Day, before Father's Day, and at summer camp) on the beach while we were camping at Indian Island.
So now, everything's based primarily on periods of six weeks, and on a broader scale, on periods of 36 weeks. Each week shifts between "good week" and "bad week", even if actual events do not match up. How "good" or "bad" they are varies depending on relation to other weeks in any 36-week period. However, there is a "worst week" every 36 weeks, followed right by a "best week".
The week that involved bashing mailboxes is (fittingly) a "worst" week, while the weeks that we watched the two movies mentioned previous entry are both "best" weeks. That's why I chose A Bug's Life to refer to in this morning's post, instead of, say, Disney's Tarzan (39 weeks minus one day prior; some regularity there, though, since 39 is a multiple of 13, which is a factor of 52, the number of weeks in a year).
After I finished 8th grade, I became less conscientious about keeping track of time like that. So, for the most part, everything afterwards is convoluted, except for much of 11th grade (when I attempted to write The New Era, which I never got very far with and had a hard time keeping up with before simply abandoning it). If you'd like to know, this whole week system is exactly how I was able to start writing Chronicles of 7th Grade while I was in 10th grade, and possibly why even the negative stuff of that year is nostalgic to me.
Speaking of Co7G, since Getter Love!! had such a big part to do with it, it's ironic that that game's release date fell on Friday of a 36-week-period worst week (December 4, 1998), since discovering it was one of the best things that happened to me. However, if I did the math correctly, the day it had become prominent in my life had fallen on the best week of a 12-week period (twelve weeks after the previous "best week of 36"). Might be off by a week or two, though, what with days shifting between good/bad weeks and the one date that gets added to each leap year.
EDIT: No it wasn't. It was on a "Getting there" week, two weeks before the "best week" of the 12-week period, ten weeks after the "best week" of the 36-week period.
http://gothamist.com/2010/12/17/upper_west_side_woman_remembers_eve.php
So, Mom asked me not too long ago how I could remember things so well back then. I told her it was complicated to explain, and also that Nickelodeon had something to do with how it all started. In any case, it's probably gonna need its own post, so, here goes:
Well, it all started when Nick announced thirteen new episodes of Rugrats to air on SNICK (its Saturday night block at the time; don't know or care about nowadays) at 8:00 PM, starting on August 23, 1997. It fizzled out three years later, right after I had finished 8th grade.
So, at first, I would keep track of exact dates in my head, in relation to each airing of a given episode. However, that all fizzled out, but I was still able to remember clearly what happened on any given date in relation to another date.
More than a year after it started, I found some kind of pattern:
The Tuesday before Mother's Day of 1998, Mom got mad at me for something I wrote in Writing Lab, which talked about a murder that happened a year earlier, and ended saying how "funny" it was.
Six weeks later, the Tuesday before Father's Day, I got in trouble with Dad for mooning and flashing Marie and her then-friends Lauren and Nicole, giving them the finger, and probably cursing at them too. Mom and Dad let me off the hook the following day, though, after I got a good grade on some kind of test.
Six weeks after that, the first week that summer camp started that year, I got in trouble with Mom for giving our camp counselor Corinne the finger when she made us sing If You're Happy And You Know It. Brian also got in trouble about whining about various things (never knew what exactly the deal was with him, although yeah, Corinne sure did piss all of us off the first couple of days at camp).
Each event happened exactly six weeks apart, on a Tuesday. However, six weeks before the aforementioned murder excerpt incident is much more notable, spanning for nearly the whole week:
Sunday, isolated from the rest of what happened, I was being rude to the rest of my folks while we were at the library and coming home. Wednesday is where it really started, though: The previous day, she found out that I had been giving the finger to some kid on the bus next to mine, who had also been giving me the finger, and both of us (or at least I did) meant it as a joke. However, Mom insisted that I write an apology to the busdriver, while I insisted on just apologizing to her verbally. She sent me outside, and when I came back in, I found that all my "doodads" (keychains of various kinds) were missing on my backpack. She took them off and hid them somewhere in response to my attitude, so I then took to causing various kinds of trouble on Masem Court, which ended with knocking lids off of mailboxes with a stick. When I got to the Weidners' house all the way from the dead end, their mailbox lid neither fell off nor bounced back shut, so I kept hitting at it as chips fell off, until Lauren shouted "STOP IT!" from the front door. The next day, Dad escorted me to each house missing a mailbox lid to apologize for it, and he and Mom had me spend most of Saturday doing various chores to make up for it all.
Six weeks before that whole deal... actually, nothing bad had happened at all.
Meanwhile, six weeks after the summer camp incident, comes this Co7G entry, where I had thrown a small screwdriver at Brian, setting him off in tears, on (you guessed it) Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday would also count, as would an unwritten part of Sunday where I used the word "damn" while we were at someone's house, and Dad told me to sit in the car.
Six weeks yet later, the only bad things that happened was that fight I got into with Ryan on... Thursday, and that dispute I had with Dad on Saturday night, and even those weren't too big of a big deal as any of the above mentioned incidents. However, Saturday of that week was the day I contemplated all this (particularly the three incidents that happened before Mother's Day, before Father's Day, and at summer camp) on the beach while we were camping at Indian Island.
So now, everything's based primarily on periods of six weeks, and on a broader scale, on periods of 36 weeks. Each week shifts between "good week" and "bad week", even if actual events do not match up. How "good" or "bad" they are varies depending on relation to other weeks in any 36-week period. However, there is a "worst week" every 36 weeks, followed right by a "best week".
The week that involved bashing mailboxes is (fittingly) a "worst" week, while the weeks that we watched the two movies mentioned previous entry are both "best" weeks. That's why I chose A Bug's Life to refer to in this morning's post, instead of, say, Disney's Tarzan (39 weeks minus one day prior; some regularity there, though, since 39 is a multiple of 13, which is a factor of 52, the number of weeks in a year).
After I finished 8th grade, I became less conscientious about keeping track of time like that. So, for the most part, everything afterwards is convoluted, except for much of 11th grade (when I attempted to write The New Era, which I never got very far with and had a hard time keeping up with before simply abandoning it). If you'd like to know, this whole week system is exactly how I was able to start writing Chronicles of 7th Grade while I was in 10th grade, and possibly why even the negative stuff of that year is nostalgic to me.
Speaking of Co7G, since Getter Love!! had such a big part to do with it, it's ironic that that game's release date fell on Friday of a 36-week-period worst week (December 4, 1998), since discovering it was one of the best things that happened to me. However, if I did the math correctly, the day it had become prominent in my life had fallen on the best week of a 12-week period (twelve weeks after the previous "best week of 36"). Might be off by a week or two, though, what with days shifting between good/bad weeks and the one date that gets added to each leap year.
EDIT: No it wasn't. It was on a "Getting there" week, two weeks before the "best week" of the 12-week period, ten weeks after the "best week" of the 36-week period.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-15 01:39 pm (UTC)This manner of keeping track of time, events rather than dates, might imply a difficulty associating abstract information (numbers, names) with dimensional information (sounds, images). I have this too, to the point where it took my five years to learn my own phone number. I remember my life not in years and dates, but like a sequences of events. I know when what happened by looking at a visual timeline.
The test that measures this (during the autism probing) is the one where they ask you to remember words, the first being visually oriented and the latter more abstract words.