Yesterdays Tomorrow is Today

Cara Jean Kamehiro
April 4, 2011
FD3

Yesterday's Tomorrow is Today

It felt like yesterday was the last day of twenty-ten, a night filled of alcoholic beverages for adults and sparkling cider for the twenty-one and under. Another cloudy black sky on a new year filled with smoke and flashes from all the different firework shows exploding along the shores, including a couple illegals you see in the neighborhoods here and there. I find that time is all around me like noise. Its everywhere, and I cant ever escape it. Time is such a tricky and an amazing thing. Just one tick of a second is a new minute, another tick is a new hour, an hour to a new day, a new day to a new year, new year to a new decade.Life can be measured in so many ways, there is no right or wrong way to measure life, just like how there is no right or wrong way to live life.[[THESIS]]If I had to measure my life, it would be with time and the moments time brings me. My life is time, it is tricky and amazing. [[THESIS]]

There is this song called "Seasons of Love" from the broadway musical called Rent. If you ever listen to that song they ask "How do you measure a year in the life," and answer "In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee, in inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife, In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes."The first time I saw Rent and heard this song was with my mother on our comfortable charcoal gray couch in our little Kahala town house. It was just around our dinner time, seven or eight o'clock during a cool spring night. I remember this night because my mom got me this play on DVD for my fourteenth birthday since she knows how much I love musicals. This play is not like the other musicals like West Side Story or Grease which has a Romeo and Juliet story line. This play deals with real life situations and how these people take the worst situations life could offer and continue to live and love. After two hours and fifteen minutes went by, my mom and I listened to the song one more time as it rolled through the credits. We were singing to it like we heard it a million times. As the song was playing I realized how this one song that is three minutes and seventeen-seconds can sum up a movie that is 135 minutes long. We wondered if there really were five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes in a year, so out came the calculator and all the numbers added up.

We were blown away that there is only 525,600 minutes in a year. If you were to put a minute count down for a year, you could literally watching time fly by. Imagine five hundred twenty-five thousand and six hundred minutes times five, thats how many minutes a five year old lives. I find it interesting to hear about people who live their whole lives, trying to figure out the meaning of life and how to measure it. That is a lot of minutes trying to figure out how to measure life.

When I was in grade school I would go to my granny's appartment after school with my cousins and sister. When my mom was finished from work she would call me and say, "I'm leaving my office now, meet me downstairs in ten minutes." I would always make her wait either a couple minutes or five minutes accidentally. One day she was so upset at me after she waited for ten minutes, she told me loudly in her blue 2001 corolla, "When I tell you to come downstairs you have to time yourself using the same clock, because not every clock has the same time."  A lesson I took to heart because never did I like it when she yelled at me, and I never made her wait again.

Since no two clocks are exactly the same time, I figure I need one watch or clock to follow from the strike of a new year till the end of it. For my christmas present a coupe years ago I got a stunning, bright yellow rubber band, with rhinestones lining the face, and glow in the dark hands, Juicy Couture watch. There is so much technology and different clocks I was not sure whether to set my watches' time according to my laptop, my pink smart phone, the cable channel on tv, from the numerous radio stations, or from my smallest house clock. I really wanted my watch to be as accurate as possible, deciding which clock to set my watch to was very difficult. There is this clock known as the universal clock that is accessible to any one who knows how to use google. It shows all the times of every time zone in the world. However, google users know that when searching for a specific thing, there are always umpteen million websites that have similar searches. Great, more different clocks to choose from. All the times on these websites don't have seconds either, just minutes. Every time I set a clock, I always wait till the number changes than hit save or push the little button in on the side of watches as fast as I can so that the seconds are almost the same.

The last day of the year, twenty-ten was almost over as my sister and I were watching a rerun of our favorite show called "One Tree Hill." This episode was about one of the girls who became really famous with her clothes line, is no broke and is trying to find inspiration. She finds a list she made when she was rich of things she has always wanted to do. One of the things was sky diving, so her boyfriend takes her in an airplane and their mark is coming up. Up in the air she wants to back out, but her boyfriend tells her this quote, "Life isn't measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath way."  My sister and I laughed, cause we knew it was from another funny movie called Hitch, and the girl in the show knew it too. I knew what my sister was thinking when we heard this quote, as we both started to sing this line from the song by Nicki Minaj, "I believe life is a prize, but to live doesn't mean you're alive."

Life isn't about precisely setting my watch on time, or knowing how many minutes I have in a year to make life count, its about moments that take my breath away. Life is always in the present, always moving, no stopping, like seconds on a watch. Every breath I take is right now, today, no one ever says they breath tomorrow. There is no tomorrow unless the world enters a black thickness of nothing, when everything just stops. So thats why with every breath taken, the world is still in motion, the today and the now. The present never rests, it doesn't matter if I'm awake or asleep. It's always breakfast or dinner somewhere in the world. I like to live today and for right now. The only minutes I worry about is the seconds ticking on my yellow Juicy watch. If tomorrow comes right now or in a week, or in the next five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes I know I can say I lived my life to its fullest of every second. There is no day but today.







_X__ Mar. 3- Intro to Paper #3: Personal Essay.
_X__ Mar. 7- Complete readings: all of chapter 12.
_X__ Mar. 10- Laulima Discussion 1: “Chimera“
_X__ Mar. 14- Laulima Discussion 2: “Notes of a Native Speaker“
_X__ Mar. 16- Laulima Discussion 3: “Under the Influence“
_X__ Mar. 18- Laulima Discussion 4: “Being Brians“
_L__ Mar. 29- Laulima Discussion 5: “Warring Memories“ and “Snakebit“
_X__ Apr. 1- RD3 due [50 pts]
_X__ Apr. 4- Submit three RD3 evaluations. [50 pts] Review the guidelines.
_L__ Apr. 6 - FD3 due [125 pts] You can submit it anytime during this period.