MadMup.com

As I’ve mentioned, my next-door neighbor mows my lawn. “It only takes me three extra minutes,” he says. I feel simultaneously grateful and guilty, which is sort of my default state on most things anyway, so I’m getting used to it.

I was talking to him the other day and discovered that he also has been tending to some of the landscaping in my front lawn. Aside from the corn stalk, there are all kinds of bushes and flowers and things in front of my house, and I have no knowledge of how to take care of them or, frankly, to even figure out what they are. His wife has planted hostas on my side of the stairs going to the back “yard,” in an effort to make that path look more even, and I was more than happy for her to do it. I might as well put a “Lawn available for horticultural experimentation” sign out front, as other people might as well have fun with it. I’m just happy to not have a large gaping hole out there – having a Sarlacc Pit as your front lawn is a sure way to invite lawsuits.

While I was talking to him, he revealed his method of taking care of my landscaping: “We’ve got similar stuff, so when I cut mine back, I cut yours back, too.” Makes perfect sense to me. Ah, but there’s more. How, you may ask, does he know when to cut his back?

“I walk the dog at the park over here and they’ve got some of the same things we do. I know that [local plant nursery] takes care of that park, so when they do it there, I do it here.”

And that, my friends, is the secret to great landscaping. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know that knows what.

For years I’ve worn a watch, and for several of those years, it was a calculator watch. I didn’t need to do calculations all that often, but I did like keeping 40 or so phone numbers handy. When I was younger, I was a big fan of watches that could play tunes – just a bar or two of beeps, nothing like ringtones these days.

My watches have always been digital. I can read analog watches, but it takes me a while, and I don’t like how imprecise they are. I like being able to say “2:17” when someone asks me the time, rather than “somewhere around a quarter after.” And, yes, I know that no one knows the exact time anyway – Chicago even sang a song about it.

For whatever reason, this summer I stopped wearing a watch. I have a perfectly great watch, too – it’s just like the one Will Ferrell wore in Stranger Than Fiction, only it doesn’t do things like make me late so I fall in love with someone. At least, it hadn’t. Maybe I should have worn it longer? Hmm.

Anyway, I’m not sure why I stopped. It’s made things more vague. I can look at the time on numerous devices – computers, cell phones, banks, radios – but I have less of a sense of time. I think maybe that’s okay, but I’m not sure yet.

There are four ways to play the videogame Rock Band: play guitar, sing, play drums, or play bass. Those are listed in order of enjoyment for me. The reason I don’t like playing bass is because I don’t see how it affects anything. The other three have immediate feedback and I can tell how I’m doing. If I’m doing well at bass, the only reason I know it is because I’m getting the multiplier and not failing. I can’t hear the bass line, so it might as well be me playing random notes.

It’s funny/scary how geared I am toward immediate results. I sometimes feel like I lack the ability to consider the future – I eat this Dove bar because it tastes SO GOOD right now, and even though some part of my brain knows the cumulative effects of eating Dove bars will some day wreak havoc on my body, that knowledge doesn’t stop me from eating it… or the next three in the box. It’s the same reason I can’t motivate myself to work out – I know that getting on the treadmill today will help Future Me, but Present Me doesn’t like how he feels during the process, so he doesn’t do it. Future Me can deal with that stuff later.

Future Me can also figure out how to retire when he gets to that point, and where to put all these old game consoles Present Me is collecting, and how to deal with the house projects Present Me has been putting off. The way Present Me looks at it, Future Me will be older and wiser and will know how to handle all that, and he will forgive Present Me at that point.

I can barely even type that in jest, because it’s too close to home. How can I train Present Me to look toward the future? If I were given three wishes, I think one of them might be the ability to see what would result from my immediate actions. Even having the predetermined-path-indicators like Donnie Darko could see for a while be help a little, I think. If I could see that my half hour on the treadmill today added 3 days to my life, maybe it’d help me get up on the treadmill.

Any thoughts? How have you helped your Present Self start now to help your Future Self? Or is it just a matter of playing bass forever, knowing you’re headed in the right direction just because you haven’t failed out of the song?