Galileo and Newton measured linear time with pendulums and water clocks—and that type of time measurement is one I can wrap my head around.  Einstein had more flexible ideas about time and relativity, and though I confess the physics of Einstein-time are fuzzier to me, there has to be something to it, just based on my observations about how time squishes relative to deadlines.

I haven’t figured out why a series of near-identical articles can take me half an hour apiece to write, until I have four left with an hour till deadline.  I still haven’t missed a deadline, haven’t (yet) been late by more than ten minutes—but man, I always take it down to the wire.  Why is that?  I’ll have 24 hours to write 20 articles, and I’ll wait 18 hours to start.

I can’t explain that behavior on my part, and I really can’t explain how time squishes differently as I get closer to the deadline.  I swear I’m working at the best pace I can when I’m three hours away from deadline, but somehow I’m smashing more words into the same amount of time (or so says the clock) when that deadline looms closer.  I haven’t figured out the math or the physics behind that, except by concluding that I’m some sort of Smashmatician.

No doubt these same elastic properties of Time are responsible for things like how much shorter a year is than it used to be when I was a child, or how much longer Mondays would last compared to Saturdays (back when I had to go to an office-job),or why the clock on the dashboard moves so quickly when I’m stuck in traffic and supposed to be somewhere else, or why Christmas-Eve-Day used to last longer than any four normal days, or why the day-before-Exams when I still needed to cram a library’s-worth of material only lasted a few hours, or why a flight takes so much longer with a fussy toddler on my lap than the exact same trip when I’m accompanied only by my book, or why the kids’ football and soccer games last so much longer when it’s cold or rainy…

It’s undeniably a fact that my method of waiting-till-deadlines-loom enables me to spend less time on my freelance writing than I would if I started earlier, given the accelerated pace of work that magically (Smashmatically) happens as the deadline gets closer.  If I started my work when I first got my assignments, I’d no doubt be working at that more plodding pace that seems to be my “best effort” when I’m not yet in deadline-danger.  Time is clearly relative–the sundial measures an hour as if it were always the same amount of time, but my word-counter says it just ain’t so.  Smashmatician I may be, but I really can’t explain an extra thousand words per hour unless Time is doing some squishing of its own.

My husband wickedly points out that “Smash” is also a current bit of Hawai’ian slang…  We stream a Honolulu station over the internet—when the DJs chit-chat about celebrities hooking up, the conversation runs along the lines of, “He wen’ smash wid her!”  So now that I’ve hit my deadlines for the day, maybe I’ll power down the iPad and see what other kind of Smashmatical powers I can test…