how to time travel (kind of)
okay so straight-up the title is clickbait.
BUT.
i still feel like this technique could bring some amount of value to your life, so i hope that makes it a little less morally bankrupt.
no, i unfortunately cannot teach you how to control or travel through time. the best i can do is teach you how to intentionally alter your perception of time, making time feel like it is going faster than it actually is, which is only like 25% as useful, and several orders of magnitude less cool. but it still might be a good skill to learn!
in my freshman year of college, i took a trigonometry class. this surprisingly is notable for a few reasons, namely due to the fact that this class started in january of 2020. "moments before disaster," if you will. but for the few months between the class starting and the world exploding or whatever, i still had to deal with this dumbass math class.
now, i'm a changed man, but especially back in my freshman year of college, i was far from the best student. my goal in school was not to learn; it was to get through it as quickly and painlessly as possible. i was too scared of consequences to cheat, but that didn't stop me from employing other tools of the trade. skipping class,1 extended bathroom breaks, the works. and when all else failed, 'ol reliable: staring longingly at the clock, counting down the seconds until i could go home and get back to giving myself repetitive strain injuries like i was born to do.
it was in this very classroom, staring at that very clock, that the secret to time travel was revealed to me. and in my infinite wisdom and benevolence i bestow my knowledge upon to you, reader, so that you may share in this wondrous ability and practice the same technique which i so magnificently engineered and perfected. all for free!
pop quiz for the class: has everybody reading heard the song "someday" by the strokes? no? well, get on that. it's important to the time travel method, sure, but more than that it's just a phenomenal song. one of the GOATs, as some might say.2
okay now that you've familiarized yourself with that song (or relistened to the entire thing if you were already familiar), you'll clearly understand how easily you can loop that song. i know i'm kind of a freak in that when i get into a song, i really get into it. but even for people without this particular brand of brainworms, i'm hoping you'll agree on the loopability of this particular track.
i don't know if i'm just exposing more brainworms with this one, but for as long as i can remember i've almost constantly had music playing in my head. you know, when a song gets stuck in your head and you can't stop your brain from playing it with your mind's, uh, ears? well it's like that, but constantly looping the "trace classics" playlist, curated by biological intelligence™. sometimes i wish it would stop, like when i'm trying to sleep, but i've gotten used to it.
anyway, someday is already loopable as-is, but when you throw in my uh, affliction, it means that i have easily spent days of my lifetime listening to that song on loop in my head, whether i wanted to or not. the good news is that i did want to! that song is awesome and i could never see myself getting sick of it.
now, what does this random rock song from 2001, and my strange music listening habits, have anything to do with time travel? well, everything really. "someday" by the strokes is such a banger that i'm often shocked by how quickly the time goes by when listening to it. it's not a long song by any means, but it always feels like it ends sooner than i expected. this oftentimes leads to me looping it anyway.
one fateful day, in that very same trigonometry class, whilst longingly staring at that very same analog clock, a thought occurred to me. if i just intentionally looped someday in my head for the duration of this class, i bet the time would seem like it was going faster. i mean, i can easily listen to that song 10 times in a row without even realizing it. if i just focus on this instead of all the stupid nerd shit this lady in the front of the room is trying to """teach""" me, i bet things will go much smoother.
using this knowledge, i developed my own trace-certified unit of time measurement. i call it...
the "SD."
yeah okay so i'm not the best at naming things. "SD" being a shortening of "someday" works kind of well, though, and in a sentence it flows decently enough. i was kind of forced to abbreviate it due to the word "someday" already relating to the passage of time, so it made it sound very awkward when used in a sentence.
i'll admit it does make me think of super smash brothers but we'll just need to let that one slide.
the SD is powerful in that it recontextualizes everything. okay well maybe not everything, but let me ask you: what sounds worse, 30 more minutes of class, or 10 more SDs? i mean come on. i can easily listen to someday by the strokes 10 times. the best part? the song is almost exactly 3 minutes long, making it easy to mentally convert to "real" units of time measurement.
if your brain's power level isn't as strong as mine, and you're not able to listen to music in your mind like that, this is easily worked around. just get some wireless earbuds and listen with that. hell, you could just sneak in one wireless earbud if you're worried about getting in trouble for listening to music at class or work or whatever. if there's a will, there's a way!
but really though. this strategy was shockingly effective for me in college, and it continues to benefit me into adulthood too. even for frivolous things like waiting in line at the dmv or sitting in queue in an online game, the power of SDs can be applied across your whole life! and if you somehow don't like someday by the strokes, any song with a 3 minute duration can work. it's customizeable, too!
so i suppose that's it. i'm sorry that i wasn't able to provide you instructions to actually time travel, but i hope that this strategy can still be effective for you in your day-to-day life. it certainly has helped me, and if nothing else, maybe this post will introduce somebody to the strokes, and that's cool.3
employ the power of SDs into your life, and you'll be dozing off in your classes and getting laid off from your job like never before, guaranteed!™
i skipped so much, in fact, that my sociology professor had to implement a check-out procedure for the whole class because of me! she looked me straight in the eyes when announcing this to the class, so as to let me know she was onto me. that same sociology teacher also bragged about trying to run over students on campus when they walked too slow, but that's another story entirely.↩
i wouldn't say someday is my favorite song, but it's pretty much the perfect rock song as far as i'm concerned. extremely catchy main melody, just repetitive enough to get stuck in your head without getting annoying, lyrics that are surprisingly well-written for a poppy song like this, and it's the perfect length to not get sick of it. i also have a thing for lofi vocals. they just tingle my brain in the right way.↩
if you liked someday, you should listen to their other music too. it might sound like a criticism, but i genuinely love how every strokes song kind of sounds the same. it means you know what you're getting into, and it's consistently great. i really like their album room on fire.↩