A Few Quick Observations to Mark the Passing of the Year
The other morning I was looking at my calendar and I realized that it was October. In fact, it said so, right there at the top in big bold letters above a shiny picture of caribou cavorting. I paused for a second because something felt off and I had to think about what was causing this feeling. The month being October explained the orange leaves and cold draft outside but there was something I was missing. I took a sip of my coffee, wishing there was a quicker way to get that sweet, sweet caffeine into by bloodstream to jumpstart my brain. And then it hit me – I moved to Victoria in October. October of last year. Somewhere, somehow, a whole year had just gone by.
Just last week, I was talking to a new classmate of Jen’s at a party. “I just moved here in October,” I told him, thinking it was clear that I just moved here only four or five months ago. My statement didn’t strike me as odd at the time. The party was for Thanksgiving and science has proven that the tryptophan in turkey makes you stupid. It hadn’t seemed so at the time, but looking at my calendar, I realized that something was wrong. A whole year went by in what felt like six months and, just as strange, I had eaten Thanksgiving dinner before Halloween and on a Sunday night to boot. Clearly, time must be acting differently here.
Like any seasoned researcher, I thought briefly about how much grant money I could get to help me solve this mystery, but instead I just turned to the Internet. It turns out that the origins of the first Thanksgiving are probably different from what most people in the States learn. Forget all the times you dressed up as a religious sect or as a snarky (as they say in Canada) beagle in your elementary school play. It turns out the neither the Pilgrims nor the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving Specials were the beginning of Thanksgiving. The first Thanksgiving in North America was actually held in Newfoundland in 1578 by Martin Frobisher - a British seaman who made several voyages to the New World to look for the Northwest Passage. He was giving thanks that he was on dry land and hadn’t died on the long sailing from England. If he was like most modern ocean goers, he was probably also giving thanks that he never had to sing karaoke in the ships Intermezzo Piano Lounge. With a little further research it turns out that in 1957, the Government of Canada proclaimed that a Thanksgiving holiday for an abundant harvest was to be observed on the second Monday in October. Since the harvest season generally ends earlier in Canada than it does in the States, it made sense for the holiday to be earlier as well.
I paused. While this might generally explain how I came to be slurping up cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie in October, it didn’t explain how a whole year went by in just months. Upon further reflection, I think there is a simple explanation for what’s happened - one that’s related to the biggest cultural difference between living in Portland and living in Victoria: the metric system. I constantly have to do the following rhyme in my head to figure out if I need a jacket or pants when I go outside:
Zero is freezing,
Ten is not,
Twenty is warm,
Thirty is hot.
Well, when it comes to time, either that grumpy old man who told me “the older you get, the faster time goes” was right, or more likely, Canada implemented Metric Time. Metric Time is, of course, a decimalized time system based on taking a solar day and dividing it into units of tenths, hundredths, thousands, to keep and tell time. Confused? Here’s a complete guide to Metric Time.
As I write this, I realize that I’ve actually come to grips that a whole year (3.65 kilodays) has, indeed, gone by since I moved Canada. It must be true - I'm using the word "snarky" like a natural. And my calender has pictures of caribou on it. Cheers, eh?
