All In Good Time

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• June 12, 2014

If you haven’t seen the new X-Men Days of Future Past, I highly recommend you do so.  If you don’t like X-Men, we’re probably not friends, nor will we ever be.  Not only do I love super heroes, but I’m very into time traveling stories.

If you don’t like X-Men, then…

Oh time traveling, long are the hours I’ve spent day dreaming the concept.  Perhaps it’s more than just a concept.  Even Einstein said it was possible.  Or probable.  Or theoretically.  Whatever.

Time traveling stories are hard to pull off.  They usually pose more questions than answers.  But isn’t that what makes it great?  I’m sick of answers.  I’ll take a good question over an answer any day.

Most people say that with time traveling abilities, they’d kill Hitler as an infant (this is abortion, guys).  Or they’d go catch a Beatles concert.  If they could travel to the future, they’d see where they’d end up.  Or learn who wins every Superbowl, then make a fortune on bets in the present.

(By the way, this picture is why the internet is the best.)

The time traveling conundrum is this: if you go back in time, and kill your mother before you are born, then who killed your mother?  Because you would have never been born.  The more important question here though is, who the fuck is going back in time to kill their mother?  There are few people on this planet I love more than my mom.  The last person on planet Earth I would kill is her.  Everyone knows, you should avoid your parents if you travel back in time, because there’s a chance they might be sexually attracted to you.

The appeal of time travel for me, is not about changing the past, but rather learning the truth.  History is nothing but an exaggerated version of the truth told by the people who won.  To be an observer, and to learn what’s been twisted over the years, would be fantastic… mostly.

Finding out the truth about JFK, the dinosaurs, and Jesus would be super cool.  But it would be too tempting to look at ones own life, and those who so heavily influenced it.  But I think what you would find is a web of un-truths.  I won’t call them lies.  There will be that too, but an un-truth is different from a lie.  An un-truth is just something that people believe is true but isn’t.  I think you’ll find that half of your life is un-true memories.

More than unveiling the truth, time travel is about control.  Time, for certain, cannot be controlled.  It moves at the same pace, in the same direction, and you’re given only so much of it. Like a floater in your eye, you can never look directly at it.  It will always move away from you.

Our society loves the cliche saying, “youth is wasted on the young.”  I feel like this year has gone faster than any year I’ve lived before.  Twenty-five is not so old, but before I know it, people will be telling me that my time to bear children is almost up.  I disagree with that saying, because in my youth, I didn’t realize the time passing, or that I was young, or that one day, I’d wish I could go back to certain moments.  It’s not the moments I want to change that I’d want to go back to.  I’d leave those.  My mistakes shaped me.  It’s those family vacations in Disney World, time spent on the beach, when I was with people I love, just laughing.  Those are the the places I want to go.

Last weekend I went surfing with some of the crew I grew up with.  I dropped in on one of my best friends from childhood. The wave closed out, and we both tumbled off our boards, and then we giggled like kids, and for a moment, I forgot I wasn’t twelve.  Because it’s impossible to waste time, if you’re not aware of it at all.