there's a reason i'm always ten minutes late

My mother has this habit of "rounding" the time. Like when we were growing up, when there was a 8:30 am dentist appointment, she'd tell us it was at eight so that we'd be strapped into the car by 8:15. This was clever, but we really got screwed during the times when the appointment actually was at 8 am.

I blame her for my overly optimistic time-judgement, which has put me in a perpetual rush for nearly all of my life. It's been a running joke in the family that I've only been on time once in my life, and that was on the day I was born: Monday morning at 10:30 am. It was the target day the doctors had expected and I showed up, just as predicted.

So while I've been unemployed, I've gone through some of the boxes of miscellaneous things and happened to stumble upon an envelope stashed among old magazines and tax bills from 1987. In it were our birth announcements, Christening announcements as well as the little placards they put on our clear plastic cribs in the hospital nursery where we hung out to be gazed upon through the window after we were born.

Of course I was comparing them, because I like to win. My brother was 19 inches long and I was 19 and 1/4 inches long; he weighed 5 pounds, 8 oz. and I weighed 5 pounds, 10 oz.; even my room number was higher than his (I was in room 234 and he was only in room 232.) All was right in the world. Until I looked at the birth times. It turns out that I was born at 10:40 am, not 10:30.

Suddenly I felt like all my life, I'd been living a lie. And when I told my mother, she she shrugged it off. "Eh, 10:40, 10:30, it's practially the same thing."

From this point on, I take no responsibility for my inability to show up on time.