Revelations on time and perception

When something from your past comes back and re-enters your life, a strange thing happens. You start to really feel the burden of time. I used to always think about how time was just this unimportant system of organization and I was completely wrong. I'm reading this book called A Sideways Look at Time by Jay Griffiths, and she dicusses what little bearing the true notion of time has on our bodies and ideas. She writes that our perception of this artificial system has changed the way we think and has limited our experiences throughout the course of human existence. Despite all of her research and everything she claims to be fact, I know that she is totally misrepresenting her findings. What we need to take into consideration is that our perception is all we have. The checks and balances of society do not alter our thinking, our perception alters the fundamental evolution of that society. We are biologically destined to pursue that which will increase our chance of survival. If we can space out different events into set units, then we facilitate learning and episodic memory. I would say that learning from experience is a pretty advantageous trait for an organism to possess. To get off this biological rant I always find myself engaging in, I want to talk about a phenomenon that occurs as a result of time. Let us just say, hypothetically, you spend a certain amount of time with a person. That person starts to represent something in your life. In your brain this person and your experiences with him or her will get filed in some cabinet with the heading: Fuck Buddy, or Dickwad, or Drug Dealer, or Bus Driver, or Cult Leader, or whatever. Now you have learned something. Despite your greatest efforts to smoke as much drugs as possible to unlearn all that your ninth grade World Cultures teacher tried to teach you about the Hutu and Tutsi tribes of Central Africa, here you are learning about life with every human exchange. That segment of experiences has become a part of what you've become. You can look back into that cabinet and say, that experience is mine and this person means this to me. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. We have ways to take that cabinet and pry it open with every instrument of emotional destruction we can get our selfish hands on. People lie to each other, change their image, say the wrong things, write the wrong words, hump the wrong friends, laugh at each others expense, and anything else to do whatever they can for the slightest feeling of comfort. I've learned that it's exhausting to deal with that change. It's impossible to change you really are, genetics just doesn't work in our favor in that department. And don't even try to comment on your aunt who was having trouble meeting guys at dive bars in Wisconsin before she increased her bust size to double D, what she has gained in chest size she has lost in dignity so they cancel each other out. Trying to alter your emotional attachment to the time spent with a person is futile. What happened was at a different point on the timeline of existence and we need that sense of history to understand the world around us. What's right here in front of us is new, but that doesn't mean it's bad. The best you can do is get excited about what's happening, because pretty soon it'll change. And I always try to remember how comforting that can be. What would be the point of living the same present over and over again? I'd rather castrate myself with one of those Nathan's two-pronged plastic fry forks. And on that note, I leave you confused and appauled to be affiliated with somone who actually has fun writing this bullshit.