i fail at bus.

It takes 11-13 minutes to walk up the hill to downtown.

When I checked this morning, I saw that the next buses would be arriving up the hill downtown in 4 and 14 minutes. “Aha!,” I thought. “It takes three minutes to walk down the hill to the ‘at trailer park’ stop. I can just go there and it will be just perfect timing.”

If the bus stopped at the trailer park after it stopped downtown, it would have been perfect timing. But it is the other way around. It’s not as if this is news to me—the whole reason I like to walk up the hill to downtown is so that I spend less time in the over-heated, motion-sickness (not-helped-by-drunks-reeking-of-cigarettes-booze-filtered-out-the-skin-and-and-sometimes-also-urine)-inducing bus.

I arrived at the trailer park stop feeling quite satisfied with myself. And then I thought I’d check when the next bus was going to come so that I could inwardly gloat over my great timing. Then I received the text telling me the next bus was in 36 minutes. I went blank and confused for a couple of minutes as I tried to process this. It slowly dawned on me that the bus that would be downtown in 14 minutes stopped at the trailer park while I was traipsing down my driveway on the way to the trailer park stop.

Sigh.

I go through periods of obsessively tracking how much time everything takes. This is how I know it is 3 minutes to the trailer park stop from home, 11-13 minutes to the downtown stop from home, 9-10 minutes from the frat house stop to my desk at work, 12 minutes from the cheap parking deck to my desk, and so on. I always think that if I just know how long everything takes, my problems with time will be solved. I am always wrong.

Times just do not stay in my head in a meaningful way long enough for me to line them all up properly. This is why I have spreadsheets to calculate when to leave for the airport and what time to start baking bread if I want toast at 4.30pm.

Now, this morning I was super-fixated on getting to work at 9:30am because a) that’s what time I am supposed to be there; and b) I had a meeting at 10am and I needed to refresh my memory on the matters at hand. At least, I was pretty sure the meeting was at 10am, but I realized I needed to check just as I shut down my computer before leaving home for the day, and I hadn’t written it in my calendar—because for some reason I always think I will remember the time. Or that I will remember to check the time before I shut down or leave my computer.

Finally it sunk in that I was totally going to be late to my meeting if I took the bus, walked, or biked. I clambered back up the hill and jumped in my car, hoping I’d be able to get back up the hill after work (winter storm alert!).

When I hit my desk at work at 9.20am, I felt slightly heroic for being 10 minutes early. This gave me plenty of time to prepare for my meeting, because it didn’t start until 11.

Every time I have a time-fail like this, I resolve to get my act together and do better. I try, but it never works for long.

Perhaps this is what used to make my parents say “She’s book-smart but she has no common sense.” Which is not true. I have plenty of common sense. It’s just that, between the ADHD and the depersonalization, I happen to nearly lack the normally-functioning time-sense module of the common sense package.

At least I’ve long since given up beating up and berating myself for being an idiot and feeling ashamed when these things happen. Now I can usually laugh at myself and accept that I’m far from an idiot, but certain tangles of my brain just aren’t hooked up right. I do what I can. What I can’t be is perfect, and I’ve got no time for feeling bad about my humanity (except for when I’d rather be a cat).

Oh look, suddenly it’s an hour later than I thought it was and there’s a 9am all-staff meeting that is still on despite the weather being bad enough that the university canceled classes until 11am tomorrow.