Re-Tardiness.

As many of you know, I’m often late. It’s a chronic condition commonly known as tardiness. Let’s take a look at the word a little more closely, because I think it is telling of whom I am or, at the very least, how I act sometimes.

According to Dictionary.com: [Alteration of Middle English tardive, slow, from Old French tardif, from Vulgar Latin *tard vus, from Latin tardus.]

Vulgar Latin? Gee. I wonder where the vulgarity comes in to play. It seems, Gentle Readers, that tardy is another word for retard. So, I am a retard because I am tardy more often than not.

I stumbled across this not-so-revelatory revelation last night as I was listening to music, staring at a blank Microsoft Word page, dismayed by my lack of creativity that my lead to generating some possible blog topics for the days ahead. Yeah, that’s right. I was trying to plan ahead.

Instead, I screamed inside and did not post to the blog after midnight, as I had planned. I thought to myself, “Great. Now I’m going to get some crappy, retarded thing up there tomorrow late in the day and no one will read it. I am always fucking late.” Two key words there, obviously: retarded and late. And then, in a neat bit of synthesis, my brain reorganized the statement and I repeated to myself, “I am fucking retarded.” Then I thought, “Wait. Tard. Tardy.” And, I have myself a nifty little post.

I can’t speak to the virtues of tardiness. Certainly, it is largely drawback. Timeliness, on the other hand, gives one the advantage of being the first to arrive, or simultaneous arrival with whomever you’re meeting/working with. Getting started on time is important when we work because, well, the business days has strictures, and one of those is time.

But creativity doesn’t have time boundaries. That’s one reason why time is this amorphous thing in my retarded head.

Oh, sure, it used to be very important to me that I was on time. Certainly, a bell schedule in high school helped matters quite a bit. Deadlines for essays and projects, too. Rehearsal schedules. You get the point. After college, though, all those timelines vanished and it was all me and all nothing. Writing doesn’t need a schedule, but it’s helpful to have one. But when I had nothing to do, there wasn’t a need for walls.

Suffice it to say, I know better than to be late. I have disappointed, upset, enraged, pissed off, driven to murderous rage many people close and not so close to me because of my often late habits.

In college, I dated a woman who lived two hours away. One Saturday, I was to drive up to see her and go to a local festival with her and her friends. I was an RA at the time, so, I was “On Duty” the night before (basically, making sure nobody got drunk, made noise and/or fell off the balcony). These nights typically required staying up till 1 or 2. In fact, our RA guidelines mandated we keep our doors open till at least midnight. I’m not an early riser, so, I shut my door at 11 and went to bed soon after.

But I still didn’t get up till later than planned and I got to my girlfriend and her friends two hours late. That’s right. Two hours.

I was 90 minutes late for my first date with my current girlfriend. Sure, I called ahead to amend the meet-up time, but I was still later than expected.

These are two supreme examples of my retardation. In both cases, the people expecting me were important. Yet my tardiness not only suggested that I was unreliable, but also that I viewed them as not that important.

In relationships, tardiness creates anxiety and resentment, which soon leads to anger, which soon leads to the Dark Side – err, arguments, anyway. Nothing groundbreaking about that statement, I realize, but it’s important to have it on a Google search in case some teenage boy whose father never bothered to teach him about respect for relationships comes across it. Or, better still, a tacit acknowledgement of my fuck-up-itude.

Tardiness for work is another matter altogether. In a lot of jobs, they’ll just fire your ass. I’ve been fortunate in that regard, as the majority of my jobs here in Los Angeles have had flexible work hours. Still, I recognize that coming in later than most of my co-workers sets an ugly precedent and suggests to Higher-Ups that perhaps I’m not as invested in my job and the organization as they’d like.

Would I show up earlier if I loved my job? Hard to say.

I do believe, however, that chronic tardiness represents a social retardation of sorts. If late people can’t arrive to congregate with other people in a timely fashion, maybe there’s something wrong with them. Maybe they’re socially retarded. Maybe I’m socially retarded.

Yuck. So many words and so little revealed. If I were a judge – or better yet, a teacher – I’d say that I spent a lot of time and used a lot of words stating my case to you, the public, the jury, etc. but that, ultimately, I didn’t make my case.

Tomorrow: A Smelly Hobby.