When poets write about time, they seem to be adrift some sort of cloud, snatching florid and euphoric verses floating in midair and stacking them neatly into stanzas. When workaholics discuss it, they sound harried and victimized. When nostalgic people talk about it, their words drip out in melancholy, wistful tones. Time plays tricks. Time is killed. Time drifts, flies, flutters, and flits.

At this point, I could paint some pretty metaphor about hourglasses or sweeping paper or ruffling wall calendar pages. But you’ve heard it all before. These archetypal images are really only created as a way to make time seem like something attractive and acceptable in our sour and shaken minds. However, as much as we try to normalize time in our minds by making it something pretty and natural, like the “sands of time,” it’s still the strangest phenomenon that exists.

Sometimes, as a busy and crazed high school student, I find time’s puzzle tapping on my mind quite often. The first key thing was my packed schedule as a junior. I get up, go to school, stay after school an hour and a half everyday for various reasons, and come home to slump in a chair and complete homework. Over time, this homework period was slowly replaced by more frivolous activity. But nonetheless, the effect of rigorous routine on time was something funny, something certain yet unsettling.

Because this is really the funny thing about time: it is the one certain and periodic thing that we can all always count on as humans, yet its passage in the form of a rigorous, repetitive monotone is extremely unsettling. Because it becomes like a familiar, yet alien thing. While people tend to thrive on the possession of niches and comfort zones, this one is rather unsettling because it is made constant by its constant rate of change.

But the weird thing about time is that even spontaneity and variety don’t seem to make it any more comfortable of a niche. This year I pulled my first all-nighter – my first and last, to be careful and specific. I was faintly curious, in the back of my head as I frantically completed a project last minute, about what would happen if I stayed up all night, upsetting my natural settings. I kept looking back at the clock, and, as it got later, the world seemed to be bathed more and more in a strange, tangerine, and alien haze. Things seemed odd, and I kept feeling urges, not just out of sleepiness, but out of my proclivity towards normalcy, to go back to sleep and depart from my really weird surroundings. So, as predicted, even spontaneous events can’t ease time’s awkward passage.

Once in a short version of the game “Would you rather?” a peer asked me whether I would rather keep hearing a persistent beeping at regular intervals in my ears, or a random beeping. I’m pretty sure I laughed. Because either way I would go absolutely insane.