unit of account

Having recently been informed that the Inca reckoned the passage of time against the duration it took to cook a potato made me reshuffle my own ponderings on how we measure time. Of course, the size of a potato should be taken into consideration as well as the time it would take to boil would vary a lot between the Amazon basin or at the mountain citadel of Machu Picchu—which is a much different form of time-dilation than what Albert Einstein worked with. Since I began wearing this little snitch on my wrist, I’ve noticed that I am becoming quite obsessed with the different metrics that track my rest and wakefulness and hardly ever look at the watch face any more, though always have been an avid walker and flaneur. It’s as if I can tell what time it is by the pedometer count and whether I’m a-pace, ahead or lagging behind the typical day. Are you driven to get your steps in? I am motivated by the little feeling of accomplishment and conditioned message of praise. Living so much of our lives virtually, augmented and in a sense either accelerated or outside of time altogether, it’s strange that we can still find routine and patterns in unmediated data, cues that’s processed and collated echelons above in ways we don’t understand.