Man of Time

"Never doubt the timing of things. They may not happen exactly when and how you think they should, but they will always happen when and how they are supposed to." -Randi G Fine

"You just never know where life is going to take you. You never know where your talent level is going to be and timing is everything." -Fred Funk

1.

When I opened my hand underneath my desk, my pencil rolled into the palm of my hand. It just happened to be that way every time. I wasn't trying to catch the pencil. My hand was just there for it at the right time, every time.

When I was about 9, I mastered spinning my pencil on my fingers. I liked rolling and spinning my pencil between my fingers, while pretending to pay attention in class. I don't remember how I got to learn how to do it, but I remember the day I tried to teach it to my friend.

While practicing what I taught him, my friend dropped his pencil. The pencil flew out of his hand and hit the floor.  I asked him, "You give up?"  "No."  "Then why didn't you catch it?" I remember my friend pausing for a moment. I guess he was trying to see whether I was joking or not. Then, he reluctantly replied, "I couldn't." His reply upset me a lot. I never dropped my pencil on the floor, so for him to drop a pencil meant to me that he let that happen intentionally, as though throwing the pencil to the floor. I kept asking him why he dropped the pencil, and we eventually got into a fight. 

I never played with my pencil again.

2. 

When I was in 5th grade, I started to notice a unique feature of my life. At the end of the school year, our school gave special recognition to students who had not missed a single school day. I wasn't expecting my name to be announced for perfect attendance that year, because I remembered that I skipped a school day and played at the playground instead. To my surprise, the teacher called my name and I received an award. After class, I asked my closest friend about the day I skipped school. We figured out that the school had an emergency closure that morning, because the entire faculty experienced some food poisoning symptoms that they suspected to have caught during a faculty meeting. I realized how that coincidental food poisoning allowed me not to get caught by my parents for skipping school that year. I didn't understand any statistics or probability at the time, but I knew that I was a very lucky man.

3.

There was a TV cartoon show that I always watched when I came back from school. I never missed a single episode. However, in the following year, the cartoon's final episode was going to be aired on the day of my class field trip. School day was going to be a bit longer than usual due to the trip, so missing the last episode of my TV show was inevitable. The day before my field trip, I was so heartbroken while I watched my favorite show for the last time. I thought I would never get to know how the story was going to end.

The next day, it rained.

I watched the ending of my favorite show with great delight. But I began to have a curiosity of the extent of my luckiness. I figured that I was a lucky guy all along, but I wasn't sure the extent of my luckiness or what I was capable of with my luck.

4.

In 8th grade, I finally had enough curiosity and playfulness of adolescence to put my luckiness to test. I stole a lottery ticket from a convenience store. I scratched the silver coating off the ticket with a coin, and I won $50. I didn't try to claim anything since I was underage and the ticket was stolen.

I wasn't happy at all. I was nervous; I was stunned.

I didn't want to give it to my parents, because they would start questioning me of my misbehavior, so I gave it to a friend.

5.

I didn't come up with another creative test to discover the extent of my luck for a while. I daydreamed about how I could test my luckiness from time to time but they were either too mundane to prove anything or too daring to even try. So I decided to just ignore all the lucky moments in my life as mere coincidences.

In high school, I got to learn more about statistics, which seemed like a reasonable and logical explanation to what had happened in my life. After all, I realized that everybody have some moments in their lives which seem so perfectly planned out to be accepted or understood as mere coincidences. I was an ordinary boy in high school, going through an ordinary life, and that's how I wanted it to be for the rest of my life. However, each time I won small bets between my friends, and avoided getting tardy or absent marks in class, the idea that I'm extraordinary kept coming back to me. By the end of 9th grade, I finally came up with a good method to put this idea to test.

I decided to join my school's baseball team.

6.

I never swung a bat in my life until I was 16 years old, when I joined our high school's baseball team as a sophomore. I didn't know what to expect of myself in how well I would be hitting the ball. If I was truly an extraordinarily lucky man, I would hit a home run every swing. If I can't hit a single ball, my ideas of luckiness would be proven as something delusional.  

"Strike!"

I was relieved in a strange way. Being back as the norm is a very comfortable feeling. But somehow, the second ball of my entire life hit my bat. It wasn't as though I swung the bat to hit the ball. It was more like the ball flew towards the bat that I was swinging, and it ended as a foul. The next ball wasn't a home run, but it flew quite far enough for me to run to first base.

I didn't hit a lot of home runs or hit every swing throughout the season, but I managed to perform just enough to save our team's score from critical moments. The statistics didn't highlight my performance as outstanding, but by the end of that semester, I was the star of our school's baseball team. 

7.
I got carried away with being part of the baseball team as a valued player. By my senior year, I came to a point where I no longer thought about being lucky, but believed that I simply found my true talent as a baseball player after all.

Despite of my popularity in school as a baseball player, I had no confidence in myself when it came to matters with women. There was a girl in my class, whose beauty caught my eyes every time along with the eyes of many other guys. I didn't have the courage to even approach and speak with her. As our Prom approached, however, I felt the urge to leave at least a few romantic memories in my adolescence. And if I were to make only one last romantic relationship, why not make it with the girl I found most attractive? It may have been because I needed some confidence in any form or because I was simply desperate, but anyway, the thought of my luckiness came back to me.

Love is a powerful emotion, and it led me to think and reevaluate all the fortunate events of my life that may possibly give me some advantage in getting her attention. There was one thing that I was absolutely confident in, keeping time. I have never missed a dropping pen nor have been late for class or anything that I wished to attend. And perhaps, I may have been able to even steal a winning lottery ticket because of this ability of carrying my actions on the exact right time.

8.
While dancing with Jessica at Prom, she whispered to me that she was so glad that I asked her to attend the event as her partner, because she had just broken up with her ex-boyfriend just a few days ago. I had a great time with Jessica at the party, and she wanted to spend more time with me that night after the party. My heart raced at the chance of spending a lucky night with her. As I was about to buy a condom for the first time at a convenience store, I received a phone call. I was notified that my family got involved in a car accident and left me alone in this world.

It's a bit funny to look back at what I thought about everything back then. I mean, getting a phone call about the death of my kin, not just one member but the entire family, while trying to buy a condom after Prom? Besides, I've been thinking all along that I was the luckiest guy in the world with a unique ability of being on perfect time. 

But looking back at it, this tragedy happened at an age where I was old enough to be independent. If my family were destined to die and leave me, it could have been a lot worse if it had happened when I was younger. Later on, I even found out that Jessica had been pregnant by her ex-boyfriend near our Prom date. My fate could have ended up a lot worse if I had spent the night with her that night at Prom.

9.

My family's death served as a great excuse for me during college to get heavily drunk frequently. Frankly, I don't regret a single one of those nights of partying and binge drinking, because even in those wild times, I was never late to any of my classes or duties. The answer to my long held question about myself was very clear to me by then. No matter what I did, I wasn't going to be late. Even if things that I didn't wish for happened, they were all for a greater good in the future. In addition, my actions were taking place at a specific time that brought me favorable outcomes, like hitting a baseball on critical moments in the game. I literally proved this to myself on numerous trips to Casinos. I didn't hit jackpots every single time to be blacklisted or gain attention, but I never returned losing money.

Despite living hedonistic days, I did try to plan out my future. During a drunken night while I was contemplating about what occupation I should aim for, I thought of journalism, because I will always be at the right place, at the right time, all the time.

10

My job as a journalist is a piece of cake. Wherever I go, there is news to report, and whenever there is news, I am there. No need to rush and no need to run. I could even go on trips for a break anytime, and even then, I would be in the middle of a special event if I needed to show some professionalism as a journalist. Life started to feel too easy for me with the knowledge of what I was capable of, along with the confidence that all outcomes will eventually turn out to be positive.

11

There's one thing I'm incapable of and that is the failure of attending to my duties. I have a natural tendency to work up towards my goals, but even if I tried to run away from my duties or try to intentionally fail something I'm working on, I couldn't. It is as though my life is on a train track that I have no control what so ever to get off of or make a turn. I don't have many complaints about this, but it makes me wonder what all these favorable outcomes are ultimately for. I don't feel like my freedom is compromised in anyway, because I eventually reach what I hope for, but I wonder what would have happened all along if I had hoped to intentionally harm others. If I were a terrorist, I am sure that I can be an infamous one. But somehow, I didn't turn out to be a very despiteful man, since the tracts of my life led me to some place morally straight instead of evil.

My question is, however, where does it go from here?

12

Everything I've done in my life so far has been for myself. I mean, I could have achieved many greater things for the good of the public with my ability, but I chose a path of convenience for my own life, and I became a journalist. For the first time, I'll do something more altruistic. I volunteered to write a report on the crimes of a vicious terrorist organization that people seem to care less about because no American has been involved.

Shit, this is the 12th entry about my life! Why didn't I notice all along about the reason for the sudden urge to write about myself nowadays?

•  ~ .

Fuck, I just dropped my pen.

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Epilogue:

"Masson Chrone is an American journalist. At the age of 24, he eradicated an entire notorious terrorist organization, in the midst of its operation with a single baseball bat. He has been missing since the massacre, but intelligence agencies speculate him to be dead." -an excerpt from an online encyclopedia.