Now. This is going to be a weird post. See, for as long as I can remember, when I think about years, decades, centuries, even millinia, I see them in my head in this certain way, this certain formation. There's some bits of it that seem pretty normal, but others that just seem weird.
So I thought, "I know! I'll describe it all on PPT! And I can even draw crappy graphics to really make it comprehendable!"
So here goes nothing.
First, when I picture a particular year, this one for example, I see it this way:
Pretty normal, right? The months descending downward like a calendar. Except, remember these are crappy graphics. I don't just see the names of the months, I see a grid, like a calendar. Except there are no numbers, because I can't remember what date fell on which day in any months, not even the current one. The grid is just there to give a vague representation of the thirty or so days in each month.
Now, when I think about multiple years together, they go across like this:
Again, pretty normal (except they too actually have the grids as described above). All my years going left to right. I see future years (2006, 2007, etc.) in this same manner. But I only picture a few years at a time this way, and usually only close ones.
When I think about years themselves, just the years, as singular things, not as blocks of twelve months, I picture them like this:
They go downward like that, all the way down, through the 90s, and the 80s.
This is where it starts getting really weird. When I think about the decades of the last century, I see them like this:
They go up, from 1900, 1910, the 1920s, the 1930s, onward, until 1980. Then everything shifts over, and the 1980s are next to the 1970s, instead of above them. I can only assume my brain decided to seperate the 80s because I was born smack in the middle of them, and they begin the fragment of time that I as a human occupy. (The years within each decade block are stacked the same as seen in the previous image).
It's when I start taking previous centuries into context that things get even stranger:
Okay, the 1900s go upward as seen above. And the 1800s are to the right, and so on and so forth, going right to left through time (no clue why my brain doesn't make them go left to right).
The odd thing is, every century gets it's own space next to one another. But as you saw above, the 21st century (starting in 2000) is stacked above the 1980s & 1990s. But I probably did that because they're part of my lifetime so far, so I need them all on the same plane or something.
Also, this is where it all stops making sense, because if you were to cut out a model of all this from paper or something, the 1980s and 1990s would have to lay on top of the 1880s and 1890s.
Now, all of the centuries of the rest of the past couple of millenia continue on in this way, side by side:
Here we have another overlap. Picture it this way (I could've drawn a picture for this, but umm, I didn't think to). The crossover from B.C. to A.D. is usually represented like this:
3 B.C. 2 B.C. 1 B.C • 1 A.D. 2 A.D. 3 A.D.
Now, in my head it's the same way, even if it doesn't seem like it from my crappy graphics. Imagine that the above example was printed on a strip of paper. Now fold the paper in on itself right along the dot. Okay, it's like that.
In a nutshell, like the 1980s and 1990s would overlap the 1880s and 1890s, the first 100 years of A.D. would overlap the last 100 years of B.C..
Now, were you tempted to tilt your head to the right because of how I wrote "B.C. Time" on the above image? I hope so.
Because everything rotates 90° for B.C.:
This is pretty self-explanatory. I view B.C. on a horizontal, going backwards from right to left (because you're
supposed to view it that way). The major difference is, I only see B.C. in millenium blocks, unlike A.D., which I see in century blocks.
Okay folks. That was the warped tour of the way my brain envisions time. I hope you all enjoyed that (and you probably all think I'm nuts now, but I just had to get that out of my head =P).
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