Weekend Assignment: A Button to Pause Time

This one is based on a question posed by Michele Agnew on http://micheleagnew.com, way back in 2005.

Weekend Assignment #336: Magic Button<

If you could have a magic button that would do one particular thing for you, up to once a day, what would that function be?

Extra Credit: Would your answer to the above change if it were a person doing the task (for free and without complaint, using ordinary human abilities) rather than a magic button?

Here's what my magic button would look like:

For over five years now, I've coveted a button that could pause time. (The graphic above, for example, dates back to January 2005.) I'd love to hit a pause button, and have time move forward only locally around me. I would go to bed, sleep until I'm not even a little bit tired, read, take a bath, watch a DVD, eat lunch, read the email and message board stuff that was already there when time was paused, and get some serious writing done. When I had finally done all the sleeping, reading, writing, housework and hanging out that my body and mind craved, I would hit "unpause," jump back to real time without losing the benefits of my actions in "local time," and get on with my day. Imagine goofing off for ten hours, sleeping for another ten hours and still having 24 hours left for work and Facebook and television and everything else that involved interacting in real time. It would be great! I'm sure there are other people who are bored, who have nothing much to fill up their days, and would therefore find a time pause useless. I'm not one of them.

The extra credit is harder for me to answer. I suppose I would have to frame it as having the ability to hire someone to do that daily task. Oh, except I said for free. Well, then, it's someone who just loves to do this task so much that she's happy to do it for free, or else loves me so much she insists on helping out in this way. Or both. At that point we're pretty much getting in the realm of housework. My all-too-mundane answer is to get the someone to wash and put away the dishes, if I can count that as one thing. Alternatively, it would be nice to have someone do the physical labor part of sorting through boxes with me, organizing the results into trash, recycling, donations and several flavors of "keep," and putting the results in the appropriate places. Yeah, that would be good.

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In other meme news, I've decided to give up on

at least for now. For both weeks of this meme, which was meant to fill in for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot while Carly is on hiatus, only Jama and I participated. Thanks, Jama!  I may give this, or something like it, another shot later. For now, though, when I'm really busy with other things, a meme with almost no response isn''t really worth my time. Sorry!

Karen