Traveling Back in Time

by Madeleine Kando

I really don’t like what I have done with my hair. The picture I saw in the magazine looked so nice. I even went to the trouble of photoshopping it and superimposing my own features to see what I would look like. I was very pleased, so as soon as my hairdresser could squeeze me in, off I went with my photoshopped illustration in my purse and a vision of looking like a film star. What I ended up with was totally different.

Not only did I not look like a film star. I looked like an oversized carrot with a perm. I barely made it to the dark safety of my car (with a parking ticket stuck under the windshield wiper to boot) where I started to sob uncontrollably. I knew my life was ruined. I could not be seen in public any more.

As I was driving off, barely seeing the road through my tears, I was contemplating giving the steering wheel a sharp twist to the left so that I would crash into the oncoming traffic and end it all right then and there.

I had to pick up the kids from school and didn’t have time to drive home to turn on the gas and shove my carrot colored head in the oven door. The look on my children’s faces when they spotted me will be etched into my memory forever. For a brief moment they simply did not know who I was. After a while they silently climbed into the car and just kept staring at me without uttering a word.

I knew I had made the biggest mistake of my life. I started to think feverishly. Can you glue hair back on? Can you undo a bleaching? Can you straighten a permanent perm? I could hear a resounding ‘no’ to all these questions.

But WHY? Who made this stupid rule that you cannot undo things? Whoever is responsible for having created the world must have been the biggest idiot. I mean if you have the power to create an entire world, why not do it right and make bad things be undoable?

If I had been in charge I would not have been so cruel as to force gullible housewives into walking around like oversized carrots. I would have made time reversible. I would have created time like space. You don’t like where you live? Just move to another town. You don’t like what you did to your hair? Just move to another time where no such deed took place.

I can hear you think already: ‘but space has dimensions and time doesn't. Time is something that we have invented to prevent everything from happening at once.’ Yeah, yeah. I heard that argument before. Another argument you hear is that if time were reversible entropy could decrease which would violate the second law of thermodynamics (if left alone, anything will eventually revert back to chaos).

Well a little less chaos wouldn't be such a bad thing, would it? Besides I don't need help from father time in that department. I am very good at creating chaos all on my own, thank you very much.

My conclusion is that time is irreversible because we don’t live long enough. Take my hair for instance. If I were to live 3000 years and I would look back on my life as if I was watching a movie, my carrot hair would take up a brief moment of that time and then would return to its normal color. This might happen a few times (depending how many stupid hair-mistakes I would make over a 3000 year span). As I would watch the life-line of my hair, I would be able to play it back in reverse and it would look the same as if I played it forward. Like watching a tree turn brown and green over and over again over the course of many seasons.

So, is the solution to all bad things to let enough time pass? Would bad things eventually revert back to good things and vice versa? Unfortunately we do not have the luxury of living for 3000 years and undo all the bad things we have done during our lives. Maybe that’s why the concept of time is inevitable. It keeps us in line. It keeps us from making too many foolish mistakes. After all, if everything can be undone: why do the right thing to begin with?

Note: If the above theory sounds somewhat illogical it is because I am suffering from post traumatic hair disorder. leave comment here