The Chicken

Welcome back to Tea with Liya! Today, I'm playing what you might call a "modern jazz" tune by Pee Wee Ellis. It's called "The Chicken," and it was written in 2001 - that's 20 years ago now, but it's pretty new compared to the jazz songs that were written in the 1940s. I hope you like listening to it!


Listen to the song here
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So, we've got the year 2001. We've finally turned the corner of the century (and the millennium), but there's another hundred years in front of us now. In fact, right now in 2021, we've only gotten through a 5th of them. Twenty years isn't nearly as much as a hundred, is it? Maybe 2001 isn't very far away.

But, if you were 7, you would say that you didn't exist in 2001. That must have been a long time ago, then. What was happening in 2001?

If it was 2057, then 2001 would be as far away as 1965 is now. Then, you'd have a real reason to say it was a long time ago. You also would if you were talking about events that happened in the last week, and then 2001 came up in the conversation.

Time, then, seems to be a lot more relative than we might notice. Not only do lengths of time seem longer or shorter in different contexts, but it also seems to pass faster in certain situations than in others.

You might think, while waiting for a slow traffic light, that half an hour has passed, when in reality it's only been 5 minutes. On the other hand, when you're taking a vacation for a week, the end seems to come before it's even started.

You want to know another way in which time is relative? Right now, it's 5 AM. You must have really decided that waking up at 5 AM would change your life. I don't know how many times I saw that YouTube recommendation...

But wait, my clock clearly says 8!

What if I was using PST, and you're using EST? Now, we're both running on different clocks and trying to coordinate times.

Even minutes and seconds aren't concepts that are embedded into the nature of time - if that's what it should be called. Someone had to decide to use those as a tool for measurement.

There's sometimes no way of knowing exactly what is meant by a "long time" or a "short time." There's a lot of variables one would have to look at to make a conclusion about what amount of time that actually is. Even though we have clocks on our walls, they don't tell us everything we need to know.

Maybe now, rather than the clock being on your wall, it would be on your computer screen. You know what I'm going to put there?

A teacup - now it's your turn to fill it up!
~Liya