I think about time zones a lot.

Because the majority of my most formative friendships began on tumblr, all of us flung across the globe, all of us online at strange hours just so we could catch each other.

Because I’ve shuffled between Eastern, Central, and Pacific throughout my 29 years of living in nine different cities.

Because every relationship I’ve ever been in has, for a significant stretch, been long distance.

Because of that summer I wasn’t sleeping and kept a mental catalog of which friends I could text when it was 2, 3, 4, 5 o’clock in the morning my time without worrying about it being a bad time for them.

Because my dad was overseas a lot when I was growing up and once lived in a place with a half-hour time zone, and no one ever believed me about it!!!!

Because someone in my pandemic game night group started saying “6/8/9 damn so fine” when confirming what time we would be meeting within our respective time zones.

Because I just started working full time here at Autostraddle, where the senior team is spread across two (and sometimes three, thanks to Laneia living in Arizona which likes to make up its own temporal rules) different time zones, so it seems like we’re all counting out hours on our fingers before agreeing to meeting times.

It really is that last one that led to me creating Time Zones Week tbh. Starting this job placed time zones front and center in my day-to-day brain in a way that hasn’t been the case since I lived in Chicago (I feel like living in Central time is just, like, endless time-math for some reason??? Like even worse than Pacific somehow???).

So I threw this out there to the rest of the senior team:

you will note that these messages were sent before I learned “time zones” is two words, not one

And then this:

Thankfully, people did have interesting things to say about time zones. I anticipated a lot of pitches about how Time Zones Suck. I was technically open to essays of that nature, bc yeah! Time zones do indeed suck! But ultimately, the six pieces I moved forward with (HAVE YOU READ THEM? GO READ THEM.) were more about bending time zones. They were about finding ways to transcend physical and emotional distance. They were even, sometimes, about time zones being Good. Like how time zones meant I almost always had people to text when I couldn’t sleep that summer, others found strange and surprising upsides of temporal dissonance.

I wasn’t ready for how much these pieces would teach me about time zones, a thing I thought I knew so well. Grief has its own time zone. Relationships are their own time zones. Kitchens have their own time zones. Time can be bent, and it can jump, and it can hurt, and it can heal.

When I met with artist and designer Vivienne Le, who did all of the outstanding illustrations for the series, they said they promised they wouldn’t draw any clocks. We laughed. We were on the same page: NO CLOCKS ALLOWED. (We also both admitted it was hard not to think of clocks when reading the pieces, be they literal or abstract.) Viv had another rule in mind: no straight lines. These illustrations would be curvy, swirly things unrestricted by the confines of straight lines, of time.

Vivienne nailed the vibe and scope of these essays, all distinct and yet bound by some unintentional overlaps, like the fact that they all more or less deal with a relationship between two people (in the case of Dani’s, I see that relationship being between two of her selves). As with the words on the page, the artwork time travels. It’s playful and a little haunting.

And WITH THAT, I will leave you with these VERY COOL behind-the-scenes process videos Vivienne surprised me with that provide a little glimpse into the magic behind Time Zone Week’s otherworldly art.

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