About
Time We Get is a personal lifestyle journal about health, aging, family, technology, money, curiosity, and the ordinary business of building a decent life from whatever happens to be in front of us. Cancer is part of the story, but it is no longer the whole story.
About Time We Get
Life Is More Than the Thing Currently Going Wrong.
Time We Get is a personal lifestyle journal about health, aging, family, technology, money, the things we buy, the things we keep, the things we lose, and the ordinary business of trying to build a decent life out of whatever happens to be in front of us.
Time Keeper
Writer.
Observer.
Professional overthinker of ordinary things.
I write under the name Time Keeper, which probably sounds more organized than I actually am. I do not possess a perfect morning routine, an immaculate home, a six-figure watch collection or any particular wisdom about becoming the best possible version of yourself before breakfast.
What I do have is a life. It contains family, illness, technology, bills, good purchases, terrible purchases, things I am interested in, things I am trying to understand, things that make life easier and a considerable number of situations I would not have chosen if somebody had handed me a menu.
Time We Get is where I write about all of it.
What Time We Get Is
This is a lifestyle site, but probably not the kind that normally gets photographed beside an infinity pool. I am more interested in the life people actually live: the apartment or room they really have, the money they actually earn, the body they woke up in this morning and the relationships, responsibilities, interests and frustrations that fill the hours between getting up and going back to bed.
Some of that is practical. I like technology, photography, useful gadgets, shaving gear, headphones, apps and finding things that do their job without requiring a second mortgage. I am interested in making the space around me more comfortable, finding better ways to do ordinary things and figuring out which products are genuinely useful rather than merely very good at being advertised.
Some of it is more personal. Aging changes the way you look at time. So does illness. So does having children, losing people, watching plans change and eventually realizing that life does not begin once everything is finally sorted out. This is it. The cluttered, unfinished version counts.
Life
Family, aging, relationships, independence, changing circumstances and the thousand ordinary moments that somehow become a life while nobody is paying attention.
Health
Cancer is part of my life, along with treatment, mobility, fatigue and the practical consequences of living in a body that occasionally ignores the itinerary.
Technology & Things
Phones, Macs, cameras, apps, gear and products that might make everyday life a little easier, more interesting or at least less irritating.
Living
Money, food, clothes, grooming, home, hobbies, entertainment and the ongoing project of making an imperfect life comfortable enough to enjoy.
A small declaration
I Have No Interest in Selling You a Better Life.
Much of the lifestyle world seems to operate on the assumption that everyone is one purchase, habit, supplement, productivity system or kitchen renovation away from finally becoming the person they were meant to be.
I do not believe that.
Buying something useful can make life easier. Looking after yourself matters. Money matters. Health matters enormously. A comfortable home matters. But there is no final upgrade where the human operating system stops producing bugs.
I am much more interested in making the life already here a little better than pretending another one is waiting just beyond the next checkout button.
What You Will Find Here
Personal Essays
The things I notice, worry about, laugh at, remember or cannot quite stop thinking about.
Everyday Life
Home, family, money, food, sleep, mobility, aging and all the supposedly small things that consume most of our actual time.
Technology
Apps, computers, phones, AI, cameras and technology considered from the radical perspective of whether it is actually useful.
Things Worth Having
Products I use, want, try or investigate, especially when there is a sensible option that does not require pretending money has ceased to exist.
Health
Cancer treatment, disability, changing physical limits and the strange negotiations involved in continuing ordinary life when your body changes the terms.
Curiosity
Books, photography, history, documentaries, culture and whatever else has wandered into my attention and refused to leave.
Why “Time We Get”?
Because eventually time stops feeling theoretical.
When I was younger, years seemed to exist in almost unlimited supply. There was always another one available for whatever I had not done yet. Another year to go somewhere. Another year to fix something. Another year to spend more time with somebody, learn something, make something or become slightly better at being alive.
I no longer think about time that way.
That is not meant to be grim. If anything, it has made ordinary life more interesting. A good cup of coffee is still only a cup of coffee, but you might as well notice that it is good. An afternoon with somebody you care about does not need to become a profound memory before it counts. Buying the right tool for a job can be satisfying. Finding a book you cannot put down matters. A quiet day can be a perfectly successful day.
We spend a remarkable amount of life waiting for the part that feels important. Time We Get is partly an attempt to stop doing that.
The point is not to squeeze maximum productivity out of every hour. It is to notice that the hours are the life.
And Yes, Cancer Is Still Here.
Time We Get grew out of a site called The Cancer Years, which began as a record of my experience living with mycosis fungoides and going through cancer treatment. That story has not ended, and I am not going to hide it simply because the site has become something larger.
I will continue writing about treatment, medications, appointments, side effects, mobility, exhaustion, fear, uncertainty and the occasionally absurd machinery of modern medicine. Those subjects belong here because they belong in my life.
But cancer is not the only thing I think about, and I reached a point where I did not want it determining the boundaries of what I was allowed to write.
Some days cancer will be the story. Other days it may be a camera app, a new cane, a book, a bad night's sleep, something my son said, a piece of technology that has irritated me beyond reason or an entirely unnecessary investigation into whether a thirty-dollar gadget is worth thirty dollars.
That feels much closer to the truth of living.
No Expertise Required
I am not presenting myself as an authority on how anybody else should live. When I write about something practical, I will tell you what I found and why I think it matters. When I write about something personal, it is exactly that: personal. When I write about health and cancer, I am writing as the person receiving the treatment, not the person prescribing it.
I am also not particularly interested in converting every experience into advice. Sometimes a story can simply be a story. Sometimes something is useful because somebody else recognizes themselves in it. Sometimes an observation deserves to exist even if it cannot be turned into seven steps for improving your Tuesday.
There Will Be Humour
Not because everything is funny. Quite a lot of life has terrible comedic timing.
But people are ridiculous, technology is frequently ridiculous, bodies are spectacularly ridiculous and adulthood contains an astonishing number of situations in which everybody involved is pretending they know what is happening.
I am not going to force humour into subjects where it does not belong. I am also not going to remove it from the places where it naturally appears.
This Is Time We Get.
A lifestyle journal for a life that is not particularly interested in behaving like a lifestyle advertisement.
There will be good days, difficult ones, useful things, pointless things, serious subjects, trivial obsessions, health problems, family, technology, opinions, experiments and probably a few purchases I will later have to explain.
I do not know exactly what this site will look like years from now. That is part of the point.
We get the time we get. I would rather spend some of mine paying attention.
Medical note: When I write about cancer, treatment or other health matters, I am describing my own experience and sharing information for general interest. Nothing on Time We Get should be treated as personal medical advice or as a substitute for care from a qualified healthcare professional.