Thoughts on Queer Time

I found the discussion we had on "queer time" in class interesting because it really brought to mind not only how Western society views the idea of time itself, but how Western society views success and "milestones" in a person's lifetime. Many of these ideas of success and milestones revolve around very traditional concepts, such as the idea that everyone should be married and reproduce at a certain point. The issue with this "normative" time is that it is exclusive of certain people, such as those who choose not get married, or those who cannot reproduce, and so on. That is where the idea of "queer time" might come into use. When I was learning about it, I was pretty confused about how "success" would be measured in queer time. Then I thought "Why does this idea of success have to factor into it? Is life really just a sum of successes and failures?" I may be simplifying it too much, but that's what we're often told life is: success and failure. We're constantly under the pressure to perform in order to succeed, learn from our mistakes the first time, and place value on who we are based on these things. However, if the ideas of success and failure were taken out of the picture entirely, I don't believe I, or many other people, would be productive or want to learn from experience. Both "normative" and "queer" concepts of time have their problems, but it was good to learn about ideas of time outside of what I've always known.