i don't know where all the time goes
suddenly it's sunday night, and damn if i don't have to go back to work tomorrow morning. luckily it's the last full week of the quarter, and though it looks like it will be hectic, it's going to go fast and furious. it's funny, because i always remember folks older than myself shaking their heads, tsk-tsking, saying almost wistfully, "where does all the time go?" but here i am, marveling that it's the last sunday in november, and that it's almost my thirtieth birthday. it's two-oh-oh-six, for crying out loud, and for just a few more weeks at that! yesterday i went to see the queen, and there went my head from side to side, as i sighed, "where did all the time go?" wasn't it just the other day that i was sitting on the beige stained carpeting of my studio apartment in hollywood in the middle of the night watching the live broadcast coverage of princess diana's funeral? and yet that other day was almost a decade ago... and, just for kicks, lately i like to knee myself in the gut extra hard by reading diary entries from around this time in 1995; fine, so instead of skipping freshman classes i teach them, but my diary entries of the present day say pretty much the same things about my same feelings about the same person as they did eleven years ago. go figure. and yet... i know somehow these stretches of time can be accounted for. i lived them. i'm sure of it. just as i'm sure i lived all of the past week up until this moment, this waning sunday night moment of me realizing i forgot to do some laundry this weekend, heavy-eyed from having wasted my day curled up on my bed watching old movies and bad sitcoms and japanese cooking game shows, but not entirely sure where all that time went. i realized this thanksgiving that i'm not entirely sure where this past year went, but that despite this overriding sense that i was still pretty much unchanged, very little of what was foremost in my mind then bears any relevance to my life now. i sat on my parents' couch, digesting our delicious dinner, thinking how nice it was to not be in crisis mode this year. last year at thanksgiving i know for sure i had to contend with writing a paper for one of my last grad school courses, with all the trimmings of being an a-student over-achiever, with unreliable transportation, with always unreliable sources of income, and with the soon-to-be-answered omnipresent wondering of "will he ever...? could he? will we?" hanging on the back burner of my whirring mind. and then...in a snap and a blur, the year's gone by. and still, i don't know where the time goes. it disappears in minutes. hours. weeks. months. years. and here i am. and there it goes again...