so it's been a year.

it's kind of nuts that i ended up here in the first place, when i started my senior year, southern california wasn't even on the map as far as places i thought i'd end up after graduation. the drive started a couple days earlier, left dallas around eight in the morning friday august 30th. the first day was pretty easy, no real rush, i figured on being on the road about ten hours or so, driving through the most cosmopolitan cities texas has to offer. i mean abilene, midland, odessa, el paso? that's four potential sidetrips right there. it wasn't so bad really, west texas has this charm to it that i think only texans can appreciate, so i enjoyed it. the next day was miserable, pretty much all day the desert, spent the heat of the day crossing the entire state of arizona. both nights i spent at motel 6's, friday in deming, NM and saturday in palm springs.

it was sunday morning, palm springs is about a hundred miles from long beach, and leaving there at half past seven that morning saw me roll into long beach around nine. that was a year ago, september 1, 2002. a year. i remember having my lil car packed to the gills with pretty much everything that i owned, coming out here, not knowing a soul, having a job, but no place to live, stuff like that. i feel so far removed from that now, but at the same time the memory of that is so vivid that perceiving the amount of time that's passed since then is nuts.

time fascinates me, it's so paradoxical. we always have it, yet somehow there's never enough. we curse clocks and calendars that move too slowly and then find ourselves shocked by how quickly they change. i remember reading a calvin and hobbes comic when a few years ago, calvin was talking to his dad about getting older and how people slowed down as they aged. calvin told his dad that since he'd have less and less time as he got older, he'd want to go faster instead of slower. i remember being a little kid and thinking that a year was such a long time, and how once i got to high school and college, it would seem that i could blink and miss one.

one of my professors in college explained that in a way that made a lot of sense, when you're five, a year is a whole twenty percent of your life, even at age ten, it's ten percent, no small fraction itself. as you get older, a year makes up less of a fraction of your life, so perceptually, they seem to go faster. that only explains one side of the paradox though. it seems to me that the longer you live and the more you experience, the richer, the thicker your experience with time is. being bound by time and aware of how quickly it passes puts us in a position where we have to reconcile that with trying to fit so many experiences and memories into that framework. your brain and your heart become so engrossed all that's taken place in the time that's passed, which sort of accounts for those moments where a week seems like a year.

i'm not sure abilene even had an olive garden.

feeling: calm
thinking of: FM 1382 between I-20 and US 67
music: "acquiesce" stavesacre