I’m feeling a bit melancholic as I prepare to begin yet another year of my existence. I already get stiff when I kneel for a few minutes; I’ve been trying to lean Ruby on Rails, but it’s taking my head longer to wrap itself around concepts than it used to. The infinite potential possessed by those when they graduate from high school—that I possessed when I graduated from high school—has shrunk to become something finite, and I’m keenly aware of that loss. In high school I used to joke that, as each day became a smaller and smaller percentage of the total life we had lived, and therefore felt shorter than previous days, that we were accelerating to our deaths. Bad news: it’s no joke.

I can’t get half the stuff done in a day that I used to accomplish. (Witness: updates to my blog.) Also, when did it become May of 2008? I swear 2007 wasn’t that long ago.

…

Back in high school, I thought that it would be nice if I were to have a girlfriend* and I could introduce her to my grandparents, because they were some of the finest people ever put on this planet. Now I look at my parents—who are also awesome, in their own way—and hope that my wife* will be able to know them (and they my wife) before they start falling apart. My folks married somewhat late, and I seem to be following suit, so… it’s not much of a stretch to see a situation where that might not happen.

[*Brent <-- dreamer]

And that leads to the idea of living in a world without my folks, and that’s a terrifying thought. My parents are one of the few points of stability in my life, and I fear for how I’ll cope with the world when that point is lost. I have a long-held suspicion that adults are just kids with more life experience, and I’ve not found anything that argues otherwise. (This perhaps explains my high-school fascination with Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.)

…

It seems to me that my ultimate folly, here, is looking too much at the final destination and not looking enough at the journey. Anime demonstrates why this is a mistake: while there are a good number of shows that are loads of fun to watch, there are darn few that actually end well. Nobody watches anime for the endings—and if you only watched anime that featured strong endings, you would miss out on almost everything anime has to offer. [How much that is, of course, is open to debate.]

Of course, recognizing the issue and addressing it are two different tasks.

…

Part of my funk seems to be cyclical; I have periods—on the order of months to years—where I am happier and more outgoing (my high-water mark was in 2000, when I could be mistaken for an extrovert at times) and times when I’m more of a recluse and generally antisocial (low-water mark being around the time I made this blog, actually).

Another part is probably the fact that the girl I was(/am) crushing on in dance now appears to have hooked up with some other guy. This other guy really knows how to dance, too. (This is bad, people!)

Happy Birthday, me. Great birthday present, or greatest birthday present?

…

In random news, it is a small world. In dancing with said girl this evening, she mentioned that she graduated from Central Linn High School. Having no idea where that was, I Googled it and learned that it was in Halsey.

Halsey is a small place. It is also where one of my childhood friends, Teri, moved to sometime in third or fourth grade. Reminded of Teri, and curious what she’s up to these days, I Googled her and got jack squat—save for one college course page (for a Washington college) that seems to indicate she worked on some project with a girl named Lindsey. This Lindsey has a rather unique last name, which just so happens to match that of a Lindsey who is a friend of my friends in Portland.

Also, apparently Lindsey is a published (and award-winning) poet. I had no idea.