... time marches on

not in a "for whom the bell tolls" (metallica) kind of way, maybe. circumstances have reached a kind of ... intersection in my life where i've been thinking a bit about what kind of life i've lived and where i've been and, to a certain extent, where i'm going.

in the short term, i'm going to america! (only 11 sleeps to go!) this has actually been one of the things i've been thinking about.

the last time i went overseas, i went to china with a group from my old school. that was in january,1993. thinking about it, i have memories that feel like only yesterday, although some memories have devolved into those facts-and-figures style memories that aren't true ones, but rather the stories that one tells about some past event, stories you remember better than what they actually describe.

in other news, it's my birthday this month, but other people are also having their birthdays earlier than mine... (happy birthday for friday, motherly type person!!! heheh) i turn 31, which feels kind of... old. it's the stupidest feeling in the world, because i'm the youngest person at my workplace by about 4 or 5 years. what i think it is, is that when i look back on my life thus far, there's more to catalogue than i can actually remember.

ask me what i did this week just gone, and i can remember in broad strokes what i did, but my memory is beginning to fail in the details. i wasn't actually expecting to notice that kind of thing until, oh, i had kids, or some other life-changing event. i find i'm longing for the kind of memory that sax russell (one of the main protagonists of kim stanley robinson's mars sequence) worked to develop, with more room and better filing.

i don't think i've actually lost memories. i think i've just lost access to them. i often in conversation refer to my brain as a library using old-fashioned file cards to index it. while the library itself is theoretically infinite (given the laws of functioning l-space, viz terry pratchett's discworld novels), the file card box i have for indexing it is proving to be about the size of the shoebox a kindergarten kid's first school shoes come in!

curiouser and curiouser...

(i should say more curious and more curious, but even then it doesn't make much sense...)