Miss Perception Takes It Easy

My subjective perception of time has been really screwy in the last month or thereabouts. I was going through some recent email just now, and thinking, "Hm. That was on the 24th. I was worried about finding a job, and every day felt like a week."

Now it's my dad's birthday, and the last two weeks have blitzed by at Ludicrous Speed. How did I manage to cram as much stuff as I've actually done into just one summer, and why did it feel, for the entire month of July, as if I'd done nothing at all?

In other news, my trip to LA seems to have turned into a trip to San Diego. What was originally intended as a one-day jaunt down south to visit perspectivism and be introduced to interesting SD folk turned, instead, into a two-and-a-half-day jaunt which included crashing starling321's baby shower (and meeting even more interesting SD folk, including simonfunk and madbard), wandering around La Jolla Cove and observing the harbor seals, tidal-pool sea anemones and other neat marine life, and getting through a bottle of sake and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut over at agnosticessence's.

Star's party reminded me of why I seem to gravitate toward people who are a few years older than I am: they do the most interesting things, and hanging around them gives me concrete where-do-you-want-to-go-today? ideas. Hearing madbard explain how he got into being a professional composer, and Gerry talk about being a bioinformatics consultant, and so on and so forth, fills me with hope and, more importantly, confidence for the future: "in four years, I'll be doing stuff this cool too." Of course, then you have people like Mathew, who are my age (ok, a little younger), have seen far more impressive ups and downs than I have, and are entirely self-supporting and enjoying the hell out of themselves. (Not that I don't enjoy the hell out of myself, it's just that I have to take out student loans to do it.) All things considered, though, I definitely haven't done badly. I have no earthly idea whether the next two years will hold the long march to the PhD or whether I'll derail into something more practical along the way, but I'm ready for, if not anything, at least lots of things.

And now Troy and I are going out clubbing -- one last hurrah at the end of the last hurrah of summer.

It's one hell of a good life.