Wednesday, January 09, 2008

I Think I'm Getting Old

First, I should preface that I know I've aged since starting this sentenance. But it's all relative and it's the scale of things really that one considers. But all of a sudden, this afternoon, I just realized that time has been going by really fast. It's like in the movies where they have the character frozen in time staring at the camera while the world behind is moving in accelerated speeds. Well, I feel like that guy the second the two times are reconnected - all of a sudden tons has changed. And where was I when this all happened?



This feeling began last night. I had a wonderful time meeting up with some old friends for dinner. It was at a place near work which was very busy and loud in the bar but perfect in the dining room area - not too crowded and easy to hear things. I'm finding that I've started picking locations based on the noise level since it seems that I just don't have the patience to deal with not hearing very well nor straining the voice to be heard.



Anyways, it was a nice happy reunion with Maggie and Nima who I had gone to highschool with as well as meeting Nima's wife. We've been pretty much out of touch since highschool which ha been quite awhile. We had a fun time chatting, mainly about politics and changes in the old home town and our lives. It was just what I needed, a nice change of pace and a relaxed evening. We ended up not being able to catch up as much as we had wanted so will hopefully reconnect again soon, but the time just flew. I didn't get home until midnight which meant this morning was a bit rough. The old body just isn't great at the late nights.



Talking, I discovered that Nima's wife who is a teacher has to deal with students and their ipods (did you know in her school they are allowed to listen to them during class?) and cell phones and stuff like that. We were talking about texting and although I did finally discover the wonderful pros of texting, I have a fairly limited texting quota I perform.



I think it was an evening of accumulated things. Here I was with professional, grown-ups, talking about grown-up things. And it was strange because the last time we were together was when we were kids. And comparing notes about how things have changed back home just made it all the stranger. I have to admit we did throw out the phrase "back in our day" a couple of time. But the times really have changed.



Really, the kicker came this afternoon at work. I was eating some M&Ms and I look down and think to myself, I don't recognize these anymore. They were completely different. And I know they had changed, but it hadn't really sunk in, or it snuck up on me, or it was a gradual change, I don't know. But there in my hand were orange and yellow and brown and green and blue and red M&Ms. It was all different - where did the red M&Ms come from and blue?! Who makes blue M&Ms? That's just strange. And really, what happened to the two shades of brown M&Ms? It was just a complete mess, sitting there in my hand. Without change where would we be? But did we really have to change the colors in M&Ms? And why hadn't I noticed? It's going to take some time for me to get used to this. I just hope there aren't any big things I've missed lurking out there around the corner waiting for me to run into.

No comments: