Last night I had the strangest dream. (I did not sail away to China in a little rowboat to find ya.) I don’t know if it was to do with trying to catch up on a month’s worth of Glee<\/i> (we are seriously in arrears on television, and Top Gear<\/i> has gotten totally out of hand) or just a byproduct of Sunday’s trip to the theatre, but somehow, in my dream last night, a bunch of people I didn’t know and some I did were doing some sort of theatrical production. I was late, but I didn’t have any lines until the second act. And I had no idea what my lines were<\/i>, but knew that it was something very natural and that with a glance at the script beforehand I’d probably be golden. And somehow we did the performance and it was a smashing success, and later that day I had to retrieve something from the crawlspace under somebody’s house, but I have no idea what that had to do with anything…and scene<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Today’s topic stems from the last trip to Disneyland, in October, when I was hanging over the rail at the Boardwalk hollering at people getting ready to be railgunned on California Screamin’. It was a beautiful day, we were having a spectacular time, everything was going great, I’d forgotten all about Vandy getting railgunned themselves by Connecticut the day before, and the thought flittered through my head, I’m in denial about how old I actually am.<\/i><\/p>\n
I don’t feel 38-and-a-half. It feels like not that much time has gone by, even though some things feel like they took place several lifetimes ago. It doesn’t seem real that next May Day, I will have been in California as long as I was in Northern Virginia. Come Christmas, I’ll have been away from Apple as long as I was at Apple. I’ve been in my house for five years, which is the longest stretch I’ve lived at a single address since I left home for college, which was itself more than half my life ago. I remember the last week of undergrad, thinking “it can’t possibly have been more than two years. I have so much left to do.” And the kids born that week are driving now.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I think that’s what did it – high school was my college, college was my high school, grad school was trying to make up for the college experience and I wound up landing in the real world like a 21-year-old, only at age 25. It seems like everything was in slow motion, or else took forever. Hell, I wasn’t married until I was 33, and that was after four years in the relationship. Mentally, I’m still wired like a college student. Late nights and later mornings. Wall-to-wall college basketball. I want to stay up for 1 AM tipoffs at the holidays and yell like hell. I want to have a Nerf gun in my bag in case one of the zombies makes a move for me on the way to the cafeteria. I want to drop by random friends’ places and hang out after class<\/s> work. I sign up for things like Foursquare and Twitter, knowing full well that the key utility in them is not for people like me – I’m not going to look and see “hey, my friends are hanging out at Tied House, I should go” or check in myself at the Saint knowing that somebody will probably pop in eventually. For crying out loud, I actually volunteered to be part of somebody’s adult show choir…that is, until they got distracted with a full-scale theatrical production that they may be moving to SF or LA.<\/p>\n
And I’d really like to sign up for the junior year abroad program – except I don’t think my employer has one for IT staff.<\/p>\n
I wonder if this refusal to come to grips with how old I actually am is what they mean by “midlife crisis” – probably, except I don’t have any impulse to go get hair plugs and a motorcycle and start macking on girls half my age. I’m not out to recapture my youth as such, I just wish I’d gotten a full youth’s worth out of it. Maybe I did, and I just don’t know what’s average or normal, but somehow it never quite feels that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night I had the strangest dream. (I did not sail away to China in a little rowboat to find ya.) I don’t know if it was to do with trying to catch up on a month’s worth of Glee (we are seriously in arrears on television, and Top Gear has gotten totally out of … <\/p>\n