time has come today

i've been thinking a lot, lately, about time.
some exciting things have been happening to friends and family and it's made me reflect on the relevance, presence and dissolution of time.

what's been going on/what's coming up:

• non-date moved to florida, where he plans to stay until this time next year [something i try to not think about very often]
• my best friend from college is moving to turkey, where she's accepted a ridiculously fantastic new job, and where she will live with her ridiculously fantastic boyfriend, with whom she's been dating long-distance for two years
• my other best friend from college is getting married to boy she met while in college and has been dating for the past 10 years
• my niece starts pre-school this month [i like to pretend that this isn't happening]
• other friends are moving, starting new jobs, getting new degrees
• friends from the bookstore recently got married; the reception was a big ball of fun, completely reflective of their personalities and love for one another
• my mom will not be teaching this fall for the first time in almost thirty years
• children that i used to baby-sit for are: seniors in high school, college graduates, engaged to be married [thus, i am old]
• my nephew is 10 months old [and a cheeky monkey, which we encourage]
• my beautiful sister, who laments her absence on this blog [ha!] and has been married for 11 years, still gets asked if she's the younger or older sister [and rightly so]

so, yeah. time. when did we become old enough to move to other countries or get married or go to pre-school? the passage of time is baffling to me. just the other day, i shut my computer off at 5:22. by the time i got to my car it was 5:40 on the nose. where did those 18 minutes go? i know that i grabbed my salad bowl from the kitchen, chatted momentarily with bit, then hoofed it to the garage [which takes about 5 minutes.] but 18 minutes? to do all that? that's almost a full episode of 'friends' [sans commercials.] in 18 minutes, i could have prepped and baked a batch of cookies. i can drive to the mall and back, from my house, in under 18 minutes.

that time passes, even while doing mundane or necessary-yet-mind-numbingly-boring things, always blows my mind. i feel as though there should be some sort of pause button, to store that time up for really important events like birthdays or weddings or running through an airport trying to catch your connecting flight. but i suppose, were that the case, we'd lose a bit of the appreciation we have for those moments [i know it sounds like i'm describing adam sandler's movie, "click", but that is not the case.] even as i sit here, typing, neglecting the work on my desk, time is passing. it's almost palpable. heartbeats are biological representations of ticking clocks.

time: you're weirding me out. behave.

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and now, a funny picture:

this is jorge. in a turban.
otherwise known as: what happens when there's not much to talk about at the morning bookstore meeting