I'm honestly fascinated, flabbergasted, and a little bit scared by how fast time goes by.  Especially as you get a little older, although it seems to me you can start to notice it happening at a relatively young age.

When I was really young, I don't think I had any concept of time at all.  I legitimately don't even remember bein aware of what year it was until I was in Kindergarten.  Around then is I when a sense of time started to kick in, I think.  But it seemed to move really, really slowly at first.  Driving four hours to go on a trip felt like it took absolutely forever and a year may as well have been an eternity.  

Somewhere around 6th or 7th grade I think I started to notice a bit of a speedup.  The school year still felt like it took a long time, but summer vacation started feeling like it was passing by a lot quicker than it used to.  From there it seemed to ratchet up in speed a little bit more every year.  High school felt like it took a long time, but not nearly as long as elementary school and those summer breaks really seemed to be starting to zip by.  College still felt like I was there for a good amount of time, but it definitely went faster than high school.  And then once I graduated from college it just seemed like we were off to the races.

Every year still goes by faster than the one before and they feel like they're booking past now.  Every year it feels like I seriously just took down the Christmas tree and in the blink of an eye it's time to put it back up.  And I'm only like, at best, at the halfway point of life.  It's going to get even faster from here on out?  That's just crazy and kind of terrifying.  

Two things in particular make me really notice it: some of my favorite music albums and little kids.  I'll explain...

Somewhere around the time I was fifteen or so, I started really getting into music and one thing I liked doing was buying a new album from one of my favorite bands on the day it was released.  So there's a lot of my old favorite albums that I remember really well going out and purchasing them.  These are very clear memories and they seem like they just happened.  But now a lot of those albums are having big anniversaries like they're turning 25 or 30 years old.  They're older now than albums I thought of as old back then were back then, if that makes any sense.  For instance, 30 years ago, back in the halcyon days of 1992, I thought of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon as a really old album.  After all, it came out before I was born, so it had to be super old, right?  Well, it was released in 1973, so in 1992 it was only 19 years old, or much younger than every album that was released in 1992 is now.  That's the kind of thing that really throws me for a loop.

I think little kids throw me even more.  I don't have kids, but I have friends and family members who do and seeing how ridiculously fast kids grow up is really, really crazy.  When I first started dating Kim there was one night I came over to hang out with her and she was babysitting the neighbor's kids.  They were about 4 and 5 years old at the time.  This seriously feels like it was just a couple years ago, but those same kids are 18 and 19 now.  One of them is a senior in high school and the other is off at college.  They were just these tiny little kids, I swear.  I know when I was growing up, it felt like it took absolutely forever to turn 18, but now I think from the perspective of the parents it must seem like you give birth to them and in the blink of an eye they're walking out the door to go off on their own.  That must be really strange.  It's strange to me!

And yet somehow if you're trying to kill 8 hours at a painfully boring job, time can slow to a crawl and just drag on and on.  I remember some jobs where I would swear an hour surely had to have passed and I'd look at the clock and it had only been 5 minutes since the last time I looked.  Yet the days can go slow and the years can simultaneously go fast.  

Time is really weird.