Travelling through time at the speed of time

I turn 28 this Sunday.

Not a very momentous age, I'll admit.  Apart from being a divisible of 7, there's nothing all that remarkable about it.  It's not like, say, 18.  Or 30.  Or 50.  Or 100.

Thing is, I don't feel a year older.  By that I don't mean I'm "only as old as I feel" or some other bullshit I got off a coffee mug (if only because I don't drink coffee).  I mean I have mental difficulty grasping the idea that a year of time has passed between this birthday and the last one.  It feels more like, I don't know, four months.  Maybe six.

Most people feel like time goes by faster as they get older.  Not me.  Time's sprinted past me with nary a hello as far back as I can remember.  This is a a large element of my memory problems: I can remember specific events from my childhood, to be sure, but often I couldn't tell you precisely when they happened.  Ask me about a specific year and, more often than not I'm pressed to think of a single memorable incident.  There are exceptions--1992 sticks out to me, for some reason.  I'm not one for nostalgia, but it's one of my favorite years, if only because that's the year Crystal Pepsi came out.

But that's not my point.  My point, in the most literal sense, is--where does the time go?

My theory is I just haven't been paying attention.  Certain predispositions have led me to find the most comfort with my head lodged firmly up my own ass--or at least in a book.  I spend so much time off in a world of my own while the "real" world (whatever that is) TiVos past.  It'll take care of itself...right?  Relaxing as this sounds, it does tend to grow dull after the first couple decades or so.

And now the frigging "Skip Ahead" button is stuck...

I do have methods for counteracting this, but I don't have much in the way of fine control.  I find if I anticipate some future event, the time leading up to that event slows to a crawl.  BUT!  Once the event comes, time goes by even faster, so it passes in the near-literal blink of an eye.  And once it does pass, depending somewhat on how much I'd been looking forward to it, I may go through an odd mental state where I feel as if the event never happened and I imagined the whole thing.  Then I get depressed for a while.

Something like this happened just last weekend--something I'd been looking forward to enough for me to go through all the above steps.  More often, though, it's something as simple as looking forward to the weekend or the end of the workday.  Those are frequent enough occurrences that I at least avoid the subsequent dislocation.

Another thing that helps--waking up early.  These days I wake up much earlier than I did previously.  You get up at 7, the day races by--and you look up and notice it's still only 10.  Only problem with this is, this has got to be the laziest fucking big city on the planet--good luck getting anything done when nothing opens before 10 am.

And another thing--for the first time since I was about 6, I don't live in the middle of fucking nowhere.  No longer needing to leave everything for the weekend and no longer needing all afternoon to run the simplest errands does wonders for one's schedule.  The closer you are to stuff, the less you miss out on.

Of course, it might also help if I didn't spend every morning and evening either on the Internet or playing X-Box...

But, you know, no sense sacking Rome in a day.  Baby steps and all that.