Time continues to pass, sky continues to be blue!
I graduated high school in June of 2001. That was now nearly ten years ago. I graduated college in August of 2005. The same week I got my first job with health insurance. My first salaried full-time software job started in April 2006. That’s half a decade ago in just a few weeks. I totalled my Mini almost three years ago to the day, the same day I got the interview at Esri. At the end of this coming June I’ve been at this place longer than any job I’ve ever had before. I have institutional knowledge. Feels weird not being the outsider anymore.
The decade feels like a huge gulf — I’m not the same person I was when I was 18 by any means, I’ve forgotten names and pieces of stories that I used to consider important events in my life. I’m surprised when people re-tell anecdotes I haven’t told in years and they remember details to a story that I don’t, and I was the original narrator. I can’t list the name of every girl I dated in high school and college like I used to, I don’t think I’d recognize the faces of some of the professors I visited weekly in office hours. I certainly can’t tell you the street numbers of every place I’ve lived since 2002. I no longer remember any padlock combinations or gate access codes for places that used to be daily visits. The chronology of who I lived with and when is muddy. Those shoreline moments of a month or two where I went through huge amounts of change all at once have crystallized into single sentence summaries. I look back on some genuinely horrible and crushing defeats with a twisted fondness. I backpedal for bad decisions that I insist ten years on aren’t bad decisions. There are those vivid moments that seem like just yesterday, but for the most part it’s all just forgotten piles of legacy experience. Hours, months, years of repetition to learn one or two single-phrase lessons: calm down, you’ve got to put the hours in to learn anything. Don’t drive like an idiot. Everyone else is just as confused as you are. There are no conspiracies, there are only stupid people not thinking about your feelings. Right now I am probably unwittingly being one of those stupid people to a half-dozen others.
The second half of that decade, from graduation to now, that’s what feels strange because it just seems like one long year that continues to pass. Things still happen, but they don’t feel as important as they used to when I was a moody kid. People are more important though. I have friendships that I’ve put well over a decade or two into. I have friendships that I know I could never make again. I no longer have a steady stream of classmates and lab partners and teachers and friends-of-friends-at-parties coming and going in my life. I know if I uproot and move to a new city that I’m not going to have three different guys down the street who can all give me a jump at 3 AM if I need it. I know what it’s like to live with someone you care about and get to the point where they feel like an extension of yourself, and I know what a confusing amputation it is to break up: this person you’ve known inside and out for years suddenly a stranger with a couple of words and that overused we gets replaced with an I in all your plans.
I’ve been humbled by my own idiocy a few times, and sometimes surprised myself with how good I’ve gotten over the years at other things I never really thought of as important. I’ve gotten honest to the point of obnoxiousness with people as I get more comfortable with myself. My cynicism is fraying at the edges as it turns into a gentle curmudgeonliness. I’m a lot more patient I guess, because I know I’m going to get around to everything eventually. I’ve got two years left in my twenties and I kind of feel like I misspent them up to now, but in retrospect I did about as good a job as everyone else. Put myself through school, got knocked down a few pegs, was shitty to people and people were shitty back, started a decent enough career. I guess I could have bit the bullet and taken out a bunch of loans so my degree had the words Los Angeles or Berkeley on it and I guess I could have done that startup thing when I was a broke 22 year old with no business sense and I guess I could have done any of a large list of things differently or more risky and my life would have turned out differently but I still think I’d be just as confused and restless as I am now. I’m pretty sure 18 year old me would be fairly satisfied with how 28 year old me turned out and would probably ask me all kinds of obnoxious, ignorant questions about linguistics. You’re welcome for doing the Ling thing, 18 year old me. Now save yourself $5000 and don’t bother trying to teach, you are crappy at it, and you don’t have the patience or the focus to be a good research academic.
