Entropy
Posted by leftforcoy on May 1, 2008
Today I noticed yet another sign of the reckless speed with which I continue to approach the teeth-gnashing devastation of my 30th birthday. For whatever reason (the whispered suggestion of summer, turning the page to warmer days), I took a moment’s notice of the date — May 1. As I’m prone to do from time to time, I started daydreaming about previous May 1sts, and what my station in life had been for them.
Except that, when I used to do this, I’d think back one, then two, then three, perhaps up to four or five years, amusing myself by measuring how much of my life’s plot I could reconstruct for each reverse annual milestone. Today, however, when I thought back to previous May 1sts, I didn’t start with last year, but instead immediately jumped back ten years, and then twenty. (I suppose May 2007 still feels enough like last week that I just jumped right past it.) But in doing so I didn’t exactly stumble upon a wellspring of nostalgia:
May 1, 1998 — Finishing up freshman year of college. I don’t remember what courses I had specifically, other than a senior history seminar that the visiting assistant professor teaching it, who I hung around a lot and allowed myself to believe I impressed intellectually, let me take. Must have been cramming for finals, I guess. Gearing up for a summer job filling in Excel spreadsheets and Access databases, obtained via a favor of a friend of my mom’s at her company. Dating someone, long-distance and very, to my mind at the time, seriously. I have not seen her in almost as many years. Monica Lewinsky shit on the news all the time. Jeez, is that all I remember?
May 1, 1988 — Finishing third grade. Little League practice probably starting — the germination period for the fabulous athlete I would one day become. My teacher, a nun, took a few minutes each day to let each of us in the class take turns reading aloud from “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” (and its sequel, “More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”), which I had brought in. That’s all I got.
This was just depressing.
May 3, 2008 at 12:11 pm
May 1st was Wellington’s birthday too, but I don’t remember what year.