Passage of Time

It just occurred to me that I will be 28 in twenty days. That's twenty-eight folks. Scary, huh? For some reason, back in the day I used to think of twenty-eight as a time in a person's life when he or she would be quite responsible and very grown up. Twenty-seven still sounds youngish. But twenty-eight? Now that I'm almost at that point... I don't really feel all that responsible, and I certainly don't feel grown up. Okay, so I have a decent job and I own a house... But the job's in Korea and the house is in Georgia, so does that really count? It's a strange feeling, this supposed growing up thing. Is it really happening? I can't really understand why that silly survey I took the other day said I had only a 56% Peter Pan Complex. Shouldn't that percentage be higher?

And in regards to the passage of time - in two days I'll have been here in Korea for a full month. It really doesn't feel like I've been here that long at all. Creepy, this whole time-flying thing. And speaking thereof... I had an even creepier thought the other day: It's been five years since my first and rather unfortunate trip to Korea. I've spent all but two months of those five years outside of Korea, and as such, it seems to me as though time has stood still here in Korea, and that not much has changed in my absence. Of course, in the intervening five years the river of time has continued flowing... The point of this bit of rambling is that in these five years my former Wonderland students have all gotten five years older. Jackson and Steve, my two worst hellians, are now nineteen years old. Nineteen. Legal adults. I can't picture it at all. Remember David, the kid with the beetle? He'd be in high school now. And the class full of two and three year olds? Elementary school. (Melissa - the Apples and Oranges are now middle schoolers!) This realization weirds me out, even moreso than the fact that I'll be twenty-eight in less than three weeks. Well, sort of.