Damn, people, do you realize it's August already? We're into the eighth month of the year, a year that I could swear just started a few weeks ago.

When I was a kid, I thought my parents were insane, the way they went on about how time speeds up as you get older. Then, for me, time crawled along at an agonizingly slow pace. I waited, and waited, and anticipated, for what seemed like a lifetime (when you're little, a lifetime for you isn't really very long at all, but you don't know that yet), for Christmas, only to hear my mother meet the season with "What? It's Christmastime already? I can't believe how fast this year has gone by."

These are the kinds of thoughts that keep me awake at night (actually, last night it was that my legs hurt, and that I hoped my nephew got home from band practice okay, and that I hope they don't screw up Gambit if he's in the next X-Men movie, and how likely it is that Mr. Sinister is his father ... but usually my insomnia-producing thought processes are at least somewhat more profound) (except for that one night when I couldn't go to sleep until I'd named every single Muppet from the classic Muppet Show) (anyway ...). Is time actually speeding up? Are we caught up in some kind of entropy effect, from which there is no escape? I tell myself I've got my whole life ahead of me, that there is plenty of time to do all of the things I want to do with my life, but then I blink, and another year has gone by, wasted. This is my life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

Or maybe it's simply perspective. When you're little, you anticipate everything with wonderment and excitement: Christmas; birthdays; the first day of school; the last day of school; trips to Wal-Mart. Time seems to go so slowly because you can't wait for these things. Everything is new.

When you become an adult, the same things you looked forward to as a child become the things you dread. You no longer look forward to these things. You simply get through them. Even Christmas tends to have the joy sucked right out of it. Time goes so quickly now because we're not paying attention to it. There are exceptions when it seems to slow down: a slow work day, being stuck in traffic, standing in line ... but it's no longer anticipation that draws our attention to time, but our awareness that there is never enough of it, and our irritation at having even a minute of what's left of it wasted by something beyond our control.

We're so funny about time, the way we guard it, and the way we waste it. Right now I'm worrying that I don't have enough time today to get all of my work done, yet I'm spending a significant amount of that time posting an insignificant rant to an insignificant web site. If someone were to stop by my desk right now to chat, I'd become irritated with them for wasting my time, but once they left I'd go right back to wasting it on my own.

Something is wrong with that, I think.