It's WHAT?

Yep, it's December 7th alrighty.

How is it possible that it's FINALS WEEK?

I have these feelings sometimes about this time of year. (Honestly, I have them all year 'round, the older I get.)

I am astonished.

Now, do not confuse astonishment with amazement. I've written about amazement before...For that matter, I've previously written about how good it is to marvel, how one should live in the now, about how attending too much to the past or future is not valuable--but the truth is, sometimes all that is window-dressing, whitewashing, or otherwise hogwash. (Who knew such potential in cleansing compounding words?)

Sometimes, when I really admit it, I think I'm living in Oblivion. Yes, I felt like that when I lived in Western Kansas, but that was physical and literal...now I'm talking cerebral.

Astonished oblivion is not bliss. I wish it were, for it would then be easier to say, "mission accomplished." Bliss, after all, is on my bucket list...if it could be. Some theorize that bliss is a state of being, not a destination nor some thing one could ever cross off of a bucket list.

So here I am, dumbfounded at the date.

Where did the time go? I wish I still had my watch that chimed every quarter hour. I wish I lived and worked in places that only told time with large grandfather clocks--no, loud cuckoo clocks. Outside, every major gathering of buildings should have a bell tower with the most cacophonous carillon, and from that should burst the boldest acknowledgment of time passing, at least every fifteen minutes. No, make the carillon a klaxon, and mount it to my head.

In short, I wish I could be made more aware, constantly, of the passing of time.

Perhaps instead of cleaving to amazement, I should instead be aspiring toward awareness.

I am most alarmed by all this when I look at pictures, even ones from the recent past. I am sometimes shocked at my own work, only a semester old or less--I surprise myself that I wrote this or I did that. (Ever read Flowers for Algernon...similarly, I feel like I'm slowly realizing my own retreat to senility.) Even worse than the 'typical man' who might casually (strategically?) forget (plausible deniability?) he said or did something, I seem to be fading. It annoys my wife. It frustrates my children. It surprises me.

Maybe I'm making too much of it. After all, this is Finals week, the time when I have hundreds of papers to grade and take the responsibilities of my job far too seriously. I sleep less, I worry more, and I grade most of all. Grading papers, as anyone who does too much of it can attest, can dull one's wits. I am also prone to sentimentality at this time of year (Finals, yes, but doubly so, the holidays). In repressing sentiment, yes, even when grading, I think perhaps I repress what's left of my wit and wisdom as well.

Why else, I am realizing as I am typing this, would I have shared so?