Monday 4 November 2002

Pic of the day: Perhaps I have simply moved to this different world, and my time has moved with me. Here with some of my friends and their friends outside the chapel north of Camelot. (Screenshot Dark Age of Camelot.)

Time and time again

Some days ago, I was shaken to read my year-ago entry. Not because it was such a dramatic entry, it was rather gray. But it referred to an article in Scientific American. An issue of Scientific American that I thought I had only bought like 3 months ago, or at most earlier this summer.

Why would this stun me? Because I have enjoyed a divine gift that is exceedingly rare: Childhood time. While other adults see their time running faster and faster, I have prayed and received the gift of time. Not that I have particularly used that time well, but I have enjoyed it. Remember your childhood, when a month was an ocean of time and you could only vaguely dream about what would await you on the other side? When you had long ago got used to the Christmas decorations, and Christmas still didn't come? When the weekend was like a large pool you could swim back and forth in, not a puddle you stepped over on your way from one workday to the next? That's childhood time, my secret blessing, my real-life superpower.

But now ... if a year feels like 3 months, then I have less than two years left till 50 ... Or, if time continues to accelerate like this, I might be 70 by next Christmas! Isn't that what happens to old people? You stand there peacefully talking to your sister, and then she says: "Uh, Granma? You got my name all wrong."

But while dwelling on these unhappy news, I came to think about Dark Age of Camelot. I know for certain that I have only played it since mid-December last year, because I have read so in my journal, and because it did not hit the market until around a year ago. Yet it feels like I have played it for years.

My sense of time was always fuzzy at best. It is more a sense of sequence than of elapsed time. And so I realized why I felt I have been playing DAoC so long: Because so much has happened, because I have learned so much. I have played so many different races and classes, traveled to so many different places, met so many different people. I have had so many learning experiences.

So conversely, I guess this means I have not learned much from Scientific American recently. Certainly I haven't learned much from Psychology Today, which I did not bother to buy this last issue. I'm not sure if it's the science that doesn't expand, or I who have lost interest.

I do lose interests, one by one. But occasionally I gain a new one too. Or at least an old one grows in new directions.