It’s hard to believe that it’s September 11th, yet again. So much has changed in this world since that terrible day, and it’s almost crazy looking back on the devastation because it still, all these years later, just seems difficult to fathom. It’s also a little more real this year, because this is the first Tuesday that this day has fallen on since 9/11/01.

I was just flipping through my flickr photos and found this one. I love this picture, but there are parts of me that hate looking back on old photos so much for some reason. Even photos from so recent in the past. That time is gone, burned and faded forever. It blows my mind to think about how brief our lives are, and if we’re lucky how we only get to live 70-80 years average. Like I said, if we’re lucky… so many die so much sooner than that. I feel sad that so much of my life is already over. I love life… what’s next?

Today is my mother’s birthday. I wrote a nice post to/about her on my other blog, but, I have a little to say here too. Sometimes I can’t believe how my perspective has changed over the years. I remember being little and viewing my mother as so much older and so much more mature. As I became a teen, she still just seemed so far beyond what I could imagine… but now all of a sudden I look at my mother, who is fifty, and I get this sense of her as if she were a young woman or a teen herself. I am gaining on her somehow… I think a lot about how young she really was when she had me, and, I don’t know how to explain it, but my head gets all twisted up in memory and emotion and a shifting perspective and I feel lost in time, or lost in the timeline of my own life. It’s amazing how time and experience can shape our consciousness.

It is so disgustingly hot outside today. I really didn’t even want to leave my office, but I had to get out and run some errands. As much as I adore summer, and I do really adore it, I always start to crave that crisp, sweet smell of fall that is right around the corner. Is it crazy that I’m longing for Christmas in the middle of July? When I say this to people they look at me like I’m crazy. I just really love the holiday season, even though it’s so cold and miserable in it’s own way. I wonder what it’s like to live someplace with a more steady and even climate. I know that the harsh conditions and constant changes of the midwest have shaped my personality in some very significant ways.

It’s nearly the 4th of July again, and for some reason today I’ve been thinking about my time working at the newspaper. When I started, it was around the second week of July in 2005. I remember being home for the fireworks, and checking out the photos in the newspaper taken by the other photographer. I was to start the job in a couple of weeks myself, and I was very nervous. Probably more nervous than I’ve ever been in my entire life.

I can’t believe how many jobs I’ve worked at this point in my life. It seems like I’ve moved from one job to another, once per year, for my entire life. Move, get a new job, quit, move again, and so forth. I am ready to settle down and stop moving around so much.

It’s been way too long since I posted an entry here. Sometimes I have to force myself to blog, and it’s not because I don’t enjoy it, because I do, it’s just that I am a lazy person by nature and if I break routine for a day or two it is very hard for me to get movitvated to jump back in. Especially with this site, maybe, because no one even knows that it is here, and it’s sort of like I’m blogging into the wind.

I’ve been keeping online diaries for so long now that it has become like breathing to me in some ways. If I’m not writing here, or on one of my other public blogs, I’m writing in my LiveJournal. I just realized that my LJ has seen me through college, marriage, divorce, new jobs, new relationships, etc., etc. Kind of crazy.