I don't remember how it got from June to now.  Every day is clear in my memory, but it passes faster than I ever remember it passing.  Life is accelerating, and I don't like this new speed.  There is no time to set an anchor down; every second whooshes me along before the moment sinks in.  It seems there's still enough time for boredom, but not ever enough to savor.

Is this just how it works when your years accumulate so that every year makes up a smaller and smaller piece of your life, until each year seems inconsequential?  It doesn't feel like 2009, but then again it does.  I don't know what happened to January and February and even July, but there it is, another year almost over.  Will the rest of my life speed by like this?  Will I get time to savor everything I want to savor?  Will there be time to do everything I want to do?  Next week I'm going to Portland to visit my brother.  As excited as I am, the only thing I can think about is how much the nearness of the time at which it will be nothing more than a fond memory disturbs me.  The future constantly catches me off guard with the pace at which it becomes the present.

My father, I've been thinking about my father.  He is 63.  I want to have children soon, or at least as soon as life allows, because of him.  Not to say my mom wouldn't make a good grandmother--she would, she would--but she's only 48.  There will be all kinds of time for her to pick them up and tell them jokes and read them her favorite books.  But my biggest worry right now isn't classes or a dissertation topic.  It's this: I want my kids to know him as I know him.  I want them to grow old enough to appreciate his dark, irreverent, sometimes raunchy sense of humor.  I want him to teach them how to flip omelets and mix Old Fashioneds.  It will kill me if all they remember of him is a sick old man. 

Time is just moving too fast, and it seems like there will never be enough.