There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic to human behaviour

One of my students last week, when prompted by my book-of-questions game (it's a public speaking course and I put them uncomfortably on the spot for my own amusement), gasped in horror when asked about her preferred manner of death and to explain her answer. It occurred to me then that she must be considerably younger than I am. I was right. I have a theory - or shall I say I simply amalgamated the bits I recall from Psychology 101 - that people in their twenties don't consider their mortality except as something that's far away and abstract. Like an extension of the teenage years, early twenty-somethings live in ignorant bliss, believing all the while that they are "adults" and rarely have the capacity to think about how their own thoughts and actions fit into the larger world. My own early twenties were so fucked up that I often remark that none of us should be held responsible for anything we did before we were thirty.

In any case, right around thirty-ish, an epiphany of "oh my god, I'm going to keep getting older and die!" happens somewhere most inconvenient, like the grocery store, and suddenly buying fruits and veg doesn't seem so important. After all, if we're only going to die, why not eat whatever the hell we want? Such thoughts for me got thrust to the back of the shelf in my brain and buried beneath mountains of trivial tidbits until one day, years later, I had the same epiphanic moment and I was no longer deeply disturbed by it. Now it just seems like a fact that I have no opinion about and it's liberating - like, if I get onto an airplane tomorrow and it crashes or is crashed by some terrorist, then it must be my day to go. And if there's an afterlife in which I will be told the secrets of the universe, great; if not, then I won't know so I won't care. Now it's just this philosophical thing I can't put my brain around. How do I know that I haven't done this all before? Descartes couldn't answer it, so what makes me think I will? Does the Matrix have me?

These are the things that make being 36 a comforting thing. There's a certain acceptance acquired that I probably won't change the world, I am exactly who I am, what I am, and I don't really care if you like me or not.

Until...
I'm reminded that there were 30 or so years of insecurity, self-loathing, and awkwardness involved in getting to this point.

My daughter will attend my old high school this year as a freshman, and today I went with her to do the packet pick-up thing and as I stood in the hallway where I remember my own locker being, where I remember Ted sitting on a trash can waiting for Meridith next to said locker, I almost forgot to breathe. What always seemed like a massive hallway seemed dramatically smaller and like a remnant of a dream, or when you see an amnesia patient in movies recalling vague moments of the past. The uncanny moment of dream is where I stood this afternoon, deeply disturbed, and yet inexplicably. It's been twenty years and high school no longer seems like it was a real part of my life - it was several distinct lifetimes ago - and how could I be standing there now with a high school aged child of my own? How could it suddenly seem like it was simultaneously just yesterday that I was a student here and so distant that it's as if it never happened?