where does the time go?

Yes, it's really July 15. Four months since I arrived in Brooklyn to start my new life, to reinvent myself as a New Yorker. One-third of a year. A book I read long ago about culture shock, probably the last time I experienced it badly, as a 22-year-old in Hong Kong, said that it takes about a year to really adjust to a new culure. There is a honeymoon period where you think everything is great. Then there is another period -- I forget if it has an official name -- where you think everything is terrible and long nostagically for the life you left behind. Gradually, you stop being so crazy and seeing things in extremes. The new life becomes your real life.

But I don't know if it's so simple. I seem to run the gamut of these emotions every day. I love it. I hate it. (Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself, for I contain multitudes.) Sometimes it even seems like my real life, routine even. I do ordinary things now, things I used to do in Raleigh, like go jogging, except now I have brownstones and the Manhattan skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge to look at, instead of the nameless minipark on Oxford Street and the progress of people making mega-additions onto their formerly modest little houses in Five Points. I resumed work on my mystery, finally, and this is strangely comforting. Everything in my life has turned upside down, but in Woodfin it is still January 1999 and there is a murderer at large...

I would like to say something profound about all this, it hovers in my grasp, but the words won't come. I traded safe routine for risk, a place where I seemed to know everything for a place where I seem to know nothing, and now must live with the consequences of that transaction. Do I feel sad and afraid and regretful? Yes, often. And the strange thing is, I knew I would, and I did it anyway. Because the price of saying no would have been even higher, drifting through life, never taking a chance, getting to the end and wondered what happened. It scares me to realize that Pink Floyd said it best:

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Actually, Kazuo Ishiguro might have said it better in "The Remains of the Day," but that is harder to quote in a blog. Just read it, dear reader, if you haven't. The movie isn't bad either, but the book needs to be read first.


So, Robin is back online, after a long silence, and the blog is awaiting her words. What about you, Robin? What have you made of your trade? Any relevant Pink Floyd lyrics running through your head?