Tonight, Nolan continues its trend of being on shitty WB television shows, during something called “One Tree Hill”.

It gets dark every day at four now. I stay in this building and work overtime, pile the hours on early in the week so I can take it easy on Thursday and Friday. Sometimes, wandering the quiet passageways of various floors at the top of this immense structure, I almost feel cozy; I’m an insignificant molecule forgotten deep within the recesses of a place which is in turn tiny in comparison to the world around it.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my senior year of high school, which began a decade ago. Ten years.

I generally consider my adult life to have begun in 12th grade. Not for any good reason—lord knows I was still a whiny, melodramatic little bitch; a selfish, narcissistic, immature whelp who still had a lot of growing up to do. I was 18 years old, the arbitrary benchmark at which people are considered adults by most equally arbitrary standards. In retrospect, I think this was when I began taking things more seriously, writing about things more often, and getting just the faintest inkling at the causal nature of things: that actions have consequences, that everything’s correlative.

My taste in music became more refined, though it still had a long way to go. My approach to interpersonal relationships became a bit less selfish, though I still had/have a long way to go in that respect, too. I still hated my parents and had a few years to go before I realized they were the smartest people in the world. I was immediately dismissive of everything I didn’t already know about. I grew out of that phase, but still get genuinely frightened when I meet people my own age or older who haven’t yet. And that happens far too frequently for my taste.

So, a decade. Fuck, that doesn’t seem so long after all. Not until I reach out and try to grasp at the increasingly distant memories of having a Democrat in the White House (four years ago), getting drunk for the first time (nine years ago), being a college student (six years ago), or losing my virginity ( years ago).

I remember a time, not so long ago, when ten years seemed like a long time, an impractically abstract measurement, a meaningless span.

Now it makes more sense than ever.