Time: the languid versus the breakneck.

Do you ever feel like minutes and days are passing by at a snail’s pace, but weeks and months are whirring past you almost unrecognizably? I guess what I’m asking is, am I the only one who senses the tension between boring, monotonous, everyday life and the less predictable, more exciting “big picture”?

It’s like this. Today is Wednesday. It’s the middle of a work week. It’s been boring. And when it wasn’t boring, it was stressful. And when it wasn’t boring or stressful, it was just restless. I felt, all day, like the minutes were dragging on in super-slow motion, like I would NEVER see the clock hit 5:15 so that I could get up out of my chair and be free of corporate existence for just a few hours…until tomorrow. And then comes the realization that it’s only Wednesday! The work week is STILL not over, even though I’ve been holding my freaking breath since MONDAY, hoping it would make the week go by faster. And it’s not that I don’t like my job. I am so incredibly lucky to have this job, and great co-workers and a great boss, AND great pay and benefits. It’s just that it’s a job. It’s a run-of-the-mill, corporate America, 40-hour-a-week desk job. It’s paying the bills, and for that I am grateful. But if I had my way, I would NOT be spending most of my waking weekday hours sitting at a desk in business casual dress and making travel arrangements and showing intelligent men how to use Microsoft Word. (Okay, that’s not ALL I do. I’m just making a point here.) The bottom line is, if I didn’t need money and health insurance, I would be doing a million other things besides sitting on my butt all day in front of a computer. And thus, I get stir crazy, and the minutes drag on excruciatingly slowly.

So, right in the middle of a “Dang, work is boring and it feels like it’ll never end” kind of thought, I often reflect a little farther out…like this:

Today is January 21st. JANUARY! I can’t believe it’s already January. And it’s totally almost THE END OF JANUARY! The year 2009 is already like 6% over. Joe and I are already a quarter of the way through our pre-marrieds class, and we’re coming up on eight months of dating.

Whoa. Hold that thought. EIGHT MONTHS? I don’t know if you’re aware of this, oh faithful reader (heh.), but before Joe, the longest I ever managed to keep a steady relationship was five months. And of those five months, I was out of the country for five and a half weeks (away from my then-boyfriend). And even with those weeks apart from him, five months felt like a looooooong time. My point is, just to drive home this whole “I’m really in love with Joe” thing in case you haven’t gotten the picture these last couple days: IT’S SO AMAZING THAT I’M NOT SICK OF HIM BY NOW! Eight months. With the same person. And I love him more every day.

Okay. Back to what I was really writing about. Big picture. Weeks and months are flying by, especially as Joe and I begin to consider possible wedding dates and I realize, “Ohhh, crap. This is going to take a LOT of planning and preparation. We should’ve started MONTHS AGO! Wait, what? You think it would’ve been weird for us to start planning our wedding before we even said ‘I love you’? Psh…YOU try just thinking about planning a wedding. There is no such thing as too soon.” Hehe. Anyway, basically, today I was just perplexed by the way time seems to “move” in the day-to-day versus the more long-term perspectives. And how I can feel concurrently (big word, huh?) the humdrum of days and the rapidity of months.

…You know?

Anyone?

Bueller? …Bueller?

Maybe it’s just me.