Item: 1 piece of lasagna

...is food left over from this weekend, and even though I had everything cleaned up for the weekend, more undealt-with stuff is piling up again.  Already.  Time - where is the time going?

For maybe obvious reasons, I've been thinking lately about the ongoing process of getting older, and how this changes the way a person experiences her life.  In particular, I'm recognizing how a lot of impressions seem to get so much less intense as a person gets older, and why the word "mellowing" is so often used in association with age.  When I was little, certain things, like a book fair or the night before Christmas, made me so excited that I couldn't sleep.  When I say couldn't sleep, I mean that in the most heightened sense possible.  I can't think of anything that evokes that level of all-consuming anticipation currently.  I can still think of things that make me so angry or unhappy that I can't sleep, however.

This reminds me of a scene in Douglas Coupland's book Life after God where 2 young people are going up to an off-limits mountain lake specifically with the sense that now, if ever, is when they need to have that experience.  Here's part of the passage:

Now: I believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty.  After that, memory becomes water flowing into an already full cup.  New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact.  I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in the eleventh grade.  You know what I mean.

I think of previous experiences like the first time I heard someone singing in a subway tunnel (Chicago, 1995) that maybe don't deserve to be so vivid and other-worldly as the experience of walking in a rain forest in New Zealand (2 months ago).  But they are.

I usually think of "mellow" as being something nice.  But of course a lot of mid-life crisis activities, the fast cars, the sudden hankering to try extreme sports, probably are also attempts to jump-start in that person the excitement that a younger person just naturally has, and which was sometimes nice too.