when you're having fun?

For most of my memory, my life never seemed to be moving fast enough. When I was in one place, I wanted to be in another. When I was a child, I wanted to be an adult - make my own decisions, do my own thing, stay up late, eat ice cream all the time. High school seemed to last an eternity. College too. The workday refused to die. And so on.

Now suddenly everything is moving way too fast. Suddenly, there's a due date to the dissertation. Or at least the money will run out and the university will start to tap its toes impatiently. T. and I have leapt from cohabitation to marriage to immigration laws on both sides of the Atlantic in little more than a month. I have stuff in storage in Boston and L.A., piles of things here in Basel - little deposits all slowly spreading the globe and threatening to splinter off and cross yet more borders. I have a box with dollars, euros, swiss francs, and a check or two made out to pounds sterling. Where are the yen? the rubles? I ask myself. For every birthday after 30, I wonder, will it start jumping by fives? 35, 40, 45 for the next three birthdays? Kind of like dog-years?

How did this happen? Where did the obligatory two weeks to do nothing but sit on a beach and wake up late fly away to this year? And why is every weekend between now and New Year's booked? If someone else were writing this, the words jet-setter or high-flyer would come to mind if I happened to stumble upon it, but nothing could be worse to describe the deep end into which I - as if by ambush - have been unceremoniously tossed.

Spinning her wheels seems more apt. Chaotic, running in place, everywhere and nowhere, in the eye of a storm, maybe. These days the song that goes through my head as I'm in the shower is the chorus of a tune by R. played on the car radio during a vacation I joined with S. and her family:

Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.