It's funny how we change.

I like to keep letters and look at old yearbooks and messages written inside them with glittery, splotchy, messy, neat, hand writing. I like to look at photos from dances from freshman year and then skip ahead to sophomore year, and then junior year, just to see the differences. I like to read old diary entries and keep my favorite English papers.

I think I do this because I'm fascinated by how people change. I think I almost want to know how we change, what it is that changes us. It's not a curiosity provoked by disapproval or regret, but by sheer amazement at how life moves so quickly, how time can be stopped by no one. Amazing experiences, pain, bad decisions, friendships, thanksgiving dinners, flushed goldfish, driving lessons, barbie jeeps, flipping pancakes, middle school sleepovers, all can't stop time. In a way, all these moments are time.

If time is experience, and experience is life, does that mean every time someone says "we're wasting time" they mean "we're wasting life"? Does that mean every time I sleep in until 1 or 2 pm on Sundays I'm wasting life, or am I spending life to regain enough energy to not waste life, to do something worthwhile, later?

Though I think that during these 4 months in New York I'm not wasting life, I don't think that during my 16 years and 363 days in Texas I was wasting life either. Perceptively, I suppose I could see how some could think otherwise. ("New York is more exciting!")

But I would disagree for one reason, really:

The friends in Dallas, Addison, Plano, Austin, Houston, Pflugerville, whatever, Texas will still be there, not wasting life, and just as awesome and loving when I return to not waste life there too.