The passage of time, I suppose

My Canon Rebel 2000 OES, which I’m not sure I still like actually but at least it was cheap!

I recently realized that I’m probably not going to learn a new language again from scratch for the rest of my life, which is a silly and specific kind of realization but it was sort of harrowing nevertheless. The reason for this is because I have studied many languages to an intermediate enough level, and Spanish and Mandarin to a moderately high but still kind of crappy one, that it doesn’t really make sense to not focus language learning energy I have to those endeavors, unless some compelling real life application reason came up, and that’s not likely to. The languages that could come up in this area I live are Spanish, Mandarin, Russian and Japanese, and those are all on my previously studied list, and realistically at this stage of my life when my older kid just started public school, I’m not likely to move anytime soon.

I’m still picking up other hobbies, though, like photography and chess. I only learned to crochet last year and I’d tried knitting for the first time a while ago, but I didn’t stick with it until the pandemic. I am not too good at most of these things! It sometimes does feel like a waste of time but what’s time for I guess.

My son (18 months old) is starting to respond to verbal instructions and statements, which is exciting! It feels like only recently my daughter was doing that, and now she (almost 5) talks basically like any any other person with just a few grammatical quirks. She still uses “him” instead of “he” as a subject — “Him’s drinking the bath water, Mama!” — and it’ll be a little sad when she doesn’t do that anymore, which I’d guess is just going to be a matter of weeks.

Life gets much easier when your kids enter full time school, so I was always looking forward to it for my daughter, but once my son is in school that’s it for the little kid lifestyle in our home. It will, I think, have been eight years total! That’s longer than the amount of time I spent in college and grad school, and about as much time as I've spent in government service.

If I live to 80, which feels like a good aspiration, eight years is around 10% of my life.

If I live to 80, I'm about halfway finished!

Troubling, troubling, troubling.