The speed of time.

Time seems to be moving real slow here in the States. Have I only been in America for 4 weeks? Seems like it's been way longer than that. This isn't to say it's been a drag.

It's been great spending most of my time hanging out with people I haven't seen in a while. Yesterday, I got to be in the presence of Christine and Jason... good times. I also got to rediscover used book stores yesterday. I forgot how much I love those places.

But yeah, I dunno. Time just seemed to slow down as soon as I touched down at LAX. In Japan, it was just that the pace of things in my world was just frantic. I was busy doing something almost all the time. I was always "on." Or at least it felt that way. True, I taught a lot of English classes during my time there, but that's not the whole picture. Even normal conversations with people in Japan required a heightened awareness. Just being forced to speak a foreign language, it takes a lot outta ya. Some mornings, if I knew that I had to go to city hall or the bank or something later that day, I'd study up on the vocabulary I'd have to use to accomplish my goals. Now, in the States, I just "wing" a lot of conversations. I'm not constantly thinking about how I want to say what I want or need to say.

What I mean to say is that my time to wind down in Japan rarely felt like I was winding down. Here, in America, if I want to wind down I'll watch TV with friends or family... or something of the sort. And time would just, for a moment slow down to a crawl. In Japan, I had no such luxury. I had time to watch TV... but it'd be Japanese TV. And watching Japanese TV, although entertaining at times (most of the crazy Japanese variety shows you see in the States were from the 80s... so they don't exist anymore), always seemed to morph into a Japanese language learning experience for me (I learned a lot of my conversational Japanese from playing with kids and watching TV).

Time may slow down if you're moving faster than the speed of light... but I've found that it may also slow down if you're watching Sportscenter... duh nah nah, duh nah nah.