Thoughts of a Old Home Video Watcher, and more

- Over the weekend when I was home in Darien, my family was watching some old home videos from the year we lived in Taiwan (1995). It really is amazing to see how much has changed in the past 8 or 9 years of my life. Physically, I was a 5 foot tall boy with a high voice and these huge nerdy glasses. It was my freshman year of high school at Taipei American School (TAS), and I was taking classes like Japanese 1 and Introduction to Computer Programming with Quick BASIC 4.5, taught by Mr. Paulson. In my free time, I would take the bus to the area in Taipei where all the pirated computer stuff was being sold at the time and hang out there, or go to the arcade and play Daytona USA for hours. I lived in this tiny room with no more than a desk, closet, bed, and computer, with my only source of entertainment being a mini basketball hoop. Now that I think about it, I still live in a tiny room with just a desk, closet, bed, and computer. The only thing is, I have no mini-basketball hoop, but I do have a TV.

Meanwhile, my sister was this bratty but interesting little kid, who liked to sing the jingle from the Taiwanese commercial for Juicy Fruit gum (OK I'll admit, I liked to sing it too). She was always getting yelled at by my mom for everything from not studying enough to eating too much junk food. I remember she even used to get yelled at because my mom didn't like her wasting time twirling her pen. Also, she was obsessed with Mariah Carey and had a crush on a guy named Mark at school.

Anyways, enough about that, I'm sure nobody cares to read about more of my old experiences. But I do wish that I had kept a blog or journal from back then, that I could go back and read about life through the eyes of 15-year old Joe. Hopefully, this blog I'm writing in right now will last for a long time, and I'll be able to someday come back and read about life through the eyes of 23-year old Joe.

- Another thought that struck me after watching the old videos was, how long time seemed to drag on back then. It was only about one year I lived in Taiwan, but I remember it as feeling like forever. Now, I've been at this company for over a year, and it honestly feels like the year passed in no more than the blink of an eye. When we first moved back, we had to stay at the house of our family friends for one semester school until we bought a place of our own. That also felt like a really long time, but semesters seemed to just fly by in college. Then I see the people here at work who are celebrating like 40 years of service, and I wonder if those 40 years felt like 40 years. Like, can they go back and identify any individual year and talk about what was so special about each year? Or does it all run together like one big blurry chunk of life experience?

I mean, most of us at this age can look back and pretty clearly define the different stages throughout their lives in 2-3 year blocks of time. Such as going through puberty, being a high school underclassman, when you wore braces, the rebellious stage, the awkward stage, etc. I know I could probably pretty easily tell you about each stage of my life in pretty good detail. But, how are we going to define the next 40 years of our lives? Will our 2-3 year long stages be stretched out to 5-10 year divisions? Is it simply going to be "twenty-something", then "thirty-something", and so on? And other than scattered big events that happen only once every few years, like getting married and having kids, changing jobs and moving, or retirement, what is actually going to distinguish one year from the next, during the rest of our lives?

- This morning while eating my daily cereal, I watched some of Star Wars Episode 2 which was showing on HBO. It reminded me of how terrible that kid is who plays Anakin Skywalker. Not that the acting in the originals was that great ("But I wanted to go to Tashi Station to pick up some power converters!!"), but how do you pair up the glorious Natalie Portman with that chump? It's just wrong...

- We should play football sometime soon. I probably can't this Saturday, but hopefully we'll be able to figure out a time that works for people in the near future, because I'm getting out of shape and I feel like playing. If anyone wants to get people together, feel free to do so, otherwise, you can all just let me know when would be a good day and I can try to set up a game. It should be easier than organizing softball, because we don't need as many people and equipment. So let's do it.