a.k.a. V.J.

An’ here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice

~Bob Dylan

If you want to make a pronouncement that everybody within earshot will agree with (an incredibly rare proposition in 2026) observe that the current month is “flying by,” or that you can’t believe it’s almost [insert next calendar month here]. When people make those kinds of observations, the response is invariably something like, “Oh my God — I know!” or “Where does the time go?” It’s not just polite small talk. The feeling that time is passing by faster than we’d like it to seems like a majority position…at least among people in my age cohort.

I am writing this on the Friday leading into what is effectively the final weekend of my summer. Classes start next week at SUNY Oswego, marking the de facto beginning of fall in my life. I find this sad, because the Summer of ’26 slipped through my fingers, and didn’t enjoy it the way I enjoy most summers. That’s ultimately because I didn’t allow myself to.

I was really busy at work from June right up until about a week ago. That was largely unavoidable, and it wasn’t actually a bad thing in and of itself. The unfortunate aspect of it was that I allowed myself to bring my petty worries and anxieties from the office home with me. During evenings and weekends, I always had in the back of my mind the next looming deadline or the project I was running behind on — there was no shortage of either. For a couple months, I went through the motions of doing all the enjoyable summer things — road trips, nature hikes, going to the beach, etc.; but I wasn’t fully engaged while doing them. I was fretting. Now, as the season comes to a close, I feel like I missed out, not just on a summer but on a few months of my ever-shortening life.

The situation makes me annoyed at myself because I know better. I thought I had figured out work-life balance, compartmentalization, and stress management a long time ago. Apparently, I forgot.

The good news is that work has calmed down, and I have more or less re-centered myself. I (re)learned some lessons the hard way about the futility of needlessly grinding one’s gears and the value of genuine downtime. And there’s still a whole August weekend left to experience some.