Concussions are magic.* After all, the core of magic is just doing things that ordinary people or physical phenomena could do, but on a radically different timescale. When you have no short term memory, all of life is both an instant and an eternity away, at the same time. It's like living in a quantum paradox thought up by Stephen Hawking, or a magical kingdom thought up by Walt Disney.
All of this is to explain why, regardless of who asks me, or how everyone thinks I should feel, I'm not exactly excited, and not even close to nervous, about my two-year trip to teach English in Indonesia, for which I leave in exactly one week. Technically, exactly one week from now, I will be in the Minneapolis airport, and I've spent enough time there that while it isn't exactly home, it doesn't feel like having left home, either. After the Minneapolis airport, I will be in Earth's atmosphere, and then in Tokyo, neither of which are anything like home, so for the purposes of this blog, I leave home in a week. That's seven days, which works out to 168 hours or 10080 minutes or 604800 seconds, but all of those measurements just say "an instant and an eternity" to me. It's simultaneously way too late to be nervous and too far away to be psyched up for. It's simply something really cool that is going to happen sometime.
And, I guess, if your brain works the way it was built to work, "sometime" is pretty soon.
*Do not, under any circumstances, go out and get concussions. You do get a few freebies before they start affecting your personality, but things like short-term memory are actually useful, and hiding the lack of it takes a lot of practice, after which it is still a lot of work. Not to mention that even one concussion is bad for your long-term health. I also wouldn't wish the grinding, piercing, nauseating, eye-bending, mind-splitting migraine headaches on the worst of my enemies, although I can't complain about the lack of a sense of smell.
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