July cometh. A new year starts.

I still haven’t figured out why academic years start and end when they do.

Today is, I suppose, the exact mid-point of the year. It is six months after January 1, 2007, and six months until January 1, 2008. Midsummer Night.

The moon is full. Since the marine layer has moved in, it’s the only thing you can see in the sky besides the thick ocean fog.

365 days and counting until I’m en route to my destination, whereever that may be. Ideally, I’ll figure that out in another six months, but knowing what I know about my procrastinating nature, I certainly can’t promise anything.

By good fortune, most of the people graduating from my class whom I know relatively well are sticking around. It hasn’t hit me that I won’t see certain people on a regular, scheduled basis.

All endings are a beginning. All beginnings herald endings.

Jörmungandr the World Serpent suddenly pops into my head.

Is it mere coincidence that he is the son of Loki, the pre-eminent trickster god, frequently equated with the Native American god Raven?

Such things seem so improbable to be merely chance. And yet, the very power of chaos is to make the improbable actual.

So who is to say?

I will start missing folks acutely when I don’t see them around anymore.

The last three years seem to have gone by so fast, although only in retrospect. (Because God only knows how many late nights I stayed awake, fretting about when the sun would come out and relieve me of my awful duties.) I expect that time will continue to seem to speed up as I get older. There must be something in the brain and the body to cause this terrible amount of pain, and frankly, I’m not all that convinced that once this happens, the person will not be subjected to neediness and resource allocation.

As Robert Heinlein once said, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.