(June 4, 2004) — At last, at last, the year is at its overdue end. Or rather, for me and my peers—class of ’04, holla back!—high school is finished. I have yet to be counting any gray hairs. I’m already looking back wistfully at these past four years and wondering where the time ran off to. At least it left me my memories! So the grand question du jour for some of us seems to be whether we’ll be hanging out with our closer friends like we had so many times before even when we’ve grown older, maybe even to the point where we all have developed varicose veins and spongy skin and sagging breasts. But is there really any permanence in life? I ask that rhetorical question (to which the answer seems to be no, no, no!) in the same matter-of-fact tone that goes towards my soon-to-be-separated high school friends and I, towards everyone and anyone in my life, actually. I look at the relationships that I have had both the utmost pleasure of making and disappointments of breaking with fondness because I have learned something from every experience, as well as this calm understanding, which shouldn’t be confused with detachment mind you, that nothing is permanent. Isn’t change the only thing constant during one crazy lifetime? A sudden severing between ties with friends is a horrible thing, but drift is kinder in its slow painlessness: Japan is sinking! ever so slowly; the continents are separating; California is going to become an island in a millennia. The process of it is just so slow that no one is going to know what is going on. A friend who, ironically, had drifted away, shared with me this perspective: while you and the lost friend are not the same people anymore, and there really is no way that things could go back to how it was, the impression still remains in memories and in the person you have become. Although I’d prefer the actual dinosaur as opposed to a fossilized imprint of its foot, the thought made the notion something lost not so sad. Cheers to high school and the lessons learned.