Philosophizing and a brief account of the Alcazar

On Friday, I celebrated two things: the end of exams until finals, and turning 20.5. We celebrated by going out for Rayas (the most heavenly gelato on the planet), shopping for our "amigo invisible" (secret santa), and then going to a Chinese restaurant. All this fun cost (or as I said then "costed") me $8.20. I love being frugal.

Being half a year older in addition to realizing we have less than a month left here made me do some reflecting. Time is flying so fast. I want to try to squeeze everything in, sit in the park and journal, make time to grow closer with my friends here, all while catching up with those of you on the other side of the Atlantic. I become painfully aware of my desire to live in a timeless world as the weekends fly by. It makes me think. "Do fish complain of the sea being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Note how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown up and married! I can hardly believe it!') In heaven's name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal." (C.S. Lewis, A Severe Mercy)
I sometimes wonder if our system of measuring time is a little off. Of course it has to be that way, there has to be a standard. But subjectively, the duration of every minute, hour, or day is a little bit different. I remember things that happened two weeks ago better than I remember what I thought about on the bus this morning. If life was all black and white, followed a straight grid-line chart, that would not be logical at all. Life, though, has many more dimensions than we can fathom. It's all so much more complex than we can see. Or so much simpler. Who could know? Quien pudiera saber?
This kind of thinking makes me wonder why I get so caught up in going shopping, whether or not I'm having too many snacks between meals, or what I'm going to do when I graduate. It's so strange that graduation does nothing but get closer. It seems like it was just this past August that I packed my life as I knew it (minus Scout), into a van and headed off to Iowa. This past August, what I really did was pack my life as I knew it (again, minus Scout) into two 50lbs suitcases and hop a plane. The distance between the points on the timeline seems to be the same to me. August 2005 - present, or August 2007 - present. Me dan igual. The only difference is the amount of memories on the former is greater than the latter.

Yesterday, my friend Caitlin (I seem to have a lot of friends with the names Stephanie or Caitlin) and I went to the Alcazar. (See previous post.) It is a cool palace from the 16th C?. One of the Christian kings thought that Muslim arquitecture was awesome, so he built this palace in Seville as a copy of the Alahambra in Granada. The inside was cool, but the best part was the gardens. There were courtyards and courtyards of flowers, terraces, orange trees, fountains with ducks, and there was even a maze made out of bushes. You could be there for hours, and we were, and not come close to seeing everything, which we didn't. The two hours we spent there did not fly by, but instead gently slid away. When I am least aware of time, I live as close as I can get to a timeless world. When I don't count the minutes, each one is a little bit fuller.