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How Time Flies
By Succubyss
They say time flies when you’re having fun. Well, I’ve got news for you; time flies whether you’re having fun or not.
Human beings tend to mark milestones in their lives, such as birthdays and anniversaries. Birthdays are self-explanatory. They mean you’ve managed to survive another calendar year since emerging from your mother’s womb. Yay, you.
Anniversaries are more interesting than that, though. An anniversary milestone can be a memorial of any event that you feel needs marking.
Here at DRS, we are apparently celebrating our one-year anniversary. Which, quite frankly, doesn’t mean jack to me. Yea, I said that out loud. I’m a rebel like that. (Dear Bad Ass Editor, please don’t fire me – Note from Bad Ass Editor: I like it when you beg.) But, here’s the thing – I don’t really know what the one-year is a milestone OF. Is it one year since the site popped up on the internet? Is it one year since someone posted on the message board? A year since the idea was conceived, or the domain name registered? By the time you, my dear DRS audience, reads this, it will be abundantly clear what the milestone is marking. But, right now, I’m just not sure. And that is ok. That is the beauty of having an anniversary. You could really celebrate all those things, none of them or any wacky event in between.
I vaguely remember the first anniversary that I marked. I think I was in third grade. It was the two day anniversary of me having a boyfriend. How precocious, eh? Eight years old and already celebrating a long-term relationship. It was with Jay Rivera, and I told some other girl who said she liked him that he was my boyfriend. The other girl said, “No, he isn’t”, and I said, “Yes, he is.” And to prove it, as we were walking home, I ran up to him and said, “Aren’t you my boyfriend?” He looked confused, nodded, turned around and kept walking. Poor Jay, he didn’t have a clue. He wasn’t in school the next day. The day after that, we celebrated our two-day anniversary, with me telling him that I liked his friend Eric better. So, now it’s like the 32nd annual anniversary of the beginning of my life long relationship strategy.
Years later, I celebrated a different kind of anniversary. I was lucky enough to score a virgin boy who had been pursuing me for some time. After developing and maturing our relationship for 2 or 3 whole days, I popped his cherry and wrote it on my calendar. Then we tried to have sex EVERY DAY at the very same time to celebrate the anniversary of his virginity loss. Twenty-five years later, I am still friends with this guy. Even though we have forgotten the actual day, it was sometime in June, we’ll still toss each other a HAPPY ANNIVERSARY each year. My husband doesn’t have a clue what it means, and has told me he doesn’t want to know.
Speaking of my husband, the one anniversary we DON’T celebrate is our wedding anniversary. Why? Because it doesn’t mean jack shit to us. We got married after being together for almost 10 years. And there were so many milestones that occurred during that period, that frankly, getting married was completely anti-climactic.
The one anniversary we always do celebrate is the first concert we saw together. It was Tom Petty, March 8th, 1995. Neither one of us could stand Tom Petty, still can’t, and we weren’t even dating then. He (my husband, not Tom Petty) was married to someone else at the time, and I was also involved in another relationship. After having worked together for about three years, certain events had found us being highly attracted to each other. Those circumstances may warrant a whole other column, but it will have to suffice to say that locking conference room doors, and making out after meetings, certainly made the work day pass faster.
Anyway, I had gotten tickets to go see Tom Petty from a friend who BEGGED me to go with her and her husband. For some reason, her husband thought he could scalp these shitty seats for a mediocre concert, and ‘lo and behold, no one wanted them. So, I bought them for face value the day before the show. The day OF the show, I broke up with the crackhead I had been seeing and was looking for someone to go with me. Conference room Romeo agreed to go. Thus we celebrate this date as the first night we slept together.
Lest you think the only anniversaries that get celebrated in my life are somehow sexual in nature, let’s go all morbid and dark for a minute. Let’s talk about death. Yes, people celebrate the anniversaries of deaths.
Every year, my mother-in-law has a memorial service at her church for her husband, on the anniversary of his death. This always seemed odd to me. Why are you celebrating someone’s death? I mean, if you wanted to celebrate a life, you could do it on their birthday, or on any other day that didn’t remind you of the fact that they are no longer here. But now, I find myself remembering my dog, Hondo, on the 19th of every month. He died on June 19th of this year. So, while I’m not celebrating his death, I am using that date as a date of remembrance to recall his life. On a side note – this is why my mother-in-law probably can’t stand me. I’ve just compared the death of her beloved husband to the death of my dog. I wonder if she’d attend Hondo’s anniversary service?
Milestones are important. That’s why we have anniversaries. They mark the passing of time, the progress of life and inevitably the end of life. We can’t stop time from marching forward, but we can make it meaningful to us. Celebrate your anniversaries, learn from your milestones. Figure out what’s important to you, and remember WHY it’s important.
Because time flies… until it runs out.
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY DEAD REBEL SOCIETY!
