The Ten Minutes after 3:31 AM

There’s a guy playing the banjo on the subway platform.  Quite well, honestly.  If anyone knows good folk music, it’s me.

There’s a rare breed of people who ride the subway at 3:31 AM.  For the most part, the people here are getting home from a drunken night of gallivanting around the town or are homeless and seeking refuge from the frigid cold.  Most of the people waiting for the train are some shade of brown, except for the guy playing the banjo.  I’m not quite sure if the ethnic discrepancy has anything to do with the time of night or my location in the city.

There are ten more minutes until my train arrives.  Those ten minutes are that kind of excruciating wait that you recognize is soon enough, but not as soon as you want it to be.  Like it should be faster, and you’re somehow entitled to it.  It’s the same kind of wait when you take baked goods out of the oven.  You smell the warm, sugary goodness, and you want to dig in immediately, but you figure that you should probably wait five more minutes instead of losing all sensation in your tongue due to flaming hot cookies and doing that embarrassing pant-and-fanning of your mouth that usually comes with eating hot food too prematurely.

I wonder, as this year comes to an end, whether I think that this year has been fulfilling.  I spent the first portion of it traveling the globe and living out some of my biggest dreams while learning lessons about myself and the world around me.  I spent the next portion in a new, unfamiliar city doing something just as new and unfamiliar.  I spent the last portion getting back into the groove of normalcy as a result of the previous two portions.

There’s one more month of 2012.  And maybe of the world because, y’know, the apocalypse is coming.  Either way, I’d like to think that this year was full of personal growth and surprises.  I think that I’ve had major development in the “Paul” department; I’m really coming into my own and realizing that I’m supposed to be a real adult.  It’s a little weird to have so many new responsibilities, and it scares me how much I’ve accomplished in my young life, but it also is a constant reminder of the new challenges to come and the innumerable things I have yet to do.

Not too long ago, I was sitting on the Singapore or Shanghai subways.  And the Chicago subway.  And now, I’m back waiting on a New York City subway platform.  It’s crazy how time flies.  It’s interesting that the past ten minutes have felt like an eternity, yet the past year seemed to fly by.  I’ve relived an entire year in ten minutes.  And just like that, the 1 train is approaching the station, ready to take me to my next destination.