Postume, Postume, the years slip away and are lost to me, lost to me.
Yikes, I just passed my 9th Chinaversary. A consensus was reached long ago amongst my foreign friends here that Beijing years age you by about 5 years each (though the China life is so much more intense than that lived anywhere else that our lives before China become irrelevant, and our age clock is reset to zero upon our moving here). That means I am now well-and-truly middle-aged. Damn. [Indeed, I am going through the spooky phase where my real age and my 'China age' are the same.]
By happy coincidence, I share this anniversary with my best buddy The Choirboy (a fact we did not discover until a few years ago), so we marked the occasion with a modest two-man bar crawl.... while glumly musing on why we are still here, and how much longer we might stay. The answer to both questions appears to be 'Not sure'. Oh dear.
Sometimes, cheap beer and good friends are all the answer that we need to such troubling questions. Sometimes, but not always. I am starting to consider the road home....
[The frivolous opening quotation is another of my occasional Classical references - a joking translation of the opening line of Horace's Ode 2.14, yet another of the "Life is short; so let's crack open the good wine now" pieces with which Classical Latin poetry abounds.]
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