Where did November Go?

 

After Thanksgiving, I return to the University on Monday, November 28^th.  On the early morning drive in, I realized that November was ending in two days.  I wondered, almost out loud, “Where the heck did November go?”  I did not have a good answer.

I had a fleeting thought to blog about that wondering thought and dismissed it.  Later on same very next day, a colleague posted the graphic shown here in his Facebook Story:  “We went from November 1st to November 27th in just 5 minutes, now watch it be Christmas next week.”  Well, that was all the sign I needed to address the topic in a bloggy bit.  Clearly, I was not alone in this thought.

I have written before about the acceleration of time as one ages.  There is kind of a mathematical explanation for it. Basically, if you are n-years old, the next year 1/(n+1) of your total experience.  If you are 1 year old, the next year is ½ or 50% of your entire experience. If you are 49 years old, the next year is the 1/50 or just 2% of your entire experience.  So, I suppose psychologically, the days seem pass faster with each ensuing year even though the seconds, minute, hours, days, etc. tick off at the same rate. 

I am kind of used to this, but that is not what happened in November.  There was something else at play this November.  Seemingly, it passed faster that any other month in recent memory.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we had fully emerged from the Covid pandemic and life resumed it’s intense, at times insane, whir and hum.  Commuting, face-to-face meetings, shopping, socializing, all kind of, sort of, returned to pre-Covid levels.  Maybe November was the month where we took the biggest leap of resuming our old frenzy of activities?

Maybe it was all astrological?  Perhaps it was a certain alignment of the planets.  This one rising or that one in was in retrograde.  It could have been a comet whose orbit had somehow changed. 

It might me that the aliens so many of us believe are buzzing about our planet, used their vastly superior technology to make November zoom by faster than other months.  I cannot think of the reason they might do such a thing.  I mean how might fathom the reasoning and motives of vastly superior beings.

If I were a Republican, I might easily blame Biden and the lame press for screwing up the flow of November to make it pass before the vote counts could be questioned.  If I were a Democrat, I would be convinced that Trump and his minions were somehow manipulating things enhance his chances, somehow, of being re-elected.  I think I like the alien theory the best.

The most mundane answer might just be that only the singer and songwriter Alex Duncan IV (ADIV) and I were the only two that thought November slipped by faster than normal. We may never know.

Let’s see how December flows.