My driver's license expired this week, so I got a new one. The new one expires in 2013. Seems really far away. But then, 2008 seemed far away when I got the one I'm carrying, in 1999. I guess 2008 is really here.

When I was 9 years old I got a book about NASA for Christmas. It was the coolest thing ever. My favorite chapter was the one about the space station that would be finished in 2008. The space station seemed really neat, but impossibly far in the future.

For some reason 9-year-old me did a little bit of math to figure out how old I would be when I could see it finished. I realized that I'd be more than 30, and I remember thinking, "I'll be almost dead by then!"

I cried.