Five Year Anniversary

I got an email today from Iowa State, congratulating me on my five-year anniversary of graduating from college.  The passage of time is an interesting thing, and this little note put me in a meditative mood.  In the five years since graduating from Iowa State:

• I started my first full-time job as a "Clerk II" at Iowa State University's benefits office.
• I worked as a field manager at Iowa PIRG, knocking on doors, asking people for money, and training other people to knock on doors and ask for money.
• I completed a survive-being-kidnapped-by-terrorists training.
• I moved to China.
• I negotiated two teaching contracts in a foreign country.
• I taught over 800 students over the course of three semesters.
• I learned Chinese.
• I got two tattooes.
• I met the love of my life and I married that man.
• I moved across China on a train.
• I worked as a waitress in a South Jersey dinner.
• I worked in the marketing department of a small glass manufacturer.
• I drove across the southwest all the way up to New Jersey with all my earthly belongings in the back of a red VW bug.
• I got a job teaching Job Readiness and ESL at an awesome organization with awesome people, where I discovered that I could love teaching and I could love ESL and I could love loving the poor.

So I'm simultaneously thinking:
"Five years already?" as if it was only yesterday I was hanging out at Welch Ave Station
and
"Only five years?" since it seems that I've reinvented myself an infinite number of times since December 8, 2007.