"This is Now, now." - Col. Sanders to Lord Helmet

I was really hungry when I got off my first flight a few minutes ago. I'm in Chicago now, and I don't leave for LaGuardia for another three hours. So I passed on a quickie Quizno's to sit down at this Chili's with my laptop and some food on an actual plate.

Here are the songs I've heard so far in the course of my lunch: Adia, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Hey Jealousy, Daughter, Ordinary World. This is all musak now. Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam is musak.

But the Pearl Jam thing is better left for a separate post because what I was to share is this: I can't stop thinking about how these were all songs from when I was in high school. And I'm realizing, in a way math can never really indicate, exactly how old I am. Chronology tells me I'm 31; KCHLI is telling me the difference between me then and me now.

Not that I have a problem with getting older. I like it. I'm grateful for it. I think back to what I was like when these songs were playing in my 1985 Buick -- whose skinny steering wheel I could turn with my pinky finger -- and thank god I am not that person anymore. My tastes have changed. I started liking Brussels sprouts and stopped wearing mom jeans. I'm taller, and my body is different. (I was a late bloomer and didn't get my height til 18.) All my cells have died and reproduced -- probably a couple times -- since the mid-'90s, so physically I'm kind of a whole new organism.

The point is, when I think back to the person I was at 17, she seems like a stranger. A different person altogether. And I can remember being that age and imagining what I would be like at 30 -- what I would be doing, where I would be living, if I would be married. She seemed like a different person to me then, too: Future Lauren. What would Future Lauren be like if I could meet her? It never felt like I was her.

In fact, I used to do this little mental experiment from the time I was 4 or 5. And looking back, remembering the thoughts I thought then, that little girl seems just as foreign to me now as I did to her then -- even though her thoughts were mine.

It's encouraging, in a way. It's so hard to stay in the present -- with this breath, in this moment -- before my mind runs off to some imaginary situation in the future or the past. But sitting here in the airport listening to all this terrible music, it's suddenly so real to me how un-real the past and the future are: they're mental constructs. It's one thing to read it in an eastern philosophy book. It's another to realize it's why those young doppel-gangers don't seem like Me.

Yep, the only Me I know is the one who just polished off this black bean burger and is feeling full.