But not the kind of deja vu where you feel like you walked into the same room before, even though it's in a country you've never been to. The kind where you look around and think "Wow. That looks almost identical to what was going on 25 years ago when I was that age."
Christopher and I were out tonight at a birthday party for his younger sister, and the bar we were in - a very loud, kind of not-so-high-class place - was full of a bunch of people who... well... they were mostly of the 25-years-younger-than-me range.
While I was people watching, I found myself creating stories for each of them. Plotting out personalities for each of them. Guessing at the lives they're each now living, as well as what might be coming next.
It's amazing how many of them fit into categories that matched people I knew in college and the years after that.
The guy who was trying way too hard to be the one having a really good time.
The guy who was dancing with himself, obviously trying to impress the women at the table in front of him.
The guy who had apparently had too much to drink, now just standing in one place and kind of swaying as the world moved around him.
The guy who was standing off to the side, baseball cap on backward, who probably would be fine in a few years, but was too shy for his own good, tonight.
I watched them all and thought about my friends and the days when we were the ones who were out in the bars trying to impress the girls - and each other. And, yeah, I wondered which ones in the group would find out eventually that they were more interested in impressing each other than in impressing the girls.
We left the bar before most of them did, so we'll never know how their stories play out. Although, if history truly does repeat itself, I have some pretty good ideas.
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