a good chunk of my evening was sucked out of my control when, inspired by angela, i looked through my ancient-ish photobucket account. i first got a digital camera for christmas of 2003, right in the middle of my first year of college. i’ve got some really great, somehow really small pictures to show for the first couple years of school: that time i got stranded at the impossibly tiny “train station” in quincy, illinois, the first time i dyed my hair red and the subsequent blonde-redhead cycle, the first and only time i ever drank gin, the whole “first cut is the deepest” completely bone crushing depression thing; trips to chicago, st louis, around and across western illinois. there are also so, so many pictures of cats.
i had to talk myself pretty seriously into not totally incorporating the photos from my removed past with those from my more immediate past — i can look at all the pictures i’ve put on the internet and get very nostalgic and weepy about them, but i just feel like i became a different, better, more reasonable and adult person after my sophomore year of college. the wonder of proper socialization, the wonder of heartbreak. the pictures from four years ago feel like pictures of someone else’s life, just a little bit. i guess it’s normal to feel that way? but, you know, i’m in no rush to disassociate myself from all that crazy shit, all the weird mistakes and songs and books and movies i took so genuinely to heart and recorded pieces of all diary-like on the internet in one way or another. i got nothing to regret yet, it’s true, but at this point my life and future feel just as up in the air as they did when i was eighteen dang years old.
anyway. my most recent past has been colored by this really rad thing i did on thursday night: i got a little bit drunk at the fancy wine bar on the west side of franklin street, tripped up the metal stairs to their roof, split my knee open in a way that covered a lot of bar napkins in blood and rendered me a little helpless and whiny for most of the weekend. after i managed to figure out a way to get out of my bed without bending one of my knees (try it, and first put your mattress directly on the floor like mine is in order to get at the full richness of my experience), and with a little help from my friends, i was able to get over to CVS for butterfly bandages, liquid bandages, extra large bandages, and neosporin. it only cost, like, $5,000 dollars. needless to say, i did it very wrong with the beers and the stairs to begin with. perhaps i should come to terms with how bruising and wounding myself is most likely my most marketable skill. or whatever.
i guess i should mention at some point that i’ve started using twitter and del.icio.us a lot more in my everyday internet life. both are things that, for some reason, i thought i would hate with white-hot passion, but i pretty much need them above all else in my life right now. i will say that it took me a pretty long time to use social bookmarks with any kind of regularity, given that i’ve never ever bookmarked things the normal way before (oh, right, and i guess not even with books) but it’s a pretty rad thing to do. i’m also just really into tag clouds, but really, who isn’t nowadays.
