Ten Years

It's interesting how quickly an entire decade of your life can go by. I've been thinking about this particular post for a few weeks now. What I want to show is how much my life has changed in the last ten years by comparing my life then with my life now. It really makes my head hurt when I start thinking about all of what I've done in the last decade.

Ten years ago, I had just completed my sophmore year of college. I had been initiated into the brotherhood of the Kappa Sigma fraternity earlier that spring and still thought fraternities were pretty cool. I was only about halfway through my active enlistment in the army reserves and graduation from school seemed a long ways off.

I was living at my parent's house in Gresham for the summer and working at the local Payless Drug Store as a cashier. My best friends were Chris and Matt, two guys that I had lived with in the dorms my freshman year. That summer, our idea of a good time was to go see the Laser Floyd show at the Murdoch Sky Theatre and then go drink coffee and smoke cigarettes at one of the many Shari's scattered throught the Portland metro area. I was dating a very pretty, smart and nice girl named Nikki. She was getting her BS in genetic engineering at the University of Puget Sound and was staying for the summer at her parent's place, which happened to be a block down the road from where Tonya Harding lived. I was still closeted and doing that thing gay guys do where they think that if they act and live straight enough, they'll wake up one morning and find out that they really are straight.

Ten years ago, I hadn't lived in an apartment with roommates or by myself. I hadn't had sex of any kind with either gender and had only engaged in some "heavy petting" with what would be my one and only serious girl-friend. I hadn't smoked any pot or experimented with any other drugs. I didn't know Danielle, Ron or Olga at that point yet, though I'd seen Danielle wandering around Gleeson Hall with her boyfriend Hanni. Because of who she was dating and her complexion, I assumed that Danielle was a devout muslim from Lebanon. I don't think Ron or Olga were even in Corvallis at that point. I had started chatting with gay guys on the internet, but it was through an anonymous countrywide chat room called "gaychat" and most of the guys I was talking to were in other states. I had never played dungeons and dragons but had read the players handbook and dungeon masters guide several times.

So I guess that's what my life was like ten years ago. I don't really think the entry does justice to how much things have changed since then. Not only am I a completely different person, but the world is completely different. Ten years ago, there really wasn't much of an internet unless you were a college student and the phrase "information technology" didn't really exist.