Back Before I Blogged

I was cleaning out my hope chest today and came across something that gave me a chuckle.

Someone is going to recognize the book in the picture immediately, but for the rest of you I'll give a bit of backstory:

Way back in 2001, I moved to the mountain resort town of Jasper, AB and in with one of the most fantastic people I've ever known -- my honorary big sister, Corina.

I got this journal shortly after I moved there and it became a collaborative effort between Corina and I at chronicling our daily movements back before websites like Blogger, Facebook and Twitter allowed you to share the same with the world at large.

We'd write little snippets about people we'd met, our job (we both worked front desk at the Athabasca Hotel), boys we were into, and other notable things (like the day the lounge manager gave me a lemon and a lime, that we immediately Sharpie'd and turned into Lemonhead and Limeface, our citrus-y lovebirds).

After Corina moved back home to Ontario, I tried to keep up the tradition, writing a short 1-4 sentence entry about what I was doing that day. I ended the journal tradition on the very day I left Jasper, since it didn't seem right to continue.

I've been viewing the journal as a bit of a time capsule all afternoon. Kristy and I have been talking a lot recently about how much we've changed and matured over the past 8 years since graduating, and this book seems like a pretty accurate gauge of my 17/18 year old mindset.

I was naive enough to believe a relatively new relationship with a considerably older man would result in a happy engagement and marriage, and naive enough to believe that sleeping with your ex resulted in a reconciliation. I hopped from one relationship to the next, sometimes with scant days between, and was never more than 2 weeks without a male companion of some sort.

I'm still a little boy crazy (although definitely not to the extent that I was there), but I'm not as big of a social butterfly (there are very few entries in there where I was not hosting guests, visiting people, doing coffee/dinner or bar hopping), nor do I view drinking culture with the same excitement I once did. I would never rebound as quickly from a relationship as I did then, and if I can recall, my work ethic has improved exponentially.

The biggest difference, though, is how humbled I feel now in comparison to then. I thought I had the world by it's short-n-curlies and there was nothing I didn't know about anything. If I knew then what I know now, I wonder if I would have been more or less insufferable.

PS. It's my brother Trinity's 22nd birthday today -- Happy Birthday! In the journal on this date in 2002 I wished him a Happy 15th and ate strawberries and chocolate with my friend, Meghan, while we complained about men. Replace 'Meghan' with 'Kristy' and 'strawberries and chocolate' with 'mass amounts of caffeine' and some things never change.