What Was I Doing One Year Ago Today Volume 1:

The picture above is of me and my sister hiking in Tucson last year

Welcome to the first installment of: What Was I Doing One Year Ago Today?

One year ago today was April 8th, 2009. It was a Wednesday. I was in my senior year of college. I was living by myself in a tiny studio casita near campus. I had a planter full of dead flowers and seeds for catnip that never seemed to flourish. One year ago today I was ordering my tickets for graduation, translating a story from Italian to English, reading for Anthropology, reading Dante's Inferno, writing reactions and vocabulary for my Italian class, researching points for my term paper, applying for a job, studying for Dr. Soren's quiz and finalmente going for a run at 6:45.

I was a busy girl. I know all of this because I looked it up in my pink, leather bound planner that Russ bought for me in Italy. Peppered throughout this day would have been class, work, my boyfriend, club meetings, making dinner...routine activities that my anal retentive brain surprisingly enough didn't feel the need to jot down neatly on the next line.

It's not that I enjoy dwelling on the past, in fact it's almost a heartache to rehash old memories; however I find that the past acts as a backdrop, a canvas in which to compare or evaluate your current life. I remember waking up everyday in that small, Pepto Bismol colored guest house with a gravel yard and no internet connection, I remember feeling like I was on an island, disconnected completely from the world. The internet did not consume my life, satellite did not consume my life, I spent my nights reading for class or for pleasure: "The Diary of an Irish Slave Girl" or "Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno."

I think the trickiest part of my day back then would be walking quickly home past the halfway house that smelled like stale mattresses and cigarettes on 6th street. Scurrying across the sidewalk and averting my gaze from the shriveled up old Asian man who shuffled his feet and stared blankly into the distance, mumbling to nobody in particular. Maybe he was mumbling to me. Either way he looked like a sticky raisin, the tiniest one from the bottom of the box, stuffed in the corner, the one that is so small and forgotten that you have to shake the box to get it to come tumbling out.

So I think overall I lead a pretty happy existence. I grew catnip and studied really hard and avoided homeless drunks who who made, at best, sloppy bedroom eyes at me on my way home from school.