The inevitable overly-self-analytical-six-months-in-London post

Those of us lucky enough to be The Class of 2000 at Wake Forest University were also the first to take part in an innovative new program that as far as I know, still exists today. As freshmen entering the school in 1996, every single one of us was given a brand new IBM ThinkPad laptop computer.

Along with freedom from curfews and a rapid discovery of the academic limitations of binge drinking, it was fine way to be welcomed into the college experience.

But there was a catch.

What we members of the pioneering class (and those that followed) found out was that those ThinkPads were somehow geared to fail exactly one year after we graduated (probably providing a cushion for those 5-year slackers...yeah, you know who you are). They just ceased to function, and no amount of persuasion was going to bring them back to life.

For me, the biggest tragedy of this situation was not that I had to buy a new computer on the pittance of a salary I made when I was 23 years old. Nor was it that I had to depart with the Wake Forest licensed software that I’d um, removed from my computer upon graduation of course.

For me, it was about losing all the thousands of emails I’d sent to friends and my four-year college boyfriend during that time. (Back up? Me? Nooo….)

You know how you sometimes come across a old record of yourself—a note you wrote to your friend in high school, a card an ex-boyfriend/girlfriend gave you, etc—and you just don’t recognize yourself in that scenario? The things you said, who you must have been to receive such a card and so on?

Even at 22 (right before the ThinkPad Self-Destruction), I remember reading a handful of old emails to my ex-boyfriend from when I was 19 years old, and being simultaneously embarrassed, surprised and baffled by how foreign it all seemed.

I couldn’t believe that I thought those things, that I existed in that mindset, that I was sooo close and inextricably linked to someone who in a very short time had become such a distant memory.
Today, I’m sure those emails would be even more tangential to how I perceive myself now. Sometimes I even look at google chats (the system saves them all) of IM conversations Alex and I had a year ago, and even those look strange to me. I, we are just different now.

On a smaller scale, it’s like that with this blog (aaaannnndddd 10 paragraphs later, we arrive at my point). I took some time to read through some old posts for the first time yesterday, and already I don’t really recognize some of the Me of three, four, five months ago.

At the risk of sounding overly self-analytical and self-indulgent (way too late), it’s strange to think that I used to be constantly aware of living in a different country. It’s weird that I was so defensive of my American-ness—far more so than I should have been or needed to be in retrospect. It’s odd that I was so daunted by the things that didn’t make sense to me and so eager to cling to the things that did simply because I was accustomed to them.

Assuming yesterday's PORN-BOOBS experiment doesn’t blow up the internet, I’m glad I have a living record or my life again. Even though it’s agonizing to read sometimes (and no doubt this post will be too some day….possibly tomorrow), it seems important that the journey documented by the OckleShow remain intact for now.

You never know: Maybe when it ends, I'll know I've graduated.