Anniversary

A year ago I was sitting on a hillside in Connecticut with my family, some friends, and their two little daughters who held my hands on either side. We waited for dusk to spread across the sky, and then gazed in awe at a series of fireworks. The little girls were frightened; I just gaped with my mouth in an "O." I didn't know that I'd end up soon leaving my parents for a small town in Jersey, that I'd move into a house with 5 people I didn't know, or that I'd start a regular job for the first time in my life. I haven't been in Princeton for a full 12 months, but this is the anniversary of my blog -- a year ago, around 12pm, I sat at my father's computer, trying to draft some kind of rationale for documenting my exploits. At the time I told myself that whatever happened, it was likely that the year ahead would be unlike anything else I experienced, and therefore worthy of comment. I can't objectively say that the latter is true - my blog has been in turn adolescent, whiny, frivolous, sentimental, and pompous - but it's helped me to convert my constant internal chatter into something coherent, something communicable. I guess I think that self-scrutiny should be accorded a decent measure of self-expression.

I heard a quote this weekend by Walter Scott, in which he says "One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name." I repeated it to someone else tonight, and whatever the context, I think it holds. The past year, whenever it began (July 4th, the day I started my job, the day I moved, or the day I made my first friend), hasn't been entirely glorious, but it's definitely been a "crowded hour." If I were feeling grandiose, I'd say that July 4th commemorates my personal bid for independence, for a severence of ties with my old home and old life. But the past is always vividly reimagined and reconsidered in my present. So I'll just say that I'm glad I managed to keep up with this for a year of my life in which I've seen so much change, and in which every moment has somehow been or felt pivotal. I'd like to think I didn't do too badly by my blog's namesake: a little bar in Paris where they make a mean gin fizz. It was a good place to be; this, too, is a good place to be.