10 Years Ago

There’s no significance to this day ten years ago.

I sat at St. Cloud State University, in the lobby of Hill-Case Hall, after transferring just a few months earlier from the barren, small town culture at Southwest State University in Marshall, MN. I might have been reading Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, a surprisingly interesting book prescribed in my History of the World: Antiquity to 1700’s class. I had probably just eaten at Atwood, the student commons; a Rice Krispy bar, maybe a bagel with cream cheese.

I was studying to be a teacher. A science teacher. That was the only thing I had mapped out for my future – I would teach science to middle school kids.

I had absolutely no idea that, in ten years, I’d be sitting at a desk with no kids around me. No classroom. No school. Just a desk at an advertising agency.

That I’d be a writer.

That, on this day, ten years from now, I’d be sitting down to write an ad.

About varicose veins.

Think about that. The future really is pretty hazy, isn’t it?

This was lovingly handwritten on February 13th, 2009