Miscellany: Twenty years

There are a lot of things in life that help you mark the passage of time. Unlike some of those freaky time-lapse YouTube videos of Noah Kalina and that Asian girl, the only picture of myself that I keep close by is this one.

My childhood's over, but it was a lot of fun. I did everything a kid should do - dressed up as Robin Hood for Halloween, meandered through some drainage ditches, socked some people in the jaw, etc. Looking at an old picture of yourself, you do start to wonder, though - how might things have gone differently? If you made different friends, or lived in a different place?

The worst part is I don't even look like that any more, and I don't remember ever looking like that, so it's almost like looking at someone else's kid. The most important thing to get out of the whole exercise, though, is probably that we were all children, so no matter how nasty people are to each other, they were all innocent sometime in the past.