Maybe WordPress is More Kind than Blogger

We are about to find out.

I finished a book today, which is an accomplishment. My recent discovery that I probably very likely have moderate to severe ADD has assisted me in doing some mental revisionist history on my life. The conclusion, working conclusion really, is that I (am momentarily forgetting what I was going to say because I can hear fireworks outside and I lost my train of thought) have begun and not finished so many things, and all this because my brain won’t let me.

Or so I tell myself.

The book I finished today is called Wonder. The author, by way of one of the characters, quotes the author of Peter Pan, though the quote was not from Peter Pan, nay, indeed it was from a different book of Barrie’s. The quote went something like “always be kinder than is necessary.” I would like to make this my personal life goal. And also, I would like it if when I attempt to blog, I’m not left to discover that I can’t create paragraph breaks, or insert photos, or whatever. I am trusting that WordPress will allow me these simple requests, and therefore be kind to me.

So, New Years Eve, 1998. That’s where I wanted to start tonight. But I’m already getting bored with all this.

But anyway, New Years Eve, 1998. I was, of course, at a party, because we were getting ready to welcome in 1999, and I had to be partying like it was 1999, because by the time I got home that night it was going to be 1999. However, I think I was likely unfamiliar with the song, so really I was at party because I was 18 years old and it was New Years.

And I knew that night that things would change dramatically over the course of the next year.

There was one thing I was confident of, and that was that one year from that night I would not be in the same geographical place that I was then. I didn’t know where on earth I would be, but I knew it would not be in the Wilkinson Center on the campus of Brigham Young University.

I knew that the nature of most of my friendships would change. I knew that I would not be around the same people I was that night. Because I was 18, and when one is 18 things seem to be really big, I knew that life would be drastically different in a year. And I said as much to my friend, Yvonne.

Of course, I really had no idea just how much life would change in that year, and how it would shape the next decades of my life.

I have wanted to explore all these things in writing for some time, but it wasn’t until I recently read the stories of someone who I shared many experiences with in 1999, and realized how differently he understood these shared experiences from the way I understood them, that I felt motivated enough to begin to write about it.

So anyway, these are the stories of 1999. Very little of these stories will have much to do with reading or home teaching, but I’m kind of not the same person who so audaciously gave this blog such a title.