I started this blog 18 years ago today, so it's now old enough to vote. That's 6,732 posts, if the stats are to be believed.
I spent that first year at a small liberal arts college a few hours away, but it felt pretty distant in those days, with a pay phone at the end of the hall and only letters for communication. I was my usual misfit self and was pretty unhappy in fall term. Even though I had chosen to live on the "quiet floor," I managed to draw the rowdiest roommate, the one whose parents made her choose that floor. So I got my share of exposure to drugs, drinking, and the occasional guy staying over unexpectedly. But I also had my taste in music expanded greatly, and learned a lot about upper class East Coast people.
The bigger problem was that I thought the college was too small a place, academically — meaning I would run out of classes to take. And I had no friends, too. So I decided to transfer to a larger public university for my sophomore year.
Just around the time I knew I would be leaving, of course, I started to find "my people." Which made it harder to leave than I would have thought. And a few of the classes I had there continue to be extremely influential in my life to this day.
I don't know how my life would have been different if I had stayed.
It's hard to believe I've been doing this blog as long as my entire life through that first year of college. But that's the nature of sliding-scale time as we get old.
Oddly, I don't have a single photo of myself from that year of college. The photo on this post is from my summer job not long before I left home, so it's as close as I can get. (I'm still not big on taking pictures of myself, compared to a lot of people, despite having a camera on me at all times.)
Thanks for being here!
Here's what was in the news during the 1977–78 academic year (September–August):
The U.S. agreed to turn over control of the Panama Canal to Panama by the end of the century, there was lots of German terrorist activity (hijackings and kidnappings), three members of Lynyrd Skynyrd were killed in a plane crash, smallpox was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization, Harvey Milk was elected to the board of supervisors in San Francisco (the first openly gay official in any large U.S. city), Anwar Sadat went to Israel to meet with Menachim Begin, Rhodesia announced it would accept multiracial democracy within two years, the show Dallas started the prime-time soap opera trend, Somalia began to fall into civil war, the Unabomber began bombing, the rainbow flag was used for the first time, Louise Brown — the first "test-tube" baby — was born near Manchester, Pope Paul VI died and John Paul I was elected, and the Sandinistas got control of Nicaragua's National Palace.
In technology news, though perhaps not in mainstream news at the time: optical fiber got its first use; TCP/IP was tested successfully, connecting the first three ARPANET nodes, in what eventually became the Internet protocol; and the first global positioning satellite was launched in February 1978.
People who died that year who seem particularly significant to me: Steven Biko, Charlie Chaplin, and Hubert Humphrey.
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My past anniversary posts, each with an age-appropriate photograph:
- First
- Second
- Third
- Fourth
- Fifth
- Sixth
- Seventh
- Eighth
- Ninth
- Tenth
- Eleventh
- Twelfth
- Thirteenth
- Fourteenth
- Fifteenth
- Sixteenth
- Seventeenth
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