Los Angeles

Last Friday I flew out to LA for the day for a few meetings I needed to fit in between my trips to Peru and Tanzania. I had about an hour to kill after finishing up all the details and decided to drive over to the neighborhood where I lived all those years ago. This is the building on Stanley Avenue between Melrose and Beverly that I called home for four years. Inside apartment #5 there on the upper left is where I registered this domain name and published the first post to this site on February 27th, 2001. That means this Friday is the 14th birthday of this blog.

I have been blogging for fourteen years. In the beginning I had to hand code each page and use an FTP client to upload the files to a server. Essentially I was engaged in cave painting.

I hadn’t been back here since 2007, and it was a lot like the first time I went back to visit my elementary school. Everything seemed so much smaller, more confined, more dense. I cried my eyes out when I had to say goodbye to this place. I loved living in Los Angeles and the life I’d created there, but fourteen years later I can’t help but look at it with a totally transformed set of eyes, so much joy and pain and struggle and triumph between the woman I am now and the girl I was then.

Happy birthday to this typo of dude.