A Saturday stroll down memory lane

So on Thursday, Sebastian did a bit in his blog looking back to a LiveJournal entry from four years ago in which he enjoyed some Xtreme cheddar cheese. This made me wonder what I was doing four years ago. As it happens, very close to four years ago (in February 2005), I began keeping a journal on my computer, which I continued through the rest of my college career. Now, this journal was for my own personal use, so it's a bit different from my blog. It doesn't have damning secrets or discussion of inappropriate things, but it is unedited and rather vague in parts. Sentence fragments sometimes stream-of-consciousness-like. But anyway, let's take a trip down memory lane and see what I was up to four years ago...

3/10/05:
BIG MISTAKE (sort of): Going to see Million Dollar Baby without having a clue what it was about (other than just boxing).
Now, granted, in retrospect, the fact that it won best picture, best actress, etc. at the Oscars should have given me a clue what to expect. Still, I was totally not prepared emotionally to see that movie. It was very good, but oh my God... One hundred times over, it destroys my record previously held by Movin' Out.

You see, I was not always as knowledgeable about current movies as I am now (though I think four years ago was about when I started following entertainment news). Anyway, in this entry, I am referring to the fact that Million Dollar Baby marked the first time that I ever really cried in a movie. I mean really, really cried. I'd gotten teary-eyed in some movies, and when I saw Movin' Out (live theater, not a movie) in Boston I had a couple tears roll down my cheeks. But in Million Dollar Baby, I was sobbing non-stop, tears and snot everywhere, for at least fifteen minutes. That movie just opened up the floodgates. Since then, I have cried in movies much more than I did before Million Dollar Baby. But nothing has yet beaten Million Dollar Baby's record for oh-my-gosh-I-need-a-tissue-well-at-least-I-have-a-cotton-shirt-sleeve.

Moving on... Apparently, four years ago I was embroiled in my first play through Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Good times. In fact, a surprising proportion of my early journal entries are all about KotOR.

3/21/05
I'm starting to think that I've been spending an unhealthy amount of time playing KotOR... Sara and I were going over a fluids problem about air flowing over a hut, and finding the force acting on the hut, etc., and all I was hearing was "Blah blah blah Hutt. Blah blah blah Force blah blah..." Yeah, seriously, that was what I was thinking.

I was taking a class on fluid dynamics. Clearly, my game was interfering with my studies. I had a similar problem last summer while engrossed in Mass Effect. I attended a seminar in which the speaker kept talking about nutrient flux, and all I could think about was the Flux club on the Citadel, which of course made me think about the Flux dance (see the contest BioWare held here; see female Shepard showing off her moves here; see a pretty good entry here). It was all I could do to keep from giggling every time the speaker said "flux".

3/31/05
So I was playing KotOR...
I had just gotten the third piece of the Star Map, and I was just going to make a quick trip back to Dantooine and then stop for the night.
And then, boy did the plot thicken.
I'm sort of in shock. I've never been good at guessing what's going to happen in movies and books, but I just don't know what to say here. I never thought a computer game could be so... moving and complicated and amazing. It was like a religious experience. I'm like on a high, or something.

This wouldn't really make sense unless you've played the game. I'm being a little over dramatic, but that is how I felt at the time.

Last entry for today's post:

4/7/05
I'd just like to say...
A most traumatizing thing just happened to me. I was coming back from class walking in front of [one of the dorms], and in a gust of wind, a bee flew down my shirt. I'm sure it was traumatizing for both of us.

A few seconds of mumbled profanity and potentially embarrassing motions followed. Luckily, disaster was avoided.

That's all for this trip down memory lane.