the way we were

Recently my old Hotmail account was hacked and The Spaminator sent a grammatically errored message to everyone I've known since I was eighteen (my husband fault's my easy-to-figure-out passwords: "A computer figured it out."). While using my crack skills to change my password to another noun I disovered my old MSN profile, including this saavy shot:

and this telling profile:
Things I enjoy about this discovery:

• I look goth. I was, in fact, never a goth.
  
• The photo taken at the Oakvillian home of my university friend, Nik, probably in 2001. Back in the age of land lines.
  
• I owned leather pants. I remember submitting this picture to "Hot or Not" around the same time, and a separate photo of a close-up of my face, as a social experiment. The leather pants scored supremely "hotter" even though my face is barely visible. What that thin shine will do to boys...
• I just remembered what inspired the purchase of leather pants.
• This is one of the few shots of my short hair phase. It was shorter than this at one point, but nearly all proof has been lost.
  
• I think I'm opening some sort of chocolate snack. Since I'm at Nik's house, not my own, I was allowed.
• Chances are, I'm on the phone with my mother which means that I was keeping the chocolate snack a secret.
• Although my profile seems scattered (was I 25? was I 23?) it probably has something to do with the dates that I updated it. "Suffering from acute joy and hope"? Really?
• The Keats quote is from La Belle Dame sans Merci. I was studying Romantic Poetry in university and had fallen quite madly in love with Keats. Which was nothing compared to my love of Longfellow.
• La Belle Dame inspired famous paintings by Sir Frank Dicsee and John William Waterhouse. Incidentally, Waterhouse's painting is a fairly accurate depiction of how I try to kiss Andrew.
• I still have many of the same interests.
• I feel much older and much happier now than I did then.