Blast from the Past

You know that part of cleaning when it just comes down to you and piles of papers you have to go through and find places for? Yeah, that was me last night. Papers and pictures and letters and fliers and.... everything else that's been slowly piling up. I've got them almost gone, though! Man, that feels good...

One of the MOST fun things to go through is old photos. This is a picture of me at 19...

Too funny, huh? I was very punk rock/gypsy/artist back in the olden days. I was traveling the country, working at Renaissance Festivals* with a bunch of my friends.

*OK, if you've ever been to a Renaissance Festival, you know there are a lot of really silly, annoying people there who take it all way too seriously and are such MASSIVE dorks in their every day lives that doing Faire is the one outlet they have to be interesting or cool and they cling to it like the desperate escapist fantasy it is.

This was not us. Belieeeeeve me.

Now, I'm a dork. Don't get me wrong, I know this. But I was not THAT kind of dork. We did Faire because a couple of the girls in our group of friends had hippie parents that sold things in shops at Faires around the country. They grew up in that community and brought the rest of us into the really wonderful alternative lifestyle of traveling the circuit. The Faire itself on the weekend was actually just a side note in our lives. It was ALL about everything else you did during the week.

For a few years there, I lived in those campgrounds with the back of my minivan converted into a kick ass bedroom/living room, spending the winters and the odd college semester in Minneapolis. I've sold perfume and incense, jewelry for a few different people, chain mail (and learned how to make it), leather masks and more stuff I can't even remember. It's where I fell in love with corsets and evenings spent sitting around a campfire.

It was a pretty wonderful life and part of me wishes I could have just done it forever but I got pretty itchy to move on after a while. There's only so far you can go being a shop girl out in the woods. You either get your own shop or you find something else to do and there was so much else I wanted to do.

Here I am with a mohawk... hee! Soooo cute...

I wanna pinch my own little punk rock cheeks.

It was such a lifetime ago and weird to have it bubble up right before my birthday - that reminder of time passing. I wouldn't be 19 again if you paid me, to tell you the truth, but how nice it was to have the whole world to explore... and to be excited about it.

So, yeah, this entry has absolutely nothing to do with knitting, (and considering how boring the last one was, I'm totally cool with that,) except that first picture, when I was 19? That's when I learned to knit. ;)