Week in Retrospect: Childhood Lost

ice cream cone abandoned in a parking lot

I was born in El Monte, roughly 20 minutes east of Downtown Los Angeles (when there isn't traffic!) and lived resided there for the first 22 years of my life. Every week we would go to Thrifty (long before it became Rite-Aid) for hand-packed pints of ice cream. It was just a few streets down from our house and I used to love the novelty of their cylindrical ice cream scoops. The favorites in our household were butter pecan and pineapple coconut, although my personal favorite back then was mint chip. Thrifty's ice cream isn't the best in the world but it's good for the price. The factory was just about 5 miles from our house, so we had a bit of pride in supporting a local business…especially since it was the only thing to be proud of in El Monte. I miss those days.

Five weeks have passed since I started my final semester of my undergraduate career. And it's starting to really hit me right about…NOW. Soon enough, I'll have to start worrying about the real responsibilities of growing up: constantly having an income, what my job means to me, putting a roof over my head, working out relationships (with family, friends, and significant others) around work schedules…But on the other hand, I'm ready to get back to a life that I've missed. I want to go back to having time to read and to enjoy the hobbies I've abandoned because there's never enough time. I want to spend time with the people who really matter and let them know I haven't forgotten about them.

This is all coming very quickly. I've spent most of the week listening to what would've been on my mixtapes back in the mid-90s. At one point, I felt like I was blasting the Lilith Fair lineup…minus Sarah MacLachlan. I've come to realize just how much I love Natalie Merchant's Tigerlily; I could just listen to it for days!

Now with just ten weeks left of the semester, there just never seems to be enough time to get everything done. There's nothing left to do but to suck it up and just get to it…and get through it.