Born December 19, 1971 at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington DC. Other being a bit yellow, my birth was about as unremarkable as births can get. I went home to Bethesda, Maryland, to a four-year-old older brother who bounced on the bed and drank juice out of a bottle the entire first week of my life.In mid-1972 we moved to Greenwich, Connecticut. The only thing I remember about our house there was that we sat around the kitchen table in a booth and my brother had a blue wooden fish on the door to his bedroom. There was also a fishpond out back but we never had anything in it. The only thing I remember happening in that house was the fact that I got nightmares from the Halloween Bugs Bunny episode.
My hometown. I lived on West 70th Street in Mission Hills, Kansas from the age of three to the age of sixteen. Looking back, I probably had about as idyllic a childhood as one could have. The prototypical upper-middle-class white-bread suburban upbringing, always food on the table, two cars in the garage, me in the right jeans and shoes and purses, church on Sunday followed by brunch at the country club.Not surprisingly, I don't have anything of interest to say about it. I have learned how to count my blessings and realized that I can't have regrets about the fact that I didn't appreciate it at the time. I appreciate it now.
Due to a somewhat erratic period in my father's career, I ended up in Alexandria, Virginia for my senior year of high school. We moved the summer before, I got a job scooping ice cream and found the people in the neighborhood who needed a babysitter. I graduated from Georgetown Day High School in June of 1989. The only college I got into from the ones I initially applied to was American, and I didn't want to go to college in DC. So I begged KU to take me, and they did. I became a Jayhawk.
There is nothing on earth I wouldn't give to go back to college. The years I spent in Lawrence, the people I knew, the experiences I had, the best of good and the worst of bad, and I would jump at the chance to do it all over again. My best friends can all be traced back to these years, if not earlier. I still get nostalgic just thinking about it. 1992 may have been my happiest year.
No one writes songs about Los Angeles. (Okay, there's that one, but it's rather half-hearted, don't you think?) I had a great time there, I really did, but I will not go back, not to live. It's a perfect place for someone who's grown up rather sheltered, who has no responsibilities other than to herself, to go and hang out and see new things. There are definitely parts of it I miss: shopping at Century City, ice blendeds from Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, the fact that at any moment you could be standing behind Dennis Franz at the grocery store or Tim Robbins at the cleaners.But oh, the traffic. The expense. The O.J. Simpson trials.
I had enough.
The Great Unnamed School of Law in Smallville, Pennsylvania. While it can't hold a candle to college, law school has also been an amazing time. I've never worked so hard in my life, and it was nice to be able to find out that I could actually do it. I have made friends here I know for a fact I will have for the rest of my life. I have learned more than I ever thought possible, and developed the basis for a real career in something I turned out to love and respect.But what I will remember from this time at least as much as law school itself is the world that opened to me online. By doing what I have done for the last two years of school, I learned at least as much about myself as I did at school. Most importantly, I've found people who I feel were destined to become friends, who teach me things about friendship and about life that I would never have learned otherwise. As someone who has always strugged with feeling like she belonged, I found a circle of friends who embraced me with open arms long before I met them in person, and it has meant the world.
Who knows where we go from here? Back to Kansas City, taking the bar, getting a dog, moving forward with my life. Scary. But I'm ready.
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