It has been ten years since college.
I used to be a guy who did not have a baby, a wife, or even a blog. I don't know what I did with those days. I had a kite, I remember, and I helped this one group of French people find an address that was a couple houses down from mine...but what of the rest of the years? It has been an incredible amount of time since I was the guy outside the bar with the two chained-together mountain bikes whose friend had made off with some chick and therefore had to convince a Spanish-speaking bread truck driver into toting some fool with two "bicicletas! mine! honéstia!" three miles down El Camino at 3am. It has been pretty much exactly that same increment of time since my friend showed up at my doorstep the next morning, pretending that he had been looking for me for hours, and wished that I could have partaken in the big crazy sex thing he had done after he gave up.
It has been nearly ten years since I drove my car into a huge puddle of water while trying to get to a stupid temp job where I would sit and wonder for eight straight hours why my computer wasn't networked. The car stalled, and I had to roll up some fancy wool pants I inherited from my uncle so that they would not get wet. The cuff was all nipped away by my bike chain.
It has been almost ten years since I thought that spending an entire day's pay on a 100-CD Case Logic CD-holder was a fine investment. It has been five years since that Case Logic, sitting on the backseat of my wife's car, containing my Descendents cd AND my Mr. Mister cds (13 copies of Welcome To The Real World, which I got for a penny from Columbia House under a false name) , was stolen by a guy who thought he was only getting a snowboarding jacket.
I don't even snowboard. My wife won it on a radio call-in show, because she is good at trivia. It was draped over the Case Logic. She knows who the Hittites were. I had $234 worth of Mr. Mister stolen from me. I can't snowboard because one of my eyes is basically fake and I only keep it around to make me look friendly in Christmas photos.
Ten years, boy-whoo. The ten years between twenty and thirty. If you are twenty, do what I should have done: start Google. I swear, there was this one day at college where I was equidistant between the Communication department and the Computer Science department, and it was the day I had to choose my major, and this guy sitting outside of the Communication building was eating this great-looking sandwich. Like I said, man—decisions. Think about them.
I did, but not until this year.
— C.T.O.
PS: Maybe spell it G00gle, with two zeroes instead of o's.