An old snapshot

I’ve had a lot of time lately to reminisce and contemplate. Think about where I’ve been. Try to decide where I want to go, what I want to do.

I got a new computer near the end of 2016 and, much like moving houses, migrating the contents of a hard drive can result in finding old files, buried in some subfolder or other. In one of those, I found this picture.

It’s been cropped within an inch of its life and I think it was taken with a then-cutting-edge point-and-shoot digital camera. But, by golly, that dude in it had some hopes and dreams.

In it, I’m seated on the brick path around the Ryerson Quad. My best guess is that this was taken in the spring of 2001, or perhaps the previous autumn. I’m as much smirking at the camera as I am at the photographer, the woman I was dating at the time. I can’t help but feel I’m also smirking about the future I envisioned. My last year of theatre school. I was thinking about studying and performing in opera if, y’know, the lifelong contract at Stratford fell through.

I wonder what that naïve son-of-a-gun would think of where he wound up a decade and a half later. Would he appreciate the fact that I’m happy, despite the strange misshapen reality I made of his dreams? Probably not. Idealistic infant. At the very least, I don’t think he expected me smirking back at him today. Let alone everyone else smirking at him with me here and the other places I’ve shared this on social media. #TBT