I’ve been tagged a bunch of times for the “Seven Random Things” meme that’s been going around for a while now, and it’s high time I came up with a list to share. Rather than just do it straight, though, I think I’m going to base all seven random things about myself on this photo:

Yes, that’s me in my bedroom in the fall of 1992. My senior year in high school. Rhinebeck, New York. Sixteen years ago.

What can we learn from this photo? Let’s see…

1. I used to be a slob. This photo actually makes my room look sort of clean. Believe me, it wasn’t. I remember having to clear a path to get to my bed. It wasn’t food-and-waste dirty, mind you, but there were clothes, magazines, art supplies, records, tapes, posters, shoes, everything, EVERYWHERE. I am now a reformed slob, so I try to clean everything up before I go to bed. Or at least shove it in a box and hide it.

2. I look weird without bangs. For some reason, I decided to grow my bangs out in 1992. It didn’t last—by the fall of 1993, they were back (and they meant business).

3. The Cure will always be my favorite band. Yeah. Putting aside the fact that they haven’t made an album I’ve liked since the year this photo was taken, they were still a really important part of my life for a really long time. And they still are. I don’t like to talk about it much because I get very defensive. There are categories of fandom, and I fell into the obsessive column throughout the formative years of my life. I breathed the Cure. I celebrated Smithmas.

4. Chuck Taylors are the only sneakers I wear. I’ve owned a couple of pairs of “real” sneakers over the years, but they never feel right. I’m just not a sneaker person unless we’re talking Converse. Low-tops. Black and white. WITH LACES, not those weird elastic ones they make now.

5. I’ve always been particular about my surroundings. Note the purple walls, the black satin sheets, and the zebra print bedding. This is not stuff that happens by accident! I can remember having a “vision” for my bedroom going back to a very young age. I can also remember having to paint over all of that purple (and the black marker and the Fun-Tak residue, ugh) when I moved the following summer. My tastes may have, um, matured since then, but I can’t say I wouldn’t still feel totally at home in this room.

6. I used to have lots of penpals. I wish I could make out who the letter on the bed is from! My friend Nicole and I used to find penpals through Other Voices, a Cure fanzine (later, I also met people through the classic Morri’zine), and through friendship books (I love that there’s a Wiki page for FBs!). This was pre-internet (at least in its current form), and this was how I connected with people like me. I made some very real, very deep connections with people from all over the place, and I’m still friends with a lot of them all these years later. I truly miss the luxury of writing and reading letters on paper; of making a fancy envelope with glitter and magazine clippings and clear packing tape; of stuffing a package to the gills with tea and incense and mix tapes; and, most of all, arriving home after to school to find that it was a “good mail day”.

7. I didn’t wear pants for over a decade. No, really. I think between the years of 1991–2002, I probably wore pants/jeans a grand total of 5 or 6 times. I wore tights with skirts or dresses virtually every day (very occasionally I would go bare-legged, and then spend the day feeling self-conscious about my legs), usually with boots or heels. It wasn’t until I met Evan that I started wearing jeans. Nowadays, I wear jeans roughly 360 days out of the year. I still don’t own a single pair of non-denim pants, though!

And yeah, I still almost always wear black. It hides the coffee I’m constantly spilling on myself.