Last Friday, late in the afternoon, my bad mood was completely obliterated by the passing of a train.

My good mood prepared me to be amused when I found a 1999 issue of the Utne Reader on the ground. I read it while I ate dinner. Oh, the memories it brought back! In 1999 I was working two retail jobs, trying to save enough money to finish my final year at Williams College. One of those jobs was at a newsstand, so it’s possible I read this magazine (without paying for it, and on the clock) when it first came out. The 1999 issue was full of moral correctness mixed with wannabe-hipness, much like today’s Utne Reader, except flavored with that particular year. I don’t know how else to describe it. The articles were illustrated with collages that felt very 1999 to me. This ad was on the back cover:

We used to think those computers were so cool. How many of them are in landfills now? Or, no, wait, we don’t just stick them in landfills, we also send them to China for poor people to take apart. But that’s not my point. My point is…darn it, I forgot.

This thing was probably made at least partly in China:

It was a beautiful weekend to be walking around in the out-of-doors, with Open Studios where I could buy earrings and eat homemade cookies, lovers walking hand in hand, and families stopping their minivans to ask me how to get to “downtown” (everything’s waiting for you!)

We scored a new living room sofa, which so far only the cats have tried.

I felt guilty about not watering the plants in the front yard, but then it started raining. It’s raining again right now. I’m cold.

By the way, I don’t hate the Utne Reader or anything, I actually think it’s great. But those collages took me to a place I’d nearly forgotten. That mixture of hope and anxiety, that desperate yearning to get that Williams degree at last. It was almost worth being in that situation, just to NOT be in it now.