I’ve been alternately amusing and depressing myself by poking through my old Twitter archive. Did you know you can download those now? With all your tweets? Even the ones you wish had remained forgotten? Well, you can.

I joined back in May 2007, and, though I’ve only poked around in the first couple of years of tweets, there are a lot of significant moments in that old timeline.

My first tweet:

The week I got my job — I must have behaved like a normal 2007-era human and told people in person rather than announcing it on Twitter, because this is apparently my first mention of it:

 

[with multi-tweet images, read from the bottom up — sorry, I know that’s annoying]

Please note that I was laboring under some serious illusions about the cost of living here. I redact my earlier claim. Rent is cheap; air conditioning is expensive.

Finishing my dissertation, AKA DISSERTATION THUNDERDOME:

My first ever road race, which I still remember so vividly:

The day I met CW:

(I’ll be honest; I had a crush on him right away. Just took him a while to get on board.)

And, of course, several of my Egon Songs — this one is probably the best. (My Twitter name was @katra for the longest time, based on an old nickname devised by my college boyfriend.)

That shit is in the Library of Congress, y’all.

I really do love being able to look back at some of these moments and remember what life was like back then. It wasn’t all laughs, though. There was a lot of complaining about work and boasting about laziness and noon-time tweets wherein I had apparently just woken up with a hangover and had only one word to say: “ouch.”  I am happier now — and often more thoughtful about what I tweet.

I know it seems narcissistic, but I am the sort of person who’s always kept some kind of journal, photo album, or scrap book going. In recent years, I think of my blog as a diary of sorts, albeit one in which I only write about topics I don’t mind being public, so this is the place I’d usually go to look back at what was going in in my life at a certain time.

When I started using Twitter, though, I wound up posting a lot of little things there that would otherwise have gone on the blog. Little notes, things that seemed immediate enough that I didn’t want to wait to write an entire post about them. Life as it was happening. As a record of my life and thoughts, it forms one that is entirely different (but complementary) to the one I’ve created here. It’s never really been possible to look back at tweets this completely until now, though, so I never had access to my own past thoughts in this form. It’s strange and wonderful and sometimes boring and awful, but I can’t help myself; I am compelled to look.