Out of nostalgia I went back and read a whole mess of my journal entries. That was a trip, I laughed, cried and mostly fealt embarrassed. Youth is a horrible experience viewed through the eyes of some degree of maturity. But it was blissfull, it really was.
I don't know if those of you that might stumble upon my page know now, or remember, what it was like around this place in the early days. This was well before the explosion or to some degree the advent of social networking.
I stumbled upon dA through a friend in high school who vaguely knew °matteo, she was browsing wastedyouth.org. It was perfect, relevent to my interests and I became a fan. It wasn't long before that lead me here. The next 3 or 4 years I was immersed in the culture and community I found.
Just a brief list of the many memories - or at least what I can remember right now:
Chatting on #devart for hours on end.
Idling on #devart for even longer.
The epic war of words with ~michaeltoe that seemed to occur daily.
The Dallas meetup - which was only the second ever, °spot and °jsenn were there.
My Daily Deviation for a poem I wrote in 10 minutes before it was due for a course. Thanks `sanguru!
`w00zy sending me tons of just the coolest music ever and being such a great friend.
The Deviant Key project and its many iterations since then.
Seeing °euphoria's man pick his nose on the webcam.
Going to the wrong,
12 hour phone calls from `liquify broken up only by going to eat breakfast at the dining hall while I left the phone off the hook.
Laughing so hard at +ekud's aussie accent.
The failed deviantMag experiment - I was a copy editor. That was a miserable experience because none of us had a clue.
Breaking the story of Apple announcing the iPod and the mass skepticism voiced by the community that it would never be that great. By the way - what the hell happened to the news?
The announcement of subscriber accounts and mostly leading the massive backlash - which might seem bizzare now.
And from there we grew distant.
Feel free to add your own in the comments.
This place is just immense now, can't say that I'll be able to keep up. But the visit tonight was very nice.

For those that might be interested, I'm currently living in Houston. I love this city, I have an excellent place in the heart of the downtown area. I work as a marketing coordinator for a regional bank. This job keeps me on my toes because we have 45 branches in the Houston metro area and I'm soley responsible for meeting their marketing needs. Mostly I'm making sure they don't do or say something stupid, given the current public sentiment of banks this is really hard. My teacher friend equates it to having an absurdly large class of special needs kids hooked on cocaine.
As busy as I am and as stressfull as it is, I still love my job. I have an amazing boss and the upper management is fantastic. It also is packed with fun! I go to galas, events and I've been in the luxury boxes at Rockets, Texans and Astros games - even flown on a corporate jet. I'm living a life many fantasize about, but yet I'd still rather be doing something else. My passion is still art - I work when I can as a studio assistant for one of my former professors.

So that's it, who knows if this actually spurs some activity on my part. I'm going to guess that it probably won't. But hell it was fun.