In a world where everyone's in a constant state of trying to grow & evolve & move on, I wonder how many different people we become in one lifetime. In this spirit — acknowledging that few general rules in life can be made, but allow me to propose one — I would like to remark that, in my experience, if a person has dated a stripper, that person has lived an above-average number of distinct experiences. I'll come back to this. I've been thinking a lot about what kind of person I want to become. Part of that is inner reflection, but the fastest way — perhaps I'm too reliant on this method, but that's an issue for more inner reflection — is to model behaviour I admire in other people. As a result, one of the many reasons I feel lucky is that my gap year has been spent with many people who are *not* on a gap year, which is an useful way to keep perspective. I've hung with young students, aspiring landlords, schoolteachers, former NASA engineers, really anyone you could imagine. I spent my weekend exploring Switzerland with a friend from Middlebury. To avoid telling his story for him — especially publicly, because that seems quite bizarre — all I will say is that he's lived quite a few lives in his one lifetime. Speaking with him, no matter how banally, has expanded my conception of how radically different life can look even just a few years apart. Both Zurich and Lucerne are historic cities; like many European cities they are unlike North American ones in how they grow around these histories — contemporary constructions built on the same foundations, modern fragments housed in the same facades. Maybe that's what human growth is, or should be; that is, one that acknowledges and grows around/on the past, rather than tear it down to try again. Distinct experiences — like dating a stripper, which at least in my life, is quite distinct from the average distinct experience — make us who we are. My friends and I recently began sending each other emails. My first email just invited the text "wtf was that email" in our group chat, but soon enough, emails began to flit back and forth. More recently — almost immediately, actually — these emails have morphed into a similar structure of some kind of recounting of an experience, followed by some kind of interesting reflection, often being in turn a general abstraction for life. When we're older, I hope we'll look back on these snapshots of thought with an appropriate level of recoil at how little we knew, at how self-proclaimed our writing was.[^1] Yet I also hope we won't go too far in shunning this past, because our views will be built upon those same words; our identities based on those same experiences. [^1]: I'm certain I'll look back on this blog the same way; that's the beauty. If not, I think I'm doing something wrong.