today’s my birthday! it’s already been a great 9 hours+ and it’s only 9:25 am.

when i first started mellowtrouble, in 2002, it was as a geocities page. remember those? i had decided a few years before that i wanted to learn html, especially after seeing a cousin’s page devoted to shakira. she was 13 (the cousin, not shakira) and all i can remember is that the site had a background of purple bubbles and boy was i jealous. so, finding myself spending a lot of time at ucla’s young research library without actually being a student there (yet), and getting a little tired of writing down all my web bookmarks in these little folded books i’d make – not that they aren’t cool, i love them still – i grabbed a couple of html books from the stacks and started learning what an anchor tag is, what’s the difference between the head and the body, html-wise, etc. of course i wanted a free site for all these newbie attempts, and wow just remembering how annoying geocities admin section was – so buggy! but it worked and was just annoying enough that i couldn’t get too intimidated to keep trying. silver lining, see?

that’s me, about five weeks ago.

i’m bolivian! i feel super lucky. i love this country so.