The blog of firsts

After church yesterday, I had lunch with my friend Michel; we talked about this and that over Subway, and one subject led to another until I started tallying the number of things I wasn't able to do while I was still living at home, because I lived in a small town without many of the amenities I took for granted in Kitchener-Waterloo (and still do here in Ottawa).

It occurred to me at that point that the first month of university for me was probably the biggest concentration of "firsts" in my life. And I'm not talking about the first time living away from home, either, but small things that are now a part of my regular, everyday life - even though they were unavailable to me until I moved to a city larger than 6000 people.

During September 1989, I did the following things for the first time:

• drank Tim Hortons coffee
• drank flavoured coffee (raspberry chocolate)
• drank Earl Grey tea
• ate chicken wings (i.e. not counting the wings you get in a bucket of KFC)
• ate salsa
• ate fajitas
• ate at Subway
• ate at Taco Bell
• paid bus fare and rode a bus to get to the mall
• drove a vehicle with a manual transmission (it was also the only time)
• rode a bicycle in urban traffic
• watched a movie in a theatre with surround sound
• went to a rock concert
• went to a nightclub
• went to a keg party (though I wasn't drinking at the time)
• went to a football game
• heard house music
• watched any incarnation of Star Trek on a weekly basis
• sent and received email
• looked up library books in an online catalogue instead of index cards
• used an ATM
• played Tetris
• did my own laundry