Everything is different and everything stays the same.

Going back to a place you haven’t been in a while is a great way to keep in check. Today, I went back to La Jolla Crack House (aka La Jolla Music on Girard), which I hadn’t been to since my awkward phase. It has been about 4 years since I picked up an electric, and I figured there was no better way to spend my new free time.

Stepping in was nostalgic, as the same exact people still work there. The French lady who runs the place is still a bitch (however less intimidating now that I tower over her), and the musty music sheets and overpriced instruments still adorn the walls that should have been replaced after the police busted the former owners. Down the long, narrow hall marked “Teaching Studios”, the buzzing fluorescent lights illuminate 12 doors, leading to four by four windowless closets with padded walls (hence, the crack house).

This store, the only one with barred windows in La Jolla, exists for me as a kind of time vortex. A parallel universe to the time track I normally run around, (Starbucks, Bishop’s, 7/11, Windan’ Sea lot, home, repeat.) and returning to my favorite teacher, Josh, was refreshing in a very musty way. The man has not changed in the last 4 years, and comparing myself to his constant existence elicited an expected but comforting realization – I have become the person I wished I was when I was last here. I am also exactly the same.

I am the same person with uncovered traits. As we grow, no one ever really changes. It doesn’t matter if one of my best friends used to wear pink and now has 9 piercings. She is the same, especially to me. People often mistake surfacing of personality traits as changes, but if we are truthful to ourselves those things were always there, we just didn’t see them.

This is the same with ourselves. We are always who we are going to be, from a very young age, if not conception. We will never change into different people. Circumstances change, and time destroys and builds some things along the way, but personalities are constant and (usually) pleasant in that nature.

So go and visit an old friend, or an old stomping ground if you need a good look at yourself, or a reminder of who you are through who you used to be.