When The Hills first premiered on May 31, 2006, I was 27, and had just moved from Northern Wisconsin to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I was renting a tiny bedroom in a South Minneapolis bungalow while I worked as a counselor for a maximum-security unit of male juvenile offenders. After losing the better part of my early twenties to lonely, dead-end stints in Iowa and Wisconsin, an intense, troubled romantic relationship that had ended in fatal tragedy, and the deep, dark maw of grief that had swallowed me whole afterward, moving to Minneapolis felt like a fresh beginning…a chance to finally start the kind of glittering, cosmopolitan life I had been putting on hold for so long.
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