hate-teen years
Bruh. The year 2020 is upon us soon. I can't believe it's been almost 20 years since Y2K. The very phrase "the year 2020"still sounds so far flung into the future and it is literally a few months away. Every time someone brings up something that happened more than 10 years ago I fall into a spiral of existential angst about the passage of time. Remember when 10 years ago was the '90s? Remember when it was elementary school?
Also,
a week ago -- on Monday, September 2 -- my little journal of life turned EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD.
This JOURNAL is VOTING AGE.
This journal is OLD ENOUGH for WAR.
THIS journal. is GROWN. ASS.
It's old enough that it came from back when LJ was invite-only and you needed a code from an existing user to get your own account!
Annnd methinks this is a perfect opportunity to do that thing where I look back on an old entry or series of entries and be like "ah yes," corncob pipe and mint julep in hand, stroking my little white goatee and staring into the middle distance as my porch creaks under my rocking chair and I fan away the sweltering Georgia heat.1
In honor of my LiveJournal's 18th birthday, I decided to revisit the month of my own 18th birthday sixteen long years ago -- September 2003.
Holy sweet goddamn, was that really almost half my life ago? Have I really been legally considered an adult for almost half of my life? Did I seriously have 17 years of childhood -- and that's it? When am I supposed to stop feeling like Britney "not a girl, not yet a woman" Spears? (#freebritney tbh)
In retrospect, yes, I do feel like 17 could count as childhood insofar as requiring supervision by, and endorsement from, "actual adults." But to this day, I don't really know how I feel about calling 18 adulthood. At best it's the reception desk in the lobby of Adulthood. At that age I still felt like very much an idiot baby, like a wide-eyed five-foot-four toddler, frantically searching for a "real" adult. That feeling that I still have when I can't find the grocery item I'm looking for and I have to assess every adult person in the store with a squint. Do you work here? I need an adult.
So let's talk about September Aught-Three. This'll be a long one.
***
Basic stats:
- no job yet
- working on my driver's license, so no car yet either
- starting college at a nearby university
- living with the folks, of course, which I'd end up doing until 2014
- dating Dylan, who was a grade below me and thus still in high school
Great shows I saw in September of 2003:
- Suburban Legends and Littlest Man Band at Chain Reaction
- Kenna and Fischerspooner at the Anaheim House of Blues (when it was still at Downtown Disney and not GardenWalk)
- Radiohead and Supergrass at the Hollywood Bowl
***
My first day at Cal State Long Beach was September 3, 2003. A totally-bananas recall election was goin' down in our beautiful state, and our campus happened to be a stop on Arnold Schwarzeneggar's gubernatorial campaign trail that day. Fucking surreal. And yes, this was the time that someone egged him. I remember recording a brief clip of the soon-to-be-gubernator's rallying speech (on my Motorola V60 so obviously it was just audio). I transcribed the exact quote in this entry, including the accent.
A week later, in the early afternoon of my 18th birthday, some guy on campus with a clipboard gave me a form to fill out and voilà -- I became a registered Democrat. My first vote was cast in the recall election two months later wherein, after deep and serious consideration, I supported the Green candidate Peter Camejo (RIP). Serious foreshadowing of CA clownshoes politics -- this state ended up picking the fucking Last Action Hero for two consecutive terms ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The day after my birthday, John Ritter died. The day after that, Johnny Cash.
***
In September Aught-Three I was two months away from my very first job, and seven months/several humbling failures away from my hard-earned driver's license. My dad drove me to and from school, and I spent a lot of time simply wandering the massive campus between classes (WITH A DISCMAN2 IN TOW, because I'm a dinosaur). I'd eventually find the student union and, if I could spare a buck or two, I'd play Puzzle Fighter at the arcade instead of napping in one of the armchairs in the TV room.
With outside forces (i.e. watchful eyes and fewer distractions) helping to keep me disciplined, I pretty much crushed my first semester of college. At that rate I was on track to get my BA in English right on time, maybe even early if I lucked out on capstone class availability down the road. The thing was -- and at the time I wasn't completely sure of it, but I suspected -- I was heading fast toward a post-adolescent nervous breakdown.3
Though I did see a good handful of familiar faces at CSULB, I wonder whether things might have turned out differently if I ended up making any really good friends there. Like if I actively participated in club life or volunteered more, really entrenched myself in the culture at large. If I gave a sincere effort to meet and get to know the people in my classes. I made some extremely awkward efforts that did not pay off4. According to this here LJ I joined the Filipino club but never attended a meeting, and I registered as a staff writer for the Union but only attended one meeting and submitted two articles.
But mostly I spent my spare time on campus either sleeping or frantically blogging in the library. I was purposely, aggressively alone.
***
Back then, I was still ~*hosted*~ by Anjanette (girl, I miss you -- I hope you're okay) on her Missgeek domain. Sometimes I still peek at what remained captured in the Wayback Machine, and my heart aches. The creativity! The playfulness! The now-depreciated markup language! I miss that era, where people (lots of girls especially) who wanted their own slice of internet just went and built it in their image. It's such a bold contrast to these days, where one is essentially required to have an account with at least one social media outlet designed to pump ads and propaganda in between updates from real people. All this to essentially avoid being seen as a misanthropic technophobe.
Bear in mind: at that exact time, MySpace was just barely becoming a thing and Facebook was just a shitty hot-or-not site for Harvard students. LiveJournal and its clones were pretty much the most social-media-esque thing in the moment, and it was reserved mostly for emo teens and fanfic writers *coughtumblrwithcommentscough*
Around that time I also started up a blog on my hosted site which I designed and maintained as a separate entity from the main site, kind of like a sub-website. While I don't know what first compelled me to create it, it persisted for a couple years more before I archived it. At its peak I updated it with alarming, Twitter-like frequency. The entries got progressively more manic and terrifying, with utter bathos brewing just beneath a surface of what one might think is simply non-sequitur. Subtweeting before Twitter. Momma, I was truly goin' thru it.
My IRL posse and I started a rating community called the_uncool_club. Remember those? Ours was born in absolutely petty shit-stirring response to a hipster one of a very similar name. I love the audacity, how enthusiastically we grilled up beef with strangers online. I don't fuck with that anymore, cuz people are petty as shit and these days they get well and truly nasty over online drama. The community is still there for posterity's sake but it's not active. I'm still in touch with some people I met through it.5 It will always have a special place in the annals of my 2000s memories.
I concurrently ran guerradigital as my alter ego Anchorite -- a fantastical, and admittedly pretentious, framing of the random "artistic" photos I took with with my Canon Elph. It's still there, though behind a Friends-Only wall. Don't bother to request, none of the photos are there anymore. Between the dissolution of my Flickr and Photobucket accounts, and the loss of all my hosted space, the photos might be gone forever. I really doubt I have them backed up on any accessible physical drives.
***
What a ride.
I am blown away by how on-the-precipice this moment of time was for me, how pivotal. I thought I was so jaded then, so wise, and yet such large and gleaming pieces of naïveté and sweet optimism still lay nestled within. I had nothing yet of my own, only dreams and options and ambitions. In due time it'd all be crushed by slowly tightening nerves and shrinking freedoms, pressurized into tiny diamonds within my darkening heart.
After reflecting on all this shit, I can say with certainty that 18 took a few months to hit me. Even though I was able to vote and watch porn and buy cigarettes, I was still definitely a child-ass child during my first semester of college. My parents still shuttled me around and gave me lunch money. I thought I was so fucking grown.
When the Adulthood™ did start to hit me a few months later the heady mix of liberation and responsibility hit like a ton of bricks.
Over and over.
For several years.
Might still be doing that to me.
Might do it forever.
***
1 Apparently I have four arms.
2 In particular I remember one mix CD I made from that era that was like two or three songs from a handful of artists. It had Radiohead, Cave In, The Postal Service, and The Flaming Lips.
3 I'll reflect on all that when we start hitting the Fifteen-Year Retrospective on the Foul Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Four in about six months.
4 Except in the case of Julie -- but only because, in true creep fashion, I found her on MySpace and LJ a few years after we'd both already left CSULB.
5Among TUC's alumni, an award-winning reporter and podcaster and a popular, paradigm-changing dad-blogger. I love you both and I'm so proud of you!!
Also,
a week ago -- on Monday, September 2 -- my little journal of life turned EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD.
This JOURNAL is VOTING AGE.
This journal is OLD ENOUGH for WAR.
THIS journal. is GROWN. ASS.
It's old enough that it came from back when LJ was invite-only and you needed a code from an existing user to get your own account!
Annnd methinks this is a perfect opportunity to do that thing where I look back on an old entry or series of entries and be like "ah yes," corncob pipe and mint julep in hand, stroking my little white goatee and staring into the middle distance as my porch creaks under my rocking chair and I fan away the sweltering Georgia heat.1
In honor of my LiveJournal's 18th birthday, I decided to revisit the month of my own 18th birthday sixteen long years ago -- September 2003.
Holy sweet goddamn, was that really almost half my life ago? Have I really been legally considered an adult for almost half of my life? Did I seriously have 17 years of childhood -- and that's it? When am I supposed to stop feeling like Britney "not a girl, not yet a woman" Spears? (#freebritney tbh)
In retrospect, yes, I do feel like 17 could count as childhood insofar as requiring supervision by, and endorsement from, "actual adults." But to this day, I don't really know how I feel about calling 18 adulthood. At best it's the reception desk in the lobby of Adulthood. At that age I still felt like very much an idiot baby, like a wide-eyed five-foot-four toddler, frantically searching for a "real" adult. That feeling that I still have when I can't find the grocery item I'm looking for and I have to assess every adult person in the store with a squint. Do you work here? I need an adult.
So let's talk about September Aught-Three. This'll be a long one.
***
Basic stats:
- no job yet
- working on my driver's license, so no car yet either
- starting college at a nearby university
- living with the folks, of course, which I'd end up doing until 2014
- dating Dylan, who was a grade below me and thus still in high school
Great shows I saw in September of 2003:
- Suburban Legends and Littlest Man Band at Chain Reaction
- Kenna and Fischerspooner at the Anaheim House of Blues (when it was still at Downtown Disney and not GardenWalk)
- Radiohead and Supergrass at the Hollywood Bowl
***
My first day at Cal State Long Beach was September 3, 2003. A totally-bananas recall election was goin' down in our beautiful state, and our campus happened to be a stop on Arnold Schwarzeneggar's gubernatorial campaign trail that day. Fucking surreal. And yes, this was the time that someone egged him. I remember recording a brief clip of the soon-to-be-gubernator's rallying speech (on my Motorola V60 so obviously it was just audio). I transcribed the exact quote in this entry, including the accent.
A week later, in the early afternoon of my 18th birthday, some guy on campus with a clipboard gave me a form to fill out and voilà -- I became a registered Democrat. My first vote was cast in the recall election two months later wherein, after deep and serious consideration, I supported the Green candidate Peter Camejo (RIP). Serious foreshadowing of CA clownshoes politics -- this state ended up picking the fucking Last Action Hero for two consecutive terms ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The day after my birthday, John Ritter died. The day after that, Johnny Cash.
***
In September Aught-Three I was two months away from my very first job, and seven months/several humbling failures away from my hard-earned driver's license. My dad drove me to and from school, and I spent a lot of time simply wandering the massive campus between classes (WITH A DISCMAN2 IN TOW, because I'm a dinosaur). I'd eventually find the student union and, if I could spare a buck or two, I'd play Puzzle Fighter at the arcade instead of napping in one of the armchairs in the TV room.
With outside forces (i.e. watchful eyes and fewer distractions) helping to keep me disciplined, I pretty much crushed my first semester of college. At that rate I was on track to get my BA in English right on time, maybe even early if I lucked out on capstone class availability down the road. The thing was -- and at the time I wasn't completely sure of it, but I suspected -- I was heading fast toward a post-adolescent nervous breakdown.3
Though I did see a good handful of familiar faces at CSULB, I wonder whether things might have turned out differently if I ended up making any really good friends there. Like if I actively participated in club life or volunteered more, really entrenched myself in the culture at large. If I gave a sincere effort to meet and get to know the people in my classes. I made some extremely awkward efforts that did not pay off4. According to this here LJ I joined the Filipino club but never attended a meeting, and I registered as a staff writer for the Union but only attended one meeting and submitted two articles.
But mostly I spent my spare time on campus either sleeping or frantically blogging in the library. I was purposely, aggressively alone.
***
Back then, I was still ~*hosted*~ by Anjanette (girl, I miss you -- I hope you're okay) on her Missgeek domain. Sometimes I still peek at what remained captured in the Wayback Machine, and my heart aches. The creativity! The playfulness! The now-depreciated markup language! I miss that era, where people (lots of girls especially) who wanted their own slice of internet just went and built it in their image. It's such a bold contrast to these days, where one is essentially required to have an account with at least one social media outlet designed to pump ads and propaganda in between updates from real people. All this to essentially avoid being seen as a misanthropic technophobe.
Bear in mind: at that exact time, MySpace was just barely becoming a thing and Facebook was just a shitty hot-or-not site for Harvard students. LiveJournal and its clones were pretty much the most social-media-esque thing in the moment, and it was reserved mostly for emo teens and fanfic writers *coughtumblrwithcommentscough*
Around that time I also started up a blog on my hosted site which I designed and maintained as a separate entity from the main site, kind of like a sub-website. While I don't know what first compelled me to create it, it persisted for a couple years more before I archived it. At its peak I updated it with alarming, Twitter-like frequency. The entries got progressively more manic and terrifying, with utter bathos brewing just beneath a surface of what one might think is simply non-sequitur. Subtweeting before Twitter. Momma, I was truly goin' thru it.
My IRL posse and I started a rating community called the_uncool_club. Remember those? Ours was born in absolutely petty shit-stirring response to a hipster one of a very similar name. I love the audacity, how enthusiastically we grilled up beef with strangers online. I don't fuck with that anymore, cuz people are petty as shit and these days they get well and truly nasty over online drama. The community is still there for posterity's sake but it's not active. I'm still in touch with some people I met through it.5 It will always have a special place in the annals of my 2000s memories.
I concurrently ran guerradigital as my alter ego Anchorite -- a fantastical, and admittedly pretentious, framing of the random "artistic" photos I took with with my Canon Elph. It's still there, though behind a Friends-Only wall. Don't bother to request, none of the photos are there anymore. Between the dissolution of my Flickr and Photobucket accounts, and the loss of all my hosted space, the photos might be gone forever. I really doubt I have them backed up on any accessible physical drives.
***
What a ride.
I am blown away by how on-the-precipice this moment of time was for me, how pivotal. I thought I was so jaded then, so wise, and yet such large and gleaming pieces of naïveté and sweet optimism still lay nestled within. I had nothing yet of my own, only dreams and options and ambitions. In due time it'd all be crushed by slowly tightening nerves and shrinking freedoms, pressurized into tiny diamonds within my darkening heart.
After reflecting on all this shit, I can say with certainty that 18 took a few months to hit me. Even though I was able to vote and watch porn and buy cigarettes, I was still definitely a child-ass child during my first semester of college. My parents still shuttled me around and gave me lunch money. I thought I was so fucking grown.
When the Adulthood™ did start to hit me a few months later the heady mix of liberation and responsibility hit like a ton of bricks.
Over and over.
For several years.
Might still be doing that to me.
Might do it forever.
***
1 Apparently I have four arms.
2 In particular I remember one mix CD I made from that era that was like two or three songs from a handful of artists. It had Radiohead, Cave In, The Postal Service, and The Flaming Lips.
3 I'll reflect on all that when we start hitting the Fifteen-Year Retrospective on the Foul Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Four in about six months.
4 Except in the case of Julie -- but only because, in true creep fashion, I found her on MySpace and LJ a few years after we'd both already left CSULB.
5Among TUC's alumni, an award-winning reporter and podcaster and a popular, paradigm-changing dad-blogger. I love you both and I'm so proud of you!!