Mind Your Own God Damn Business

10 years ago (1999):

Welcome to...THE FUTURE!!!

I was 19. I worked as a line cook, drove a brown 1980 Audi, played N64 and Playstation 1, used my top-of-the-line 400Mhz iMac to browse through a futuristic source of information called the “World Wide Web” that had all kinds of fancy features like animated GIFs, frames, and flash animation, tried to get laid and took classes at the local Jr. College.

Cooking and dicking around on my computer went extremely well. Jr. College was a different story, however. I was failing and dropping classes left and right. Even though the most important thing I could do at that age was work on a degree, I put almost no effort into it. I was willing to register for classes and cut checks to the school; showing up to class or studying was a different story.

Flash forward ten years (2009, for those of you who can’t add):

My mother retired this year.

She has been cleaning out the library she worked in, which is full of boxes upon boxes of her stuff. Among those boxes was a box of my crap from 1999 that I apparently lost in a move ten years ago. It turned out to be a pretty fun little time capsule. It only really had two types of things in it: One was all of my old books on how to use Macromedia Flash, which are now completely outdated and useless. The other was a collection of notebooks that I had used for either journals or school notes. It was interesting to take a look back and get some perspective on 19 year old me.

Here’s what my notes for college algebra looked like, for instance:

Talking in barcodes.

Holy Crap! There's actually a little math on this page!

Of course.

Thanks, Adam Sandler.

Squeal Like a Pig, indeed.

I still don't know what "Buffalo Style" entails.

More barcodes, screwdrivers and the Atari Teenage Riot logo

I give up.

Still no math in sight...

It's a really good thing I put that note at the top of the page. Otherwise, I might have failed College Algebra the first time I took it.

There are a few things I notice when I look at these notes.

First of all, I had a real fixation on barcodes, screwdrivers, and ninja turtle heads.

Second of all, I notice is that although these were notes from an algebra class, there’s an alarming lack of algebra to be found. I was willing to put plenty of effort into drawing a turtle head attached to a lamp and a note to myself noting that “Black Gold = Human Shit”, but it appears that other than a few examples scattered here and there, it didn’t seem important to me to write down anything about the math the teacher was explaining to us. Nothing wrong with that, I guess- I still find these pictures vaguely entertaining, but I think that thanks to my sleuthing skills, the case of Johnny Castle and the mysterious failing grades has been cracked wide open.

Either way, it was funny to look and see what I considered important to write down while I was sitting in class ten years ago.

Dear Diary, I failed another math test, the boy who sits in front of me doesn't even know I exist and I STILL can't get the golden chocobo in Final Fantasy 7! LIFE IS SO UNFAIR!!! <3 Johnny.

My journals were fairly entertaining as well. They more or less re-affirm everything that I suspected about myself from that time: I was crazy. Really, really crazy. I read over them and realize what a whiny little bitch I was. The strangest part was reading about the events that I was whining and bitching about, because I remember almost none of them. It seems plausible that they happened, and the description of them is in my handwriting, but I have no recollection of most of them. Then again, if someone told me to get out a piece of paper and write down everything I remembered about my early 20′s, I could probably only fill up about a page with memories of specific events. Good to know that my life is evaporating out of my brain as though it never happened.

Take this, for instance: Apparently, when someone had pubic lice, Danny and I thought that it was funny to call that “Jackal Crotch”. And you know what? I still think that’s funny, but I had no idea that we ever thought that. If I hadn’t written it down, it would be gone forever!

Another interesting passage is one where I have a really stupid idea for a story that requires the main character to be constantly filming himself. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out why the protagonist would be doing something like that. By itself, that isn’t that interesting, but it got me thinking about the fact that it was only a few years ago that it was still too expensive and inconvenient for everybody to film everything that they were doing all of the time. Flash forward to now, when you can’t buy a phone that DOESN’T have a video recording feature and highspeed Internet costs virtually nothing. Anytime ANYTHING happens now, if there are people there it gets recorded. There happened to be a couple of videos of the planes hitting the twin towers eight years ago, but can you imagine how much footage we would have of that event if it happened tomorrow? And it’s not just important events – There’s an entire generation of teens clogging up youtube with hour after hour of boring, pointless talking. It was just a little bit strange to see something that was as dated as that in a journal I kept. I feel like I opened it up and found an entry that said “Day 15 – the scurvy continues to eat away at my body. When will science discover a cure for this horrible disease!?” or “You’d better get used to Ska, world, because that type of music is here, it’s queer, and it’s not going anywhere for a long, long time!”

Either way, it was kind of fun to get my hands on a time capsule from my past and see what my tiny, shriveled brain was doing ten years ago.

I’ll leave you with another little golden slice of the 90′s.

FUCK YEAH!!!