I like to pretend how much more exciting and dangerously self-destructive my life would be had I been a young adult in the mid-nineties. I fantasize about how after I'd graduated from high school in '96, I'd have dropped out of college to follow the Lilith Faire tour around the country, wound up working in a vegan bakery in Portland after that was over, spending my free time writing and sipping mushroom tea in the rain. I'd have had a string of male and female lovers, a failed engagement, and a sleeve of tattoos covering my left arm. Oh, how interesting I'd be--maybe even interesting or at least fucked up enough to be on The Real World. But, then, if I'd only been 18 in '96, I'd have still been too young for the first few seasons of the show, back when it was much more interesting that it was the few years pre- and post-millennium.
So maybe I should have been an 18-year-old in '92, in which cases I'd have worn my hair long and greasy, sported flannel and combat boots, and probably died in a mosh pit at a Pearl Jam concert in Milwaukee.
I think my quibble with coming of age when I did has less to do with nostalgia for the grunge era and more with the intensively anxious cultural climate of the late 90s and early 00s that have henceforth irrevocably altered my perceptions of the world. I spent my first few teenage years afraid for my life in the late 90s. The last two years of the 20th century were particularly anxious for a teenager, especially a gay one--what with the Matthew Shepard murder in 1998, then the spree of school shootings: Jonesboro, Arkansas (just an hour from where I grew up), Columbine in '99, and all the copy cats.
Dear God, then there was Y2K, which happened my first year of high school. I remember my English teacher, Mrs. Scott, gravely telling us goodbye at Christmas break, a bit teary-eyed (either out of fear or relief) because she really thought the world was going to explode after the ball dropped in Times Square that New Year's Eve. Everyone did. Mrs. Scott even made us write Letters to the Future, which she placed in a Tupperware bowl "time capsule" and buried in the school yard for the aliens to discover later. And I won't even touch on the cultural fear of alien abduction in the late 90s except to say this: I blame The X-Files for many a night's sleep interrupted by dreams of little green men poking, prodding, and implanting computer chips in my body.
After the turn of the century, when we all realized Y2K was a Y2joke, my coming of age was punctuated by tragedies on the national scale: 9/11 in '01, the war in Iraq in '03, and Hurricane Katrina in '05. I remember feeling like I'd never be so scared in my life again on September 11th, 2001, when I was junior in high school with big plans to work on the Homecoming float after school. But then Bush declared war on Iraq the year I graduated from high school, and I got nervous about going away to college, afraid something awful would happen and I'd never see my family again. Then Katrina when I was a junior in college, whose affects on me I've already discussed on this blog.
Please don't misconstrue my rumination for woe-is-me-ism. I don't want pity. I don't think my generation is the only one to have been socialized in an age of anxiety. Hell, compared to youth in other countries in the latter part of the 20th century, we had it made: no genocides, ethnic cleansing, civil wars. I had a happy, safe, productive youth. Still, though, I think all the cultural fear I grew up in has made me less of a risk taker than I'd like to be. When you live in a time when at any minute everything can and will go completely wrong in the world, it's sometimes hard (for me at least) to justify bumming around the West Coast or taking a year to find myself through writing and recreational drug use after college because I know what's at stake if I don't do something with my life now. So, it's a good thing I'm as motivated as I am, though, to be perfectly honest, I have no clue what I'll be doing after my MA program is over next year. Hopefully, Moulder and Sculley won't have to investigate my sudden disappearance.
5 comments:
You're from Southaven?? I went to Ole Miss-until they asked me to leave but I went back and left on my own accord- and most of my family was in Blytheville and Manila until last year.
My mom still has water left over from her Y2K mass water and can food preparations. She makes me so proud sometimes.
Well, I'm actually from Horn Lake, but no one knows where it stops and Southaven begins. Plus the Walmart is in Southaven, so therefore it's of more importance and I claim it as a hometown. My parents live in Olive Branch now, so I might as well claim DeSoto County more than any specific town therein as my home.
It's neat that we hail from the same region. I think that's why we are so awesome, don't you?
That must be the source of our awesomeness!!
Home is where the Wal-Mart is!!
You know, Tim, I was a teenager then. I graduate high school in 1990, graduated college in 1995...
It really wasn't that different, except I could wear flannel outside the house and not one looked twice. These days, it garners some funny looks (not that funny looks always stop me... but the teenage daughter asking me if I am really going to the store in that does slow me down slightly).
Any time you are not having to pay bills always looks better than a time when you are ; )
I talked about this subject with a friend of mine after reading this post. Interestingly, she claims the reason she is such a risk taker with such a wild lifestyle is the precise reason that you and I aren't.
The things in life that have made us cautious made her more chancy. I guess anxiety just affected us differently. She never claimed that she wasn't anxious.
Good post. Made me nostalgic for junior high (Oh, the Verve Pipe) and made for a good conversation.
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