Meme

[lapsedmodernist]

Pick a year and I will write about my life during that year. 1978 – Present.

Comments

[yanatonage.livejournal.com]

I think this is tricky because for most of us, lives are defined by school-years rather than calendar years until we are 22 or so. (and maybe longer for you since you're an academic?)

anyway, I pick: 1995

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

1995 was the year I graduated high school and started college. That winter, spring, and summer I was completely infatuated by (and anxious about and heartbroken by) my high school boyfriend, whom I had met at Model UN. I spent that spring visiting colleges that I had applied to. One of those visits was a car trip I took with my parents to South Florida. This was the first and the only time I had ever been to Florida. I ended up enrolling in a school in the Midwest in the end. In school I was doing literary journal and Scholastic Bowl; after school I hung out either with my two older, more "experienced" girl friends, or my strange, earnest, social filter lacking friend who was just realizing he was gay. I dyed my hair various shades of purple and pink with Manic Panic, I wore lots of broomskirts. I listened to Tori Amos, Nine Inch Nails, MLWTTKC, Janis Joplin, and Sinead O'Connor. I read Alice Walker and Ayn Rand. In the summer my aforementioned girl friends and I mostly hung out in Evanston, either in the coffeeshops, or on the rocks overlooking the lake. When summer ended, so did my relationship, very dramatically, and in a way that left me very hurt and confused.

My first semester of college was overwhelming. I think I felt everything more raw and intensely then than I had ever before (or since). I made friendships that still last today. I shaved my head in the barber shop downtown, tried acid, worked on art projects, discovered Ani Difranco. I debated objectivism and Marxism, took classes in the history of Ancient Rome and the Sociology of Deviance, stayed up all night, smoked cloves, dressed up in flowing dresses and neon-colored wigs, and had an intense (if celibate) time. I started working at one of the local food places, and ate a lot of chicken schwarma. As the year came to a close and snow fell, I phased out of my initial college crush on my RA and into an infatuation with a boy with pink hair. Right around the end of th year I got my nose pierced, completing the look that horrified my mother when I showed up at home for Christmas Break.

[nunofthat.livejournal.com]

2003

[amberskyfire.livejournal.com]

1980 :)

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

1989

[wax-heart.livejournal.com]

1999.


end of the best ten years evaar.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

The year the Berlin Wall fell. (googles) No, wait, imtboo beat me to it. OK, then, the year you moved to Los Angeles.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

the year I moved to Los Angeles...let's see. That was 1999. So winter and spring of that year was the end of college for me. I was living in a gray house on the outskirts of campus with 5 other housemates, two of them close friends. My asinine unrelationship with a certain soccer-playing, whiskey-drinking gentleman was approaching its denoument, and I was preparing for a move out to California, to go to graduate school, feeling the whole time that this was not the right step for me--a feeling that stuck around, morphing into the feeling that I had taken the wrong fork at the road--and a year later I readjusted my sextants and astrolabis by moving back East...

It rained terribly at my graduation (just like it did every year), and I spent two weeks in bed with pneumonia afterwards. At the end of the two weeks I recovered enough to board my plane for Los Angeles, where I spent the summer living in the guest house of the daughter of Jack Benny, washing her car and minding her estate while she was traveling, and amusing myself by sending my friends postcards from the 90210 zip code. I got a job as a cocktail waitress at a bar called Barfly on Sunset Strip, and took night drives through Coldwater Canyon. I taught myself how to make bead jewelry, went to the flea market on Melrose and Fairfax, read Francesca Lea Block (natch), and tried to figure out what I was going to make out of this city, and who I was going to be in it. I was more hesitant and confused about that process in Los Angeles than I had ever been anywhere else, and I was constantly jarred by the descrepancy between the Los Angeles invention of itself as the locus of magical realism, and the diffuse scarcity of that urban magic in every particle of water and air (this is as opposed to New York, where the experience of navigating the city is punctuated with moments of recognition, and pleasure, as the narratives of Magical New York are made manifest--a pleasure, I imagine, akin to finding a door in the back of your wardrobe, for real).

In autumn I moved out of the guesthouse in Beverly Hills, and into a tiny dark studio in Westwood, in one of those pink stucco houses, with an internal courtyard, from which escheresque stairs ran up and down to the apartment doors. I had a utilitarian kitchenette instead of a kitchen, and a fraternity down the street. I discovered sushi, and got into the habit of Baileys-and-cream on the rocks nightcap. I read articles and books about evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, game theory, and dynamic modeling. I continued to work as a cocktail waitress, and picked up another gig about which I won't write here, but I can tell you in person some time. Over the course of my first semester there I became increasingly agitated and unhappy, and over Thanksgiving I had an epiphany that Everything Was Wrong, and by Christmas I had worked out a plan that would get me to New York by June...which is exactly what happened, and exactly what needed to happen, because I love New York in June...

[(Anonymous)]

Lia Block, I think.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

hey, Martha, do you realize how weird it looks that you read my posts and then log out and post anonymously, correcting my spelling? Do you seriously have nothing better to do?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

denoument = denouement.

[electric-honey.livejournal.com]

2006.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

In the winter-spring I was doing my first ever real teaching job. I taught two courses. My head/eye problems were getting worse and worse, which, among other things, caused problems with driving to and from the job. In the early summer we moved from Lynn to Somerville, which was a very welcome change of scenery and apartments. I had a triple vacation--I went to Tannersville, to a rented country house with friends, to Maine with theophile's family, and then theophile and I went to the Czech Republic, to briefly visit with my parents, but mostly to do a road trip through the country, and to hang out in my father's apartment in Prague while he and my mother went to Amsterdam. Copious cheap beer and stumbled-upon ruined castles were par for the course. In the late summer I found out I was pregnant, and the next few months were a combination of stress, reflection, and changes in my body on the level of both contours and molecules. My grandfather died in November. I don't remember all that much specific detail from that fall and winter because I was so spacey all the time, and constantly felt out of it, and like my internal world was much more real to me than what was going on in the world I moved through day-to-day.

[bouncingleaf.livejournal.com]

Oh rats. I reread the question and realized that asking about 2013 is out of bounds.

Excellent meme.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

1986?