Tagged: nostalgia
Beers and Disney
- by admin
Which sounds like an unlikely combination but it's what's happening right now.
After a day of writing exams and using my brain waters nonstop it feels good to sit around with a Hops and Robbers and relax. It's still kind of hard to type right now because my right hand is all cramped from writing, but I'm making do.
Wrote my Visual Rhetoric exam as well as my War as An Institution exam as well. One's a required course and one was an elective and I loved them both; one of the things I love about being a student is the wide variety of courses available to me. As much as I might complain about the stress about being a student at the University of Winnipeg, I know I'll miss it when I'm done.
For now, I'm enjoying the freedom.
Went out for beers and tasty snacks with Kevin, Adrian and Tyrone after work. One of my favourite things about the Internet is how it connects you to people, and Adrian and Kevin are two of my favourite Internet-friends (but don't tell Kevin that, haha)
We came home and I decided to watch some old Disney. Do any other 80's kids remember growing up with The Great Mouse Detective? How great is Vincent Price's song?!
(does anyone else notice how tiny his character's feet are?)
had a dream about mcdonalds last night
- by admin
way back when I was a tween I used to work at a mcdix in this underground walkway downtown called winnipeg square and I haven't thought about that job in ages
so it was extra-weird to dream about mcchickens and chocolate milk and mini fridges under the counter
for the first time in close to a decade.
people I knew kept showing up and asking
alyson wtf are you working at mcdix for
and I had no idea.
I was too busy stressing that the mcmuffins were burnt and the grease in the fryer hadn't been changed
and I hadn't gotten my lunch break yet and it was almost time for the dinnertime rush
which was especially weird because I only worked till 4pm
so I had already made like a tree and gtfo'd before that ish started.
though one thing I did like working there was the zen state you got into
when everything was past-paced and crazy and it felt like if you slowed down you would lose yr head
kinda like how things are right now.
good but cray.
suddenly my dream makes sense.
tragic kingdom
- by admin
we also had ditches in front of our houses and one side had these shallow ditches, which was the side that I lived on in our old side-by-side house with the green chain link fence out front and on the other side there were really deep ditches with wooden bridges that crossed them and were way cooler.
I was always kind of jealous that our side-by-side house wasn't on the side with the deep bridges that were good for catching tadpoles in, instead of our shallow ditches that just got your feet wet when you forgot to check in the long grass to see if there was a puddle or not before stepping.
my friend trista who lived in one of the side-by-sides across the street with the big ditch and in the summer when we weren't catching tadpoles with home-made nets that we would dangle from the bridge we would sit on her concrete front step and listen to the boombox.
she was a few years older than me and I totally looked up to her.
she had way better taste in music and always got cool cds and had way more nintendo 64 games.
she also showed me how to use a ouija board and to draw and play You Don't Know Jack on her brother's pc.
one of the summers in the late 90's when I was probably 9 or 10 and she was probably 12 or so we would sit on her concrete steps on in the cool grass and bake in the summer sun and listen to tragic kingdom on her boombox.
most of the music I heard was junky old stuff on my parents radio and tragic kingdom is the first album I remember hearing and thinking
omg this is really good
gwen stefani made no sense to me. she had weird-colored hair and wore strange clothes and her words tapped into this weird part of me that I didn't know was there. she confused me and I liked it and I must have driven trista nuts getting her to replay the album over and over.
this was around the time when all my friends were super into boy bands and I'd go to school and squeeeeeee over posters ripped out of Tiger Beat magazine of boys with their center-part haircuts but then I'd go over to tristas and listen to tragic kingdom and nevermind and clumsy and all these albums my other friends weren't listening to.
soon my family moved into a different neighbourhood without a field and ditches and more ugly stucco houses so I stopped going over there and summers with new music and boomboxes on the concrete step were over.
even though my friends in the new neighbourhood listened to cds on boom boxes and lay in the sun in our big backyards it wasn't the same. we listened to cheesy pop music and mainstream garbage and I didn't listen to that other type of music as often.
but sometimes at home I'd tune into muchmusic and watch the wedge and listen to the 'weird' music my friends weren't into.
because nobody listened to tragic kingdom.
Once I knew a boy who owned a skateboard
- by admin
it was a few years ago and he was a cute guy from my high school who I'd always thought was a bit of a dumbass but he was popular and all the ladies loved him and I couldn't figure out why.
we reconnected while I was sitting outside having a beer with friends at the Toad in the Hole and he went by on his skateboard and we started chatting and didn't stop for the next month or so. most of our correspondence was veiled jabs at one another because we clearly both came from different worlds which didn't collide nicely.
I think he thought I was stuck up which I was and I think I thought he was useless, which he was.
he picked me up once in a beatup old red car wearing a fluffy plaid parka and a toque even though it was only early fall. there was no radio and he had groceries from his mom's kitchen in the backseat. he held my hand because it was colder in the car than it was outside. at his place we tried to watch Brazil but his pirated copy didn't work so we watched Bronson instead and made out on his couch, interrupted only once by his lesbian roommate who made a point of talking about how she was a lesbian which I thought was overcompensating a bit.
the apartment had walls of either wood panelling or brick, and the furniture were all scruffy antiques except the shelves that housed his record collection, which were 2x4s held up with cinder blocks and covered in paper doilies probably stolen from somewhere. at one point we listened to Bob Dylan, sipping cheap beers and listening to the freezing rain.
it was like being in a Wes Anderson movie.
but when I got up to use the bathroom I walked by his bedroom and saw the mattress on the floor with the dirty sheets and the pile of car tires that he was going to sell at some point, or so he said, I knew that it was over.
I was too much of a snob, and he was too useless for us to be anything but offensive to one another.
but sometimes when I hear Visions of Johanna I remember the time I let that boy who really wasn't good for me at all put his hand up my shirt while the record skipped and the rain came down, even though I knew I shouldn't have. I knew it was over and I knew it was useless but I think I kissed him harder and enjoyed the moment more knowing that once it ended, that was it.
so we kissed like we didn't mean anything to each other, which we didn't.
and that was alright.
my very first boyfriend was a sweetheart
- by admin
no pictures of us together exist because that was in the time before smart phones and Flickr and we were all young and hopeless and thought that our memories would be all the reminders we would need.of course I didn't realize what a good guy he was, then. that's how it always goes. he cooked me dinners and would bike to my house during the summer vacation and take me for ice cream and let me borrow his PlayStation to play Final Fantasy VII because the only consoles I had for a long time were the SNES and the Nintendo 64.
one day he showed up at my house with a rose bush which he gave to my mom and she planted in the backyard in the far left corner, by the grape vines which grow grapes that none of us have ever tried.
needless to say, she loved him
and compared every boyfriend I had after to him, saying "I liked J better"
which I used to find offensive, but now I understand, because the only time she stopped saying it was when I started dating Tyrone, who treats me as good as if not better than he did.
except this time I like to think I actually deserve it.
see, my first boyfriend and I haven't spoken in years and I can understand why he would have wanted me to drop off the face of the earth, which looking back I wish I could have done. in the end, I wasn't very nice to him and I wish I could take those times back.
but I can't.
so I can only be happy when my FaceBook feed pops up with good news about him, that he's out there kicking ass and living his dreams with someone who loves him more than my juvenile self ever could.
so congrats, J. I'm glad you're doing okay out there.
I never got to be on the Birthday Boat
- by admin
but one time I drew a picture of Beav and Buckley and they showed it on-air
and I was the happiest kid around
because in the 90's in Winnipeg MTN Kids was the shit.
I miss my childhood.
dial-up sounds and Neopets
- by admin
are basically what I remember from when I first began really using The Internet.my parents got us a family computer when I was in the 6th grade and in true parent style it was a hunk of junk and something that my friends who knew me then still make fun of me for. guys I dated in highschool either spent their time fighting with me, on the phone with me troubleshooting my computer, and sitting in my parent's basement trying to remove all the malware and trojans and misc viruses my brothers got from looking at pr0n irresponsibly (c'mon, I've never gotten one virus from that, once).
oh and deviantart too, I think. oh no, it was elfwood. wow, just checked out that site and it's basically pictures of faeries and Middle Earth and stuff, don't even click there it's embarrassing I even went there. but aren't most sites we visited when we were younger embarrassing?
case in point: I just showed Tyrone a picture of the Neopets site (I think) when I used to use it, in grade 8. it was freaking huge I tell you, we had to fight each other for computers to use at lunch so we could collect fake money and play stupid games like a Neopets version of Snake (which I was very, very good at).
can you believe I played something that looked like this? that the guys in my class played it, too??
what was wrong with us.
oh yeah, we were stupid kids.
in highschool things got marginally better. My friend Eric (remember him?) introduced me to ebaumsworld, boingboing and penny-arcade
(remember when they got sued by American Greetings for that Strawberry Shortcake parody?)
among other things. finally I was learning how to use that vast interconnected series of tubes -and I hadn't even discovered online pr0n yet!
and with that came the days of Xanga, LiveJournal and DeadJournal (who had one of those?) blogging! everyone had one! back before we knew how to insert photos or do anything but complain about that bitch you saw while your mom was picking you up from the mall with your friends after you blew all your money (15$) at Sirens (if you were a sloot) or Frenzee (if you went to raves like I did)
yes I went to raves, but that was back before they got disgusting and sketchy and places I now generally avoid, so, not really not really since highschool in case you were wondering, and no I never looked like this:
because kandi is stupid)
and now I've totally lost my train of thought about the years of Internet Antiquity for me because I got lost looking up pictures of people I knew partying way back in the day, how did I even get in to those parties? oh right I knew people. who doesn't 'know people' though? Everyone knows someone, that doesn't make us special.
but I was 16 and thought I was. though didn't we all.
