Good ol' AIM

Mike and I recently finished watching "Freaks & Geeks" (awesome - Netflix it if you haven't seen it) and have just started watching "Undeclared" as a follow up (even though it's not a follow up at all. They're both Judd Apatow TV projects, so it was kind of a follow up since we felt abandoned after Freaks and Geeks ended without telling us everything about everyone!!! WHY TV!? WHY!!!?)

Anyway, Undeclared follows a group of college freshman, circa 1999 or 2000, so the music, the clothes and the references remind me a lot of my freshman year in college.  I started looking through my old backup files from my old computer and found a small stash of old AIM chat sessions I had saved from late 1999 - early 2000 when AIM chat was our Facebook.  Most of my really hilarious (in my touched up nostalgic memory) conversations were lost when my parents' computer was replaced, taking with it any funny AIM conversations I had saved on it.  I think I backed most of them up onto floppy disc... but who uses a floppy disc for anything nowadays?  The only ones that I seemed to still have were the ones I had e-mailed to myself after the chat which meant it took place in the University computer lab.

The first one I found was an AIM conversation between Mike and I.  We had talked about this particular AIM conversation before - he was up in the Central Coast, living in the dorms and had just broken up with his high school girlfriend.  I was kind of starting to date someone at my college,  but was still living at home and had not really talked to most of my high school friends in a while.  Here we logged onto AIM,   to reflect on our high school relationships and fess up to old feelings.  Seriously.  I don't remember thinking it was awkward... but reading the stuff I wrote now, makes me cringe... we were SO strange. 

Mike called me "man" a lot.  Like, "thanks man", "totally man", "you got it man", "talk to you soon, man."

At the part where I admitted to having a secret crush on him in high school and explained that I had just recently "got over it" I followed up with "I hope there's not weirdness between us now."

Wtf.

Who says that in real life?

Apparently me.

I mean, I married the dude!  Obviously, we're totally cool now and it turns out those feelings were kinda legit.  So why does reading this conversation now make me feel like hiding under the sofa?  Shouldn't I be feeling "awww... we were so cute?"  We tried to talk like calm grown-up adults, discussing old feelings as if it were no big thang and instead we come off like really really weird eighteen year olds.  Really weird.

 

I found another chat - between me and a good friend from high school (SunsetBBQ... you know who you are) in the Fall of 1999 - and I wrote the entire chat in ALL CAPS.  I WAS INTERNET SCREAMING THE WHOLE TIME.  What am I?  New?

So awkward.  

And while I'm tempted to delete them out of private embarrassment, I can't bring myself to do it.  It's like looking at me in another dimension.  I can actually read how stupid I sounded.  AND when I have grown teenagers that make me maybe want to bang my head against a wall, I'll be able to look at these lame things and put everything into perspective. Right?

I had read about a monthly open mic event done in NYC where instead of people reading poetry, they read pages from their childhood/teenage journals.  I would totally be down for that.  I've got to go find my journals at my parent's house somewhere. I think I have like 40 volumes worth of material.  I had a lot of crap to write about from the ages of 11 to 17 that NO ONE ELSE WAS ALLOWED TO READ.  Nail polish, boys, parents, tv, homework.  I'm sure it's thrilling.  And humiliating.  Well, the kind of humiliating that probably leads to humility.  So.  Not too bad.