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Wednesday, November 3, 2010

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.

6 comments:

  1. oh man... my journals crack me up too. i was way awkward with everything. did i come across that way when we were in high school?? i've read them to Brian just to remind him of who he married, the most awesomest person in the world.

    AIM... good ol' AIM. i still use my original username, yup that's how cool i am. honestly i think everyone seems strangely awkward in AIM conversations i mean just ask Chris Hansen.

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  2. Oh man Dyana, the AIM conversations the two of us had are seriously a highlight of that time of my life. (SunsetBBQ here, among 1,500 other names.) I wish I had saved them so bad. We were so damn funny, like all the time. Plus that was the beginning of mine and Stal's relationship, and I remember giving you word-for-word details...

    And... that's too funny about yours and Mike's geeky "man" conversation. I love it.

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  3. Dyanamaria... I , by far, carried the bulk of the ridiculous awkwardness in those old AIM conversations. I was way worse than you were. I, too, am torn between my appreciation for them (in lieu of the fact that we would, years later, get married), and my horror at how LAME I was.

    "Private embarrassment" is the perfect description of the feeling whilst reading those old conversations.

    Great blog, man. :)

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  4. Arg... I wrote a long response, but it disappeared!

    Anyway - Marci - I'm thinking I should organize an open mic night around here and we should do this! I tried to remember my old AIM password and I couldn't - plus the e-mail address I used then is now defunct, so password recall fail.

    Kristin - oh SunsetBBQ!!! I agree... we were damn funny. I really really wish I could find some of the ones I knew I saved on floppy. Hours of just ridiculous.

    Mike - we should re-read it tonight hahah - we were equally awkward... don't you worry... man.

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  5. oh, my, goodness! haha. I think because of your feelings being legit and lack of maturity and inventory of appropriate words caused the weirdness in the conversations.

    I'd like to point out that in about 10 years if you are looking through old blogs, you'll probably feel embarrassed by the "no big thang" phrase that you used without actually putting quotations on it. At that time, it will be a 20 old phrase in a 10 year old blog. Great blog though!

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  6. yes open mic night!!! i need to find my old chats but out of the journals, im so ready

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