Seventeen
It´s Saturday evening, 08hs00 in the year of our Lord 2006 and my eyes are hopelessly wandering among dozens of diagrams done very half-assedly by my Chilean workmates for there´s this thing coming up Monday afternoon at work and I gotta be ready. Herr Mozart and his Magic Flute spin in the CD Player. Tried Midnight Oil and Sinatra before that, only Mozart made the cut.
There´s one inescapable truth to be told about the old PC at my parents´; in a crazy kind of way it´s not unlike meeting an ex-girlfriend from back when you were much younger; I did my first web-site on that computer. I wrote my first pieces there too, and most of them are still stored on its backup drive, a constellation of faded .doc stars that never got to make the cut themselves, just like Frank Sinatra tonight.
So to hell with work for a bit. Let´s take a quick tour around Memory Lane, wow, there´s some rather curious stuff in here. There is this thing coming up Monday afternoon at work. There are other things coming up in other Monday afternoons.
So do check this out. Heavily edited, adapted & translated for your own good, but here´s nineteen ninety-seven all over again. I was seventeen years old.
It was a Monday afternoon as well.
23.Jun.1997 – Monday.
INT. CLASSROOM – AFTER LUNCH
(…)And at Lit class it was all joy; the teacher asked us who´d read some awful book and no one had (why would anyone? All books they want us to read are lousy books!) but since there´s bound to be a good Samaritan in every group I raised my hand I said, for no good reason whatsoever, heck yeah, I´d read that book, so what!!
So the teacher got so happy and began firing round after round of questions about the damn book and there laid I basically floored, gee I gotta come up with something, I´m a sitting duck here. Of course that saying- better yet- establishing that the common aspect among the book´s characters was that each one of them had two hands never really helped me much. Especially because that, and I kid you not, it turned out that one of the major characters from the book had lost a hand somehow and he wasn´t even Aquaman!!
So the teacher, the witch, rained hell over me and this buddy of mine K--- whom was all good with drawing- no, scratch that, his dad was, I guess he only followed suit- he did this drawing of me dressed up like Batman and wrote something like, “Desperately looking for attention” or something and passed along to the rest of the class & to the teacher herself, the witch, and everybody laughed.
Do you remember that day in High School, K---? Our common friend, the one with no neck whom we´d say had Klinefelter waged a senseless bet against our Physics teacher about the contents of next week´s test, and we wrote the parody of a popular song making fun of this other friend of ours, whom we´d say was either the gayest person to walk on Earth, or Quasimodo from Disney´s the Hunchback of Notre-Dame (but never both at the same time. Go figure.)
It´s Saturday night and nine years later, and I´m sitting alone at my parents´ and laughing out loud- I´m actually laughing so much I´m almost crying- because I keep remembering all those funny, crazy bits from back when life was just like a sitcom. Everything was so easy back then, wasn´t it?
My web-site was hosted at, http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/9928, “Under Development” since the year before. The URL does not exist anymore, so don´t bother trying. Lots of things don´t exist anymore.
So is the future bleak? Probably. Is life harder? Yes, but well, for pretty much everyone. Did those days go by so quick & stuff? Oh yes. With the speed of a bad cliché zooming by your ears. But hey, am I glad to be here or what?
Here´s something. I´m gonna tell you all a secret now, okay? I was never really into High School, I was never really into being a kid and all that. Being 17 had a lot to do, in hindsight, with wishing I were 26.
Waking up five-ish in the morning, having my PC on before seven at the office and shutting it down after eight at night, maybe taking the full lunch break if I´m lucky… My roommate calls me a Yuppie who came in late. Of course I tell him I´m not a Yuppie, he´s the Hippie.
There´s no finer thing in life than making your own decisions, calling your own shots, knowing what is best for you and everybody around just because you think it´s best… no, scratch that too. Because you have spent some ungodly amount of time figuring things out and in doing so you probably learned a thing or two. Life itself. Like taking the evening off to see some generic Tom Cruise movie just to get your mind off things for a couple of hours & stopping by the toy store to buy a cheap Batmobile toy with the 10 bucks left in your wallet after the chocolate milk-shake. Not a care in the world, nobody waiting for you at home. The pact sealed almost in blood with your cell phone: you won´t call Bhutan and Bhutan won´t call you back.
Of course I expect to be dead by the time I´m 35.
There´s one inescapable truth to be told about the old PC at my parents´; in a crazy kind of way it´s not unlike meeting an ex-girlfriend from back when you were much younger; I did my first web-site on that computer. I wrote my first pieces there too, and most of them are still stored on its backup drive, a constellation of faded .doc stars that never got to make the cut themselves, just like Frank Sinatra tonight.
So to hell with work for a bit. Let´s take a quick tour around Memory Lane, wow, there´s some rather curious stuff in here. There is this thing coming up Monday afternoon at work. There are other things coming up in other Monday afternoons.
So do check this out. Heavily edited, adapted & translated for your own good, but here´s nineteen ninety-seven all over again. I was seventeen years old.
It was a Monday afternoon as well.
23.Jun.1997 – Monday.
INT. CLASSROOM – AFTER LUNCH
(…)And at Lit class it was all joy; the teacher asked us who´d read some awful book and no one had (why would anyone? All books they want us to read are lousy books!) but since there´s bound to be a good Samaritan in every group I raised my hand I said, for no good reason whatsoever, heck yeah, I´d read that book, so what!!
So the teacher got so happy and began firing round after round of questions about the damn book and there laid I basically floored, gee I gotta come up with something, I´m a sitting duck here. Of course that saying- better yet- establishing that the common aspect among the book´s characters was that each one of them had two hands never really helped me much. Especially because that, and I kid you not, it turned out that one of the major characters from the book had lost a hand somehow and he wasn´t even Aquaman!!
So the teacher, the witch, rained hell over me and this buddy of mine K--- whom was all good with drawing- no, scratch that, his dad was, I guess he only followed suit- he did this drawing of me dressed up like Batman and wrote something like, “Desperately looking for attention” or something and passed along to the rest of the class & to the teacher herself, the witch, and everybody laughed.
Do you remember that day in High School, K---? Our common friend, the one with no neck whom we´d say had Klinefelter waged a senseless bet against our Physics teacher about the contents of next week´s test, and we wrote the parody of a popular song making fun of this other friend of ours, whom we´d say was either the gayest person to walk on Earth, or Quasimodo from Disney´s the Hunchback of Notre-Dame (but never both at the same time. Go figure.)
It´s Saturday night and nine years later, and I´m sitting alone at my parents´ and laughing out loud- I´m actually laughing so much I´m almost crying- because I keep remembering all those funny, crazy bits from back when life was just like a sitcom. Everything was so easy back then, wasn´t it?
My web-site was hosted at, http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/9928, “Under Development” since the year before. The URL does not exist anymore, so don´t bother trying. Lots of things don´t exist anymore.
So is the future bleak? Probably. Is life harder? Yes, but well, for pretty much everyone. Did those days go by so quick & stuff? Oh yes. With the speed of a bad cliché zooming by your ears. But hey, am I glad to be here or what?
Here´s something. I´m gonna tell you all a secret now, okay? I was never really into High School, I was never really into being a kid and all that. Being 17 had a lot to do, in hindsight, with wishing I were 26.
Waking up five-ish in the morning, having my PC on before seven at the office and shutting it down after eight at night, maybe taking the full lunch break if I´m lucky… My roommate calls me a Yuppie who came in late. Of course I tell him I´m not a Yuppie, he´s the Hippie.
There´s no finer thing in life than making your own decisions, calling your own shots, knowing what is best for you and everybody around just because you think it´s best… no, scratch that too. Because you have spent some ungodly amount of time figuring things out and in doing so you probably learned a thing or two. Life itself. Like taking the evening off to see some generic Tom Cruise movie just to get your mind off things for a couple of hours & stopping by the toy store to buy a cheap Batmobile toy with the 10 bucks left in your wallet after the chocolate milk-shake. Not a care in the world, nobody waiting for you at home. The pact sealed almost in blood with your cell phone: you won´t call Bhutan and Bhutan won´t call you back.
Of course I expect to be dead by the time I´m 35.
posted by 186282mps at 8:02 AM
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