Counting Down to 30: 1999
Okay, for me this was kind of a “first year of the rest of my life” which is why I’m giving it an entry of its own. I’ve only a week to fill in the 2000s but I figure their being more recent means they should be easier to cover :)
I’d started college at the end of 1998 - a degree in American Studies - and working one night a week at the local supermarket. I really didn’t know what I was doing with myself or where I was going. The last school was just the kind of place that urged everybody to go to college, so I naturally went ahead and filled in the forms and stuff. I wanted to do a media course, I think, but they were still few and far between at that time and harder to get on so American Studies seemed “close enough”. I was lucky to fall at the end of the time where all tuition was paid for, and the grants and loans you got over the course of a course don’t actually ever have to be paid back unless you’re earning so much that the repayments aren’t worth worrying about (I’ve still not reached the threshold, and when I turn 50, the debt is cancelled), so for a few grand a year pocket money it was a no brainer. Again I’m exaggerating, but that’s pretty much what the decision to go to college was for me in the end.
So, I got my first credit card, which came with a free gift, my first mobile phone. I got my first computer - a really sh*tty PC, I can’t even remember the specs, though I remember it’s end, I left it on for over 24 hours while I stayed at my friend’s house one night, and came home to a “burny smell” LOL. I got my first DVD player, and Sky TV in my bedroom. Here’s how that bedroom looked at the end of the 90s:
So, like I said in the last entry, I had tasted the internet in the mid nineties and I liked it. It was still for our family at the time a luxury too far, however, and honestly, I wasn’t missing it or anything, so it wasn’t high on my list. But I was buying computer magazines, which always had those “free trial!” CDs in them, and it was only a matter of time before I ran an extension cord from the phone socket while my parents were at work one day and connected for the first time. And, uhh… that was that. Within months, I was so connected that I had to ask if we could get the internet “proper”, and I had my own phoneline installed. By the end of 1999 or at least into 2000, I was paying AOL up to £100 a month, lol.
The major thing that got me started online? Usenet, which at that time I discovered because it was built into Outlook Express. I forget how I came across alt.fan.lea-salonga, probably the result of a Disney connection, but after poking around a few other groups, sometimes under pseudonyms, sometimes not, I found a home among the regulars there, and well into the 2000s, it was one of the best circles of friends I’ve ever had… way more than just a fan group for Lea (who actually posted there from time to time), and I’m still in touch with many of them to varying degrees. It was there that I met Laura who without doubt was the first and possibly only true love of my life even if I still have never physically met her. It was there, despite having called myself a “fan of musicals” for nearly a decade, that I was introduced to Stephen Sondheim, Jonathan Larson, Boublil & Schönberg and more. And it was there that the closest version of the “real me”, whatever that is, was most accepted. It is a shame that it kind of fell apart, and I still feel bad that I may have been a part of that - to be honest, there is a chunk of the early 2000s that is kind of missing in my memory - but for an internet fan board, it’s kind of amazing it lasted so long and stayed so much like a family for the time it did. I wish I could link to some of my old posts on the Google archive, but it seems I did a damn good job of deleting just about everything when I had a big purge fit in the mid-2000s. Sorry bout that :(
Another reason to do 1999 as its own entry (actually, I’d have liked to do this with each year but I’m just too lazy as you’ve seen, lol) is the movies. This was an incredible year for movies, at a time when I was just about perfectly informed enough to appreciate them to the max; or maybe both of those things really cancel each other out. In any case, people say this all the time at the end of the movie year these days but I have never really felt it as strong as I did in ‘99: I can’t possibly pick just one movie as the best of ‘99… I can barely pick just 20. I’m going to list my current ranking of that year and stop only when a movie isn’t brilliant. Tarzan, Magnolia, The Iron Giant, The End of the Affair, Felicia’s Journey, Girl Interrupted, The Girl on the Bridge, Bringing Out the Dead, The Ninth Gate, Fight Club, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, The Thomas Crown Affair, Man on the Moon, Annie, Toy Story 2, The Sixth Sense, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Titus, Dogma, The Matrix, All About My Mother, The Virgin Suicides, Bowfinger, The Insider, The Green Mile. There’s still more after that which seem oddly low in my ranking right now, like American Beauty and Eyes Wide Shut, and movies that were just plain special at the time like The Blair Witch Project and Star Wars: Episode 1 (wanna know how much I spent on the merchandise of that movie? well I don’t wanna remember!) It was a huge year for movies.
Okay, I lied there, because though I can’t honestly pick one of those movies as the definite best of 1999 now, I certainly knew which it was at the time. Tarzan woke something in me for which I’m forever thankful. I’ve kept mentioning that My Girl moment in these entries and it seems to be a perfect original reference point for my emotional experiences. And I don’t know if others are the same, but when it comes to things moving me - really moving me - each time it happens, there’s a fear comes with it that it might never happen again… which makes each time it happens almost all the more special. I think when I saw Tarzan for the first time, having been in this aimless, meandering college/shelf-filling quagmire for almost a year, I was at a particular kind of low and really thought perhaps I’d finally “grown up” or something and wouldn’t be excited about anything again. And that’s when those opening drums of Tarzan came in, that astonishing opening sequence, and then the whole movie that continues to amaze me to this day. The end credits rolled, and I went back to see it again every single day for the following week, dragging everybody I knew who I could to see it with me, totalling in the end 9 visits to the cinema, lol.
Okay I feel like I should post this today, there being just 7 days left till the dreaded day. I can’t find many pics for this year… I guess I was glued to the computer too much lol. I guess when I put it all into words, it comes down to not so many things to mention - yet all those things were just so huge for me, I can’t begin to find the words. Every year that followed would be better in little ways and different departments… but 1999 was an all-round amazement of a year.
