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A decade in review - 2000
Dec. 20th, 2009 06:34 pmThose of you who have been reading this journal for a while know that I like to pause in late December/early January and write a year-end recap. The last two years I even went so far as to do an entry breaking down the year that had just passed by summarizing the happenings of each individual month.
This year I intend to repeat that process, but since we're about to say farewell to the first decade of the millennium (also my first full decade as a self-supporting adult), I want to do a little something extra and look back on the highs and lows of each year from 2000-2008 as well.
I'm gonna be doing this in installments -- one entry a day for each individual year until I've covered all of them. Let's get this started with a list of all the things I recall about the year 2000, shall we? I don't know if there will be much, because I'm feeling too lazy to refer back to my hand-written journals from that period, and I can't use my blog as a reference because I didn't start keeping my first one until 2001. Oh well, I'll do the best that I can.
I remember being at the Forest View house with Mike when the year 2000 began. We stayed in that night, because even though we weren't all that concerned about Y2K, we knew that lots of other people would be, and we didn't want to deal with their crazy paranoid nonsense. We listened to all the fireworks going off when it became apparent that the world had not ground to a screeching halt.
I was 21 years old.
I was working as a circulation assistant at the Columbia College Library at the time. In fact, when 2000 began I was only a few months into the position, which I had been hired for in September of '99. It was the first full-time, salaried, benefits-carrying job I ever had. And since I'd only been there a few months, I was still at a point where I thought it was the absolute greatest job in the entire world.
In addition to working, I was also still an undergraduate student, taking classes part-time and getting all of my tuition covered thanks to my library job. In the spring semester of 2000 I was enrolled in an advanced fiction workshop, where I first met my friends Em and Jeff, and a tutor training class that prepared me to lead one-on-one sessions with students in fiction workshops.
My tutoring sessions served as another source of income. I had three students that I met with weekly during my first semester, a time commitment that just about amounted to a second part-time job on top of the full-time one. Mostly I liked it but I had one student who liked to make my life challenging. I continued to work with him during the semester that followed, mainly because I figured out how to handle him well and I thought I should continue my work rather than foist him off onto someone else.
At the end of the aforementioned spring semester, Write Club formed. We published a collection of all of our work called Exit Wound. The core group consisted of me, Mike, Em, Jeff, a girl named Christine, and a guy named Keith.
My WWF addiction was in full bloom. The whole McMahon-Helmsley storyline was the main thing at this time, and we watched Raw and Smackdown every week to watch that unfold. I'm pretty sure we ordered every PPV that aired that year, and would invite my friend Dawn and her brother Jack over to enjoy them with us. My favorite, and really the only one I remember specifically, is Judgement Day 2000, when Undertaker made his awesome return.
My friend Sara, who I had known since 3rd grade, died just a few short weeks before her 22nd birthday, in late May of 2000. That was the first time I was truly impacted by the loss of someone my own age.
I took a summer school class that year, in order to not have to delay my graduation too much after dropping to a part-time course schedule. It was an advanced fiction workshop, and the accelerated pace meant I didn't finish feeling as if I'd written anything decent.
I had started submitting my writing to publications, and had a story accepted by Coolgrrrls.com. I didn't know it at the time, but my act of publishing a piece of fiction with them would lead to many other opportunities to contribute to that site.
I was working on a novel that I have since aborted. It centered around the relationship between two sisters, one who was obsessed with He-Man, the other who was wild and really slutty. It wasn't autobiographical in the slightest, but anyone who knew anything about my life could see that the characters were very clearly inspired by people I knew in real life. Even though it never went anywhere, I see now that it helped me come to terms with certain things that I was having a hard time accepting.
That fall semester, I enrolled in my final advanced fiction workshop, and again I got to share the semi-circle with Em. I also enrolled in a senior seminar class, which stands as one of my favorite undergrad courses because it was taught by Joe Meno and he made us all excited to be there.
As part of the senior seminar course, I organized a community service project which involved me and two other girls visiting a battered women's shelter around the holiday season and bringing a bunch of toys and stuffed animals that we collected as well as some treats.
Toward the middle (or maybe the end of the year) the library job stopped being as fun as it once was, thanks to some unnecessary drama that was caused by a crazy co-worker.
I think by the end of the year I had discovered Bust Magazine and was well on my way to becoming an active member of The Lounge, which was the message board they maintained on their website. That's where I met a lot of amazing ladies, a few of whom I am still in touch with today.
I'd have to look this up to confirm, but I think this was the year I went to my very first live WWE events. If that's correct, the first show we saw was a Smackdown taping at the Allstate Arena. We even made a bit of a trip out of it and stayed at a hotel in Rosemont so we wouldn't have far to go at the end of the show. And though it wasn't intentional, doing so allowed us close glimpses of a few WWE superstars who were also registered guests there, including X-Pac, Test, and the Road Dogg. ETA: I looked up WWE shows at the Allstate in 2000 and found info on the show in question. It took place on January 13, 2000. I think we also went to a Raw that year, leading into Wrestlemania 2000, but I'll have to do a little digging to confirm that.
Alright, I think that's all I've got. Gotta get ready to watch TNA: Final Resolution!
This year I intend to repeat that process, but since we're about to say farewell to the first decade of the millennium (also my first full decade as a self-supporting adult), I want to do a little something extra and look back on the highs and lows of each year from 2000-2008 as well.
I'm gonna be doing this in installments -- one entry a day for each individual year until I've covered all of them. Let's get this started with a list of all the things I recall about the year 2000, shall we? I don't know if there will be much, because I'm feeling too lazy to refer back to my hand-written journals from that period, and I can't use my blog as a reference because I didn't start keeping my first one until 2001. Oh well, I'll do the best that I can.
I remember being at the Forest View house with Mike when the year 2000 began. We stayed in that night, because even though we weren't all that concerned about Y2K, we knew that lots of other people would be, and we didn't want to deal with their crazy paranoid nonsense. We listened to all the fireworks going off when it became apparent that the world had not ground to a screeching halt.
I was 21 years old.
I was working as a circulation assistant at the Columbia College Library at the time. In fact, when 2000 began I was only a few months into the position, which I had been hired for in September of '99. It was the first full-time, salaried, benefits-carrying job I ever had. And since I'd only been there a few months, I was still at a point where I thought it was the absolute greatest job in the entire world.
In addition to working, I was also still an undergraduate student, taking classes part-time and getting all of my tuition covered thanks to my library job. In the spring semester of 2000 I was enrolled in an advanced fiction workshop, where I first met my friends Em and Jeff, and a tutor training class that prepared me to lead one-on-one sessions with students in fiction workshops.
My tutoring sessions served as another source of income. I had three students that I met with weekly during my first semester, a time commitment that just about amounted to a second part-time job on top of the full-time one. Mostly I liked it but I had one student who liked to make my life challenging. I continued to work with him during the semester that followed, mainly because I figured out how to handle him well and I thought I should continue my work rather than foist him off onto someone else.
At the end of the aforementioned spring semester, Write Club formed. We published a collection of all of our work called Exit Wound. The core group consisted of me, Mike, Em, Jeff, a girl named Christine, and a guy named Keith.
My WWF addiction was in full bloom. The whole McMahon-Helmsley storyline was the main thing at this time, and we watched Raw and Smackdown every week to watch that unfold. I'm pretty sure we ordered every PPV that aired that year, and would invite my friend Dawn and her brother Jack over to enjoy them with us. My favorite, and really the only one I remember specifically, is Judgement Day 2000, when Undertaker made his awesome return.
My friend Sara, who I had known since 3rd grade, died just a few short weeks before her 22nd birthday, in late May of 2000. That was the first time I was truly impacted by the loss of someone my own age.
I took a summer school class that year, in order to not have to delay my graduation too much after dropping to a part-time course schedule. It was an advanced fiction workshop, and the accelerated pace meant I didn't finish feeling as if I'd written anything decent.
I had started submitting my writing to publications, and had a story accepted by Coolgrrrls.com. I didn't know it at the time, but my act of publishing a piece of fiction with them would lead to many other opportunities to contribute to that site.
I was working on a novel that I have since aborted. It centered around the relationship between two sisters, one who was obsessed with He-Man, the other who was wild and really slutty. It wasn't autobiographical in the slightest, but anyone who knew anything about my life could see that the characters were very clearly inspired by people I knew in real life. Even though it never went anywhere, I see now that it helped me come to terms with certain things that I was having a hard time accepting.
That fall semester, I enrolled in my final advanced fiction workshop, and again I got to share the semi-circle with Em. I also enrolled in a senior seminar class, which stands as one of my favorite undergrad courses because it was taught by Joe Meno and he made us all excited to be there.
As part of the senior seminar course, I organized a community service project which involved me and two other girls visiting a battered women's shelter around the holiday season and bringing a bunch of toys and stuffed animals that we collected as well as some treats.
Toward the middle (or maybe the end of the year) the library job stopped being as fun as it once was, thanks to some unnecessary drama that was caused by a crazy co-worker.
I think by the end of the year I had discovered Bust Magazine and was well on my way to becoming an active member of The Lounge, which was the message board they maintained on their website. That's where I met a lot of amazing ladies, a few of whom I am still in touch with today.
I'd have to look this up to confirm, but I think this was the year I went to my very first live WWE events. If that's correct, the first show we saw was a Smackdown taping at the Allstate Arena. We even made a bit of a trip out of it and stayed at a hotel in Rosemont so we wouldn't have far to go at the end of the show. And though it wasn't intentional, doing so allowed us close glimpses of a few WWE superstars who were also registered guests there, including X-Pac, Test, and the Road Dogg. ETA: I looked up WWE shows at the Allstate in 2000 and found info on the show in question. It took place on January 13, 2000. I think we also went to a Raw that year, leading into Wrestlemania 2000, but I'll have to do a little digging to confirm that.
Alright, I think that's all I've got. Gotta get ready to watch TNA: Final Resolution!
