JCC Nostalgia 2000

Putting "2000" behind something used to reflect being future-oriented, but now it's something else entirely. 2000 is twenty years ago today; another world.

The bombing of the USS Cole happened twenty years ago. Al Qaeda was just getting ready. France won the UEFA Euro 2000, here in the Netherlands. Pete Sampras and Venus Williams won Wimbledon, the Olympics were held in Sydney, Australia. People in the US were getting ready to vote either Bush or Gore. Aaliyah was alive and on the radio. The internet was in its primal phase. Message boards were a thing.

I registered 20 years ago. Back then, every Friday a new image about the production of Episode II would be posted on the Star Wars website, under the "George Lucas Select" banner. The image in my avatar was what triggered me to finally sign up and say my bit, for whatever reason.

I must have signed up at work.

I worked at McAfee at the time as their box art and interface designer. It was before the internet bubble burst, and times were good. For their premium product, they flew me over to San Francisco and drove me around like this:



I designed this:



Packaging with a gold foil. There were not many printing companies in Europe that could do that, so once again they flew me out somewhere - this time it was Ballsbridge, a fancy neighbourhood in Dublin, Ireland. They propped me up in a hotel in Temple Bar district, so I was guaranteed a great night out. The day after I arrived I went to the printing company with a hangover, but that didn't matter, because all the guys at the printing company had hangovers as well.

It was a beautiful sunny day. We were on the first floor of the building, the doors to the balcony were open, there were about four or five people working there on various printing machines. As I was being shown the printing procedures, voices came from outside - from the garden next door. Vince, the print operator, told me that was The Corrs.

Does anybody remember The Corrs? A band with three girls, they had had a hit with 'Listen To The Radio' a year previously. These three girls had a house in Ballsbridge next to my printer.

"The weather's great", we heard one Corr say.
"Yes", said another Corr, "Are you going to take your top off as well?"

And I swear: all those guys rushed to the balcony. I was alone with the print machines.

I waited a bit, and eventually they came back, shoulders drooped.
Vince said: "Aah, they were only talking about their cars".

So that's my 2000 story. What's yours? Best 2000 story gets colours for a month. Gold.

 

The year 2000 was, for me, a very transitional time, though I believe the idea of “transitional times” itself is a false framing of sorts. Still, the year 2000 saw a collision of several big changes in my life.

In July, I graduated from High School & also turned eighteen. In September, I entered college & that was certainly a life defining experience. I was already into music and I liked to read, but college really unlocked the world of creative arts for me & taught me how to write. Meanwhile thousands of miles across the globe, a guy I’d never met signed up for a Star Wars message board, but I didn’t know that then & I wouldn’t meet him until years later. It was two months later when I joined, November of 2000, right around the time I cast my vote for George W. Bush in the Presidential election. So at least me signing up here wasn’t the WORST decision I made that month.

I was writing a fanfiction about Wedge Antilles & I had just read The Truce at Bakura & I had a nerdy question about it, so I registered here so I could post a thread about it in Literature. Our lives are often changed for mundane reasons; sometimes they’re changed for stupid reasons. How different would the last 20 years of my life have been if I hadn’t been briefly obsessed with Wedge Antilles & The Truce at Bakura? I swear. The stupidest **** in the world. And I’m still here. Glad to be.

But the world has changed. I remember the room I was sitting in when I registered here. I think I remember the exact computer. That room got remodeled while I was still attending college. That computer got updated. Now the whole building is gone. And they tell me Truce at Bakura is something called a Legend now. Hell, aren’t we all?

 

Graduated art school with a degree in illustration and design in 2000, and got a job as a newspaper designer a month later. (A job I had for 9 years before moving into UX Design) Lived at home with my parents for the summer, saved up every penny earned (to later spend on a 3 week vacation in Italy the year after 911), moved in with friends by fall, and generally enjoyed post-college life. I didn't pay any real attention to politics and didn't vote that fall in the Presidential election, and regretted it immediately. Lesson learned.

This was pre-cell phone, pre-social media, pre-Boards of the Force days.

Simpler times indeed.

 

I was in IT (mainframe database administrator) in 1999, so I was on-call for Y2K issues on the first day of 2000. Luckily I had a remote connection to work to handle any problems.

 

I almost had my first kiss in 2000. But I didn’t.

 

I discovered TFN in 2002 around the time AOTC was released here in the UK. I think I lurked for a bit before actually signing up.

 

Signed up in 2002. Took me forever. This place was intimidating lol.

 

The year 2000 was nothing as I was just 1. A simpler time when I could not remember anything or speak.

 

In 2000 I would’ve been a freshman in high school, 14 years old, so really I remember very little from that year. I grew up north of Syracuse in upstate New York, a pretty unremarkable area.

I did play soccer, so most of my memories are from that. I’m not a good athlete by any means, but I had a few goals and some assists that year, including a game winner in overtime. One match was a soaker, just down poured the whole time, the field was in poor condition so it basically turned into a pond, the ball was floating around so much so that when you went to kick it your foot would just go completely under the ball, we won like 10 to 1 that game, I think I had an assist.

I played basketball as well, but I was very terrible at that

Other than that I didn’t really like high school that much so I don’t spend much time thinking about it, lol

 

In 2000 I was a freelance musician with a music diary service called Morgensterns. They'd ring me up and say such and such an orchestra needs a piano/celeste player for Saturday and then I'd have to train it to wherever to dep.

Sometime in the summer I got called up to do an unusual gig just over the water in France. I knew it was a synth gig, which was unusual, but it wasn't the rock event I was expecting. Turned out to be a pre-bangface type of thing with people chucking inflatables around to rave music. All they wanted was somebody to mime on the keyboards as everything was pre-recorded, except an ironic end of evening ballade which they wanted me to play for real. It was all four square and simple. I had no idea why they'd bothered to hire me.

Before I went on, the main guy who had organised it asked me to put a big silver wig on and a tracksuit and to come onstage when I heard a starting pistol. I'd done plenty of charity gigs where I'd had to wear daft things so didn't question it At that point I had no idea what I looked like as there were no mirrors in the room I was in. Anyway, Bang! I, and a couple of others from the other side of the stage rushed on and I realised we all were wearing the same thing. A feeling of horror began to envelope me but I couldn't understand why. The drum n bass started up and one of the other guys grabbed the mic and started chanting:

Now then, now then, now then, now
Now then, now then, now then, now
Now then, now then, now then, now
Howzabout howzabout howzabout that then

In that moment I realised we were all in Jimmy Saville outfits. This will mean nothing to our american cousins, but any British person of a certain vintage is going to know who I'm talking about. This was in the years when there were rumours of his activities but still long before he was outed as Britains most notorious paedophile. But still...
So I stood onstage, inflatable banana in one hand, a yamaha synth under the other, sweating like a pig for an hour plus as that bloody tinnitus inducing anthem came back time and again. Somebody was snapping away as this all took place, sometimes right up in my face, so presumably there are still photos out there.

At the end, I couldn't find my jacket or jeans but, as always, had kept my cash and passport with me in a discrete bumbag. The weather was awful and I ended up soaking wet on a Sunday morning in a Jimmy Saville tracksuit waiting for a ferry. Good times.

 

The year 2000 was the first year I saw Hanson in concert. They announced the tour and I bought tickets in two cities. Greensboro, NC and Philadelphia, PA. I had recently graduated college (like just months before I graduated on April 30, 2000) and I was sharing an inexpensive house with a roommate. I had never been to a concert I enjoyed, but I'd been listening to Hanson for 3+ years so I knew there was something special about them. The night I got home from concert #1 I bought tickets to 2 more shows. Cincinnati OH and Eerie PA. I drove to all these shows from Harrisonburg VA. I honestly don't think I even bothered to look up how long the drives were. Haven't learned much 3 years ago I drove from Fairfax VA to Nashville for Hanson and I really didn't know that was a 12 hour drive until I got in the car.

Apparently I also signed up for this site in 2000 under the name @camisa I would have kept the name, but since the email is/was so long extinct I didn't think the name would work. I still have that username on a site or two I've been an active part of since that time period. My mom's mother had the maiden name Camisa, that is why I used to use it all the time.

 

What we need is a Darth Punk 2000 playlist with a lot of Daft Punk in it.

 

2000 here was the golden age of prequel bashing. What I remember most about the prequels were that they were worth bashing (and apparently SuperWatto and I fought about the prequels online) unlike the sequels, which just don't justify the effort. Outside the JCC, it was the midpoint between the birth of my first son and the birth of my second son. My oldest was four and got to spend the first 8 years of his life as an only child. He did not benefit from the benign neglect that has shaped my younger son. The oldest was always in the spotlight, the center of attention, the prodigal son, and we were constantly killing the fatted calf on his behalf. Poor kid. But he survived that pressure cooker and became a fantastic adult despite all that. It doesn't seem like 20 years. In the meantime SuperWatto also became a two-time parent, an entrepreneur, an artist, a musician, and a fixture of our JC community. You've packed 40 years of achievement into half the time. Bastard.

 

I was such a rebel.

 

Getting in an early prediction that nobody tops @Blobofat .

In the memory contest, anyway.

 

Don't recall much of 2000 to be honest. Probably for good reasons to be honest.

Post-Uni employment limbo of 'no job without experience but you only get experience with a job', while the main graduate firms used A-Level points as a quick filter.

In contrast, I have far better reason to remember 2001 - met my wife.

 

2000 was high school, and so for me the most memorable thing was that it overlapped with foot surgery that put me in a wheelchair for a month on a high school campus that was not designed or prepared for someone in a wheelchair. They were also not terribly thrilled about me being there in a wheelchair as another student had recently fallen down a hill in his wheelchair, breaking numerous bones. So they had some concerns, as the campus was a lot of hills, stairs, and for a couple weeks, some fallen trees blocking pathways as well.

I don't think much of this falls as being too unique to being in a wheelchair, but it certainly made for a series of stories that were generally funny at the time for everyone that wasn't me, like running over gum in the wheelchair and ending up with the gum equivalent of a Spirograph on one wheel, or having people take the wheelchair when I wasn't paying attention and going joyriding in it during one of my classes. The most positive was when I got stuck between classes because I tried to cut a corner and shouldn't have done so. With hundreds of other students walking around me on either side, someone (I never saw who) noticed that I was stuck and couldn't get myself free and so started pushing me from the base of the hill I was at up to the top of the hill before melting back into the crowd without saying anything. I'll stress that general etiquette is to always ask if someone needs help before pushing them, but I think in this case it was pretty clear there was a problem I couldn't fix. It was a nice offset to the sorts of bullying that were made available by the wheelchair, like people's attempts to try to roll me into the girls' locker room against my will (a test of how quickly I could stop it or steer away after they let go) or people stealing my crutches off the wheelchair and breaking them, or several people that discovered that if they grabbed stuff off my backpack and wouldn't give it back, they would end up with very bruised ankles as I tried to reclaim things.

The most memorable, though, and what said a whole lot about my sort of luck, was the time the wheel fell off. I have known several people that have spent a lot more time in wheelchairs than I do, and to my knowledge, none of them have a "that time the wheel fell off" story (though I think one of them does have a "that time his leg fell off" story, so I still don't win). Public high schools don't, or at least didn't at the time, really have a good idea of what to do with someone in a wheelchair, particularly if it was temporary, as Physical Education was a required class, and so for one quarter I was just assigned as some sort of vague helper that didn't actually do much. I'd show up to class same as everyone else, where the class met on one of the basketball courts, and then the class would go change, and then do whatever the activity for the day was. The track, however, was down a moderately steep dirt ramp to the football field, and that was considered generally a bad idea for me to mess with. So one day I showed up, and because they were going to be doing laps, I was just supposed to stay put and wait for them to come back. It was after the class had left and I was sitting there in the middle of a bunch of basketball courts when I felt the chair start to wobble a bit, even though I wasn't moving. As chairs aren't supposed to do that, I hopped out of the chair and landed on my good leg as one of the smaller stabilizing wheels fell off the wheelchair and the chair fell over leaving me balanced on one foot, unable to get to my crutches and looking at this tipped over wheelchair hoping for help. Eventually someone came by and helped me so that I could get to a bench and sit down, and the custodial staff were able to jury rig something together to replace the bolt on the wheelchair, and so I spent the rest of my time in the wheelchair without anything else quite as annoying as losing a wheel off a wheelchair.

I was eventually cleared for switching to crutches for another month before I returned to mostly-regular walking, and as much of a fan as I am of sitting, I've been glad that barring a minor injury I did to myself during a drive-by shooting some years later, I've been able to keep myself clear of needing a wheelchair in the 20 years since then.