If I'm 16 again, then, since I'm an October birthday it's either November or December of 2003 or it's sometime before October in 2004. Let's pretend it's this very day, so it's December of 2003. That year I'dve been wicked obsessed with the brand new Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire, KOTOR, Warcraft 3 came out then, I'dve still been playing Dark Age of Camelot pretty religiously. Heck, .hack//infection came out that year, too. Dark Cloud 2
(can you tell I'm looking at the wiki and going "oh my god wow that came out that year holy smokes")
MoO3! God I played MoO3 for what must've been the multiple entire weekends. Zone of the Enders 2. Oh lordy, MvC2 came out in 2003.
I grew up in a small town in Iowa, but super close the border with Nebraska, and right on the border on the Nebraska side is Omaha! And while Omaha may not rate as a big city to some of y'all city dwellers, to an Iowa girl like me Omaha was like an oasis. We spent every waking second we could over there, and especially at places like this arcade called Family Fun Center. Now 2003 wasn't exactly the time when arcades were totally dead, but I think people were kinda seeing the writing on the wall. Most malls still had arcades, to be sure, but Family Fun Center-style mega-arcades were getting rarer and rarer. It had a ticket section, it had a floor of pool, it had rhythm games where, especially on Friday and Saturday nights it was THE PLACE to be seen if you were nerdy or emo or "alternative" in the Omaha metro area. The number of times the Cool Kids Who Were Good At DDR would compliment my VMU-Used-As-A-Keychain always made me swoon. I remember this one girl who went to an all-girls private high school in Omaha who had actually gone to Japan basically holding court, spinning yarns about things there in the arcade.
Anywho, Family Fun Center had tons of fighting games and tons of MvC2.
Final Fantasy X-2 came out that November, too. What a monumentally formative game for me. Gosh. Sitting in the consuite at Anime Iowa 2004 talking about Final Fantasy X-2...I can still taste the slightly-off-syrup-to-soda-mixture from the amateur-changed soda bags in the consuite.
For those of you who have never been to a convention in the pre-modern era, there used to be these things called con suites. Basically it was a free hangout area with free snacks and soda--basically a common room gathering point hangout spot that was always open. For a lot of folks--like us teenagers for sure--the consuite was sorta kinda the only time we ingested anything that wasn't booze. Sure, those things were just like, popcorn, Doritos, Pocky and whatever Asian Grocery Store-bought snack cakes a con staffer deigned to buy, but hey, what more does a teenaged Otaku need? We used to call ourselves Otaku; it's the word the word "weeb" replaced. I actually don't know if the younger set use the word "weeb" on themselves with the same degree of like, self-aware self-flaggelation-slash-pride that we used "Otaku", but.
As you might be able to tell I'm not actually 16 and in my bedroom typing, but I feel that same kind of energy. In December of 2003 I would have been regularly updating my Livejournal in the same way I'm typing now--using the nice gentle rhythm of fingers on the keys as a way to sort of create a sound that brought me a little bit of peace. I was a pretty sad and lonely kid. I think I was the sort of sad and lonely that perhaps a lot of folks who use this website may be able to identify with: sad and lonely in a sea of having a standard High School Soulmate Kind Of Relationship That Posterity Would Know Was Very Toxic; sand and lonely in a sea of having a close like three best friends who you'd stay up all night with at iHop talking on and on about anything and everything fueled by unlimited refills of coffee and hoping that since you know your movie theater job direct deposit goes through Fridays at midnight that you can order another order of fries because you could float it.
Michael Chabon wrote in 'Wonder Boys' about something a character in there terms the Midnight Disease:
“The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.”
I think I've always sort of felt the kind of loneliness that that feeling evokes. Even now, I sit here in a hotel room all the way across the country from my home, my wife in the other queen bed because she has to sleep mostly upright because she's recovering from a major surgery. And I feel lonely. I feel lonely even when I'm snuggled up to her in our own bed. Even when I feel safe and deeply, powerfully loved and protected in my wife's arms, I feel a little lonely.
And I wonder if it's because the 16 year old me, sitting not miles away but years in the past, is lonely. I think a lot about how much of our young selves echo forth into who we are as adults--our tastes echo forth, our temperaments, our memories and I think our pains do too.
Before I was a youth in Iowa I was a kid in North Dakota, and the summertime there was full of thunderstorms and tornadoes. The joke for anyone raised in tornado alley is, "the whole summer is spent in a tornado watch". For those of y'all on the coasts who don't know this kind of weather, a tornado watch is when "conditions are favorable" for tornadoes, but don't really necessarily mean one is gonna happen. A tornado warning means, well, go to your basements.
As a kid, anytime there was a tornado watch, I would grab my little stuffed dinosaur friend Diny, a flashlight, a cup of water, a weather radio and a book and go to the basement and hide out underneath a table down there, having covered the table with a blanket.
The first couple times I think my parents like, cared a bit, but eventually folks just kinda think, "eh I dunno what she's up to." Because, y'know, tornado watches were incredibly common.
I still think about how sometimes I feel like I'm just under there, under that table, with my dinosaur stuffy, wondering where everyone else is. I think 16 year old me liked to hear the sound of the typing and liked posting on Livejournal and liked logging into IRC just to chat to another human being because maybe she was under that table too. I feel like I'm under that table right now.
The nice thing though is that I did indeed marry a woman who is capable of hugging that kiddo under there, but I hate how often I need her to, and I feel guilty whenever I need her to but she's, y'know, laid up going to bed early because she had a major surgery.
So I tip tap on this keyboard like I'm 16 again.
