the last time the miniumum wage went up...

[fflo]

... i was working for the symphony
... my mother was still alive
... i hadn't even met the h-bomb
... i had met the people associated with only 26 of the 94 e-mail addresses currently in my e-mail address book
... chester was a mere 8 years old
... it was 2 years before jeffrey would even be conceived

Wanna play? What else was true in August of 1996, for you personally and/or in the broader world?

It's more fun than talking/thinking about the latest war plans/escalation.

Comments

[disclaimerwill.livejournal.com]

...I'd never had a girlfriend (or so much as a date)
...The Simpsons was still funny
...I was about to enter 11th grade
...the only musical instruments I sort-of knew how to play were my dad's drum set and my display-model-at-Target Casio keyboard
...I had neither a driver's license nor the inclination to get one

[fflo.livejournal.com]

good ones! (esp. the simpsons line---zing.) hard to believe about the state of your exp w/musical inst.s.

[disclaimerwill.livejournal.com]

Well, I still only sort-of know how to play anything; I've just added other noisemakers to the repertoire. :)

[fflo.livejournal.com]

:]

[infinitepresent.livejournal.com]

Hooray for Clinton, even though $5.15/hr wasn't near the poverty line, even considering recent inflation. $7.25, though still not enough to afford life in the city, is a step in the right direction.

... I was 9 years old, having just finished the 3rd grade.

... My brother was still living with my father.

... I was just realizing that I liked to fool around with other boys.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

:)

is there an expression that's the equivalent of "baby dyke"?

[vjsmom.livejournal.com]

--I'd been unemployed for a mere 8 months, and I was still recovering from the years of working for H.

-I'd been married for 9 years, and I'd given almost no thought to having a kid. Ever.

--The lovely Vinnikins was almost 4 years old.

--As fflo pointed out, Jeffrey did not even exist. Wow, it's hard to remember what my life was like before there was a Jeffrey.

[aabassplayer.livejournal.com]

Hmm...August 96 I was just starting my first truely minimum wage job at Bradley University pulling printouts off of line printers and handing them out/sorting them into bins, only 4 months later to quit that for quite a modest income as a computer consultant at the flop of a company lovingly referred to as CyberDonut.

Just starting my first few days in college, only to start dropping out/sluffing off classes 4-6 months later which doomed me to 11 years (come Jan 25th this year) of working in IT hell.

I was still a virgin, and couldn't have imagined having more than 3 or 4 partners in my lifetime. *laugh* If only I could tell Drew-then what Drew-now knows.

I'd never lived alone or on my own.

I'd never done an illegal drug.

(The next year, all that changed.)

[fflo.livejournal.com]

If only I could tell Drew-then what Drew-now knows.

That thought, of the elder self looking back, is maybe the sweetest bittersweet smile of the wisdom of experience.

[aabassplayer.livejournal.com]

Yeah...totally....at least I can reach within myself and give that past self a big old hug and a nod and a wink :-)

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I was in college, and still living with my parents. My sexual experiences had not been particularly enjoyable. My job paid me less than a third, per hour, of what my current job pays me; it was pretty close to the California minimum wage at the time, and less than the new federal minimum wage.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

...i was about to finish college
...i went to greece on vacation
...i had a boyfriend of three years
...i was living with my parents
...i was starting to think about how i would get myself to the states, where i had never gone before
...i was working for an old lech at the serbian academy of arts and sciences
...i was working other odd jobs to make money, including interpreting at an international hunters' conference on rabies

[fflo.livejournal.com]

gee, i didn't know about the lech. or the rabies. tales to tell!

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

yes, many an adventure did i have. i forgot to mention that

...the country i lived in was called "the federal republic of yugoslavia." the name and the country have changed twice since.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

with the local czech's apparent dislike of 'czech republic' and lack of other current appellation in english, i seem often lately to confront the weird calling of certain governmentally-(more-or-less-)unified territory by the latest name agreed upon. there's something good about having countries change names often-ish. reminding us that they're constructs. but the way some of them change and some of them don't, like the way some of them go off or on the u.s. govt's 'evil' list, has an element of the creepy.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

that's very true. e and e's favorite route to provocation is to tell a bunch of amrikins that "when this country falls apart, it will be easy to explain it by the long-standing history of strife." the conversation halts at the first part, of course. :)

[fflo.livejournal.com]

i remember seeing at least one e do that to somebody at your old apartment... was it the dr husband of that kelly? somebody like that. somebody esp amusing to see squirm.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

that might be his favorite kind of victim, the 'normal' american. that one also said he didn't want to live abroad because he couldn't see foreign movies there.

[sprig5.livejournal.com]

Let's see....
I was 29 years old.

I worked at Howard University.

I lived in Takoma Park, MD.

You and I were briefly involved with each other, shall we say, after not being and being so (in spring of '96 and late summer/fall/winter of 2005, respectively). I came by your house on my way from Maryland to Wisconsin for a summer trip--wasn't feeling that great physically but headed out on the road anyway (trip went fine.) During that trip, I saw my beloved uncle D, who died in October 1999 (no knowledge then that a tumor was growing in him, or had it not started yet?), and plenty of other people.

Among several other stops, I stopped at the Elkhart, IN, Goodwill, because it was so damn hot outside and I think my A/C was not working well. I ended up buying two old bathroom drinking glasses from motels in Kentucky. I've never seen motel drinking glasses since then. I'd like to keep an eye out for genuine old cool ones and buy them if I see them.

Was that when I went to the Toledo Art Museum as well and bought you a Mudhens magnet? Don't remember if it was the same trip. TAM really has a great glass collection, because the city historically has been a place where lots of glassblowing is done. That's the only time I've gone to Toledo.

Was that the trip where, when I first arrived at the aunt's lake house in Delafield, WI, I saw my Uncle D sitting outside. He had this way of teasing people and making everyone laugh--he was very kind though. He looked at an empty fast food bag I was about to throw away, and said, "Oh, Thanks--for me?" "No," I said, a little taken aback, still groggy from the road, "I'm just cleaning out my car." And he just looked at me and said, exaggeratedly, to the point that it still makes me laugh to this day to think of it, "SSShit!"

I think a bunch of my relatives and I went on a cheesy boat tour of the Wisconsin Dells during that trip as well. All the rock formations were given names and stories, and the hostess of the boat sang songs as well.

I think I still owned these really cool old coulats (sp?) that were multicolored--I had bought them at Pier One Imports about 6 years prior, and wore them until they were majorly taped up with those patches you can tape on (and the parts with no tape finally started to fall apart). I specifically remember wearing those coulats when my uncle said that curse word....so maybe that was a few years before? Yeah, maybe that was when I lived in Bloomington IN, and i went up to Wisconsin for a visit, and then my car caught on fire as I was on the highway heading back toward Indiana. I think one or more of the belts died. Anyway. that car was a Chevy Celebrity. It also had a door that I had to keep closed with a strap.)

I had no pets.

I was driving a Chevy Malibu from the 1980s that my grandmother had owned. Since she had bought it in Wisconsin (Oshkosh was her largest nearby city--but bu now she was in a nursing home in Chicago), it had a plug so that you could plug in the engine block when it got really cold outside, but I never had to do that. She had also left a St. Christopher medal in the glovebox, which I kept there.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Oh, S. What a great response. You put my ellipsissy blurbs to shame.

Surely there is a picture of you somewhere in that old favorite pair of froo-froo britches?

Somehow your comment here reminded me that I was studying ASL back then. Or had been, at least.

[sprig5.livejournal.com]

hmmm. lemme look. funny. at first i thought you said "instead of that old favorite pair of froo-froo bitches" (i.e., my dog icons-- but only one is a gal)