I entered the world in January 2008, so it was a pretty big year for me. Hard to believe it’s been 18 years already.
Working at radio shack and serving at a kinda nice Italian restaurant. Also somehow found a way to go to community college full time. I remember taking 30 minute naps almost on command.
Mostly, getting catfished on WoW
I was in college doing art during the week and spent most weekends doing really fun drugs at psytrance squat raves.
Ugh there were so many good parties that year, one was in an abandoned fire station in the city and there were police out front because it had been going for days at this point, so we followed a punk down a side street who told us he ‘knew a way’ and he led us into one of those tiny London parks, where we climbed a tree onto a fire escape and then literally traversed roof tops following the music to a partially dismantled fire escape in the back courtyard of the fire station -and then some guy with a mohawk saw us from the crowd down there brought us out a freaking ladder so we climb down inti the rave. Oh and I did all that wearing a pair of these, lmao.
Im a current underground raver across the and thats a sick af experience. sadly we dont have crazy multi day raves where i am but thats because they’d get popped if we threw in a bando past daylight
I don’t think parties like that can still happen here tbh, the government really cracked down on squatters over the last 15 years, night clubs too, so many nightclubs here have lost their licences and closed over noise complaints.
Nonooonoonoonoono. People born in 2008 are NOT 18 years old! This was just a couple of years ago!
I was 18 in 2008 so this feels really weird because back then it felt like the year I was born was ages ago (it was in a different millennia though).
You think that’s bad, I got married in 2008.
Then again, I’ve done a lot in that time, 3 kids into it, including 2 teenagers…
I was 21 in 2008. The cat in my profile pic, Oscar, was born in April that year, and I adopted her in June. She died of complications from kidney disease last July, at the age of 17. Time moves too fast.
I was in highschool and I begun to date my ex-girlfriend this year (she’s now my wife).
In 2008, Iron Man had just come out and blown everyone’s minds. iPhones were still quite new, so was Facebook. Obama got elected and everyone was excited by the first black president, even here in Australia.
I was in Guangzhou, China.
I vaguely remember the hype around Bejing Olympics, but I never cared about sports so… eh… don’t remember much of the actual thing, only the hype around it.
I was… um… 6 years old?
In 1st grade, public schools didn’t allow me and my brother because we did noy not have a Guangzhou Hukou so we went to some privately-run school that my parents had to pay out of pocket, which according to mom, it was worse than public schools.
We lived in some apartment in a… kinda… “slum” part of the city.
Parents was either working all the time or was looking for work all the time. Didn’t get to see them too often.
Maternal grandmother was at home to watch us.
No internet, no sure if because of our neighborhood not having it or because of money issues…
But we did have some paid subscription cable(?) tv thingy… so that was all the entertainment there was… a lot of um… I think kids cartoons(?) memory is kinda blurry.
So I’d walk to school with… usually grandmother, but sometimes, very rarely, one of my parents that somehow had free time. Probably dad because he didn’t have a stable job… but I don’t remember much.
No free lunch in schools, so you either paid for lunch or you went home for lunch…
I remember just walking home by myself for lunch time, cuz grandma thought it was fine? Cuz nobody would kidnap me in broad daylight right? Right? (👀 mom told me about the supposed “lots of kidnappings” in China, idk how serious that actually is tho)
Its like 5 flights of stairs to the small apartment unit, I don’t think this building meets western building safety codes lol.
So I had lunch at home, then go back to school like approx 1 hour later.
Then finish the rest of the school day and go back home, for dismissal, there was always someone was there to pick me up, either grandma or dad or rarely mom. I remember mom always warning me to never trust a stranger that claims to be picking me up. Cuz apparantly there’s a lot of kidnappers. That “stranger danger” thing terrified me lol
Don’t think I ever remember hearing Cantonese (the lingua franca and “dialect” of Guangzhou) used in school, not by peers, no one. Its all jusr Mandarin
Teachers had meter sticks to “discipline” “misbehaving” students
The schools used blackboards and you write with chalk. There were no smartboards anywhere to be seen. No projectors.
All instruction just using this small student handbooks that each student had their own, and teacher wrote stuff on the blackboard to teach things.
I think summers we go back to our ancestral village? Dad and mom were from different villages and I think usually I go to my mom’s village, cuz that’s where my maternal grandmother lives.
Mom told me that my maternal grandfather took me to the stores and he’d buy ice cream for me… but I don’t remember lol
In Guangzhou, I remember sometimes, my parents took us to the McDonalds near us, but its more like a “vibe” memory, don’t remember much about the food or the taste of food, its over a decade ago. But I remember having ice cream.
I vaguely remember this one school trip… to idk where lol… all I remember was being on the bus and I think I threw up… car sickness lol… we didn’t have a car and so I don’t get used to it.
I think its either this year or 2009 that I had the incident of my older brother (5 years older than me for context, its not a fair fight due to age difference) fighting me then I ran away from home for a few hours… was so scary to be alone in the city for a few hours… still traumatized…
I remember the malls…
I remember being at that store and asking my parents to buy stuff…
this one time I ask them to buy these board games so I can play with my brother… (yes that same brother that want to fight with me all the fucking time)
I remember the metro system… the platform safety door thing was so fascinating to me…
…that’s all I remember on the top of my head right now. I think that one traumatic memory kinda casted a lot of “fog” the blurriness of the memory, and my family leaving that city and the country altogther made it so much easier for my brain to just repress most of it…
Edit: Also I had zero friends… :( So yea I basically spent my early childhood with my sort of abusive older brother… 😭
Edit2: Lol, fixed phrasing mistakes that I just realized after this comment has been up for hours
Markets crashed, got laid off from a good job that I was only at for 9 months making decent money (they didn’t want to let me go, but went by seniority), went on unemployment for like a year, tried taking care of a child that I wasn’t ready for, played too much WoW during that time and almost ruined my marriage. Yeah, not great.
The housing crisis and recession was in full swing, and my wife had to close her retail business as a consequence. Shitty times, but absolute bliss compared to today.
Ah I remember this. At the time, I was part of the team at my work that was tasked to monitor the user accounts of the hundreds of people who were gonna be laid off in one day, to make sure they don’t do anything before the accounts are disabled. That was a somber day.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
A tale of two shitties
What that guy said
Lol, in the first part of 2008, I was obsessed with the new Smash Bros game that was about to come out. The marketing was drip feeding info day by day, and it was all working perfectly on me. Throughout those early months, I could tell you how many days until it released in the US.
I turned out not to like that game so much.
“Why are you all concerned about boys? Have you heard the song Time to Pretend by MGMT? Why are you not concerned about the song Time to Pretend by MGMT? Do you not miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms???”
I was 29, single and back-packing in SE Asia, then Oz, working in dive bars, hostels and selling strawberries for beer money. It was a bizarre time in my life that I enjoyed tremendously.
Oh wow! Has. It ben that long already? In 2008 I had just graduated from software engineering and started my first career job. It took me months before I found a job because of the economic crash. And when I found one, the pay was shit. Cost of living wasn’t as high though so it was ok.
Happy birthday!
I was in high school and honestly having a great time. My friend group was pretty solid, I remember having a decent bunch of fun classes, and that was the first year I had a cell phone. Having a phone and a friend with a car meant that I was granted a lot more freedom.
My friend with the car would pick me up at 6am on the weekends and sometimes on school days and we’d go snowboarding, pushing each other to be better and to have fun. We did a lot together besides just that, and I spent a lot of time at her place, which was nice to get away from mine.
It was a good time :) I hope your teen years haven’t been too fraught with all that is happening in the world and you’re able to have your own freedoms and fun
