time capsules

One of the reasons that we have been catching so many older films is a series at Alamo that takes a single year and programs selected films from that particular year. Currently, it's 1999--so we got a chance to see Being John Malkovich last week, which will be followed up by Audition, The Matrix, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and some others in the next month or so.  While my own personal 1999 is tucked away in print journals for the most part, it was a strange year of transitions. I didn't catch most of these movies in the moment in theaters. 1999 was the year I finished up my MA degree and started my summer-long search for a job. When I moved back to Rockford briefly and into a gorgeous apartment with a sleeping porch and glorious floors I eventually could not afford to keep. When I took two jobs I left after the first day (one at lunchtime the day I started)  The first selling ad space in a film publication, the second as a production assistant at a small local rag under a tyrannical editor whose staff lived in fear of him. I was only 25, but even then, I somehow knew to get out of bad situations cleanly and quickly. I remember my mother telling me work was not something you enjoyed but something you endured. 

I would start working at the elementary school library that fall, and I think our only trip to the movies in my broke-ness was to see The Blair Witch Project with my sister. Summer was long that year, split by moving back in with my parents and into the room I had vacated two years before. That fall, and through the next year, I was always tired from getting up for school hours, but the work days were interspersed by things like day-long fishing trips, where not being a fisherman, I would lay under trees and sit at picnic tables and write stories in notebooks I still have. I read a lot of young adult books I brought home for fun, made a lot of amazingly creative bulletin boards. Read stories dramatically for rapt K-5th graders. Mediated battles over the first couple Harry Potter books. That winter, we rang in the new millennia and everyone was only half worried that the world's technology would come grinding to a halt (it obviously did not.) 

While the internet was familiar, with no computer at home, I would spend my brief lunch break and sometimes after school using the web to check in on Poets & Writers forums. I still read magazines and books and the newspaper, though, for the bulk of information. I didn't submit much during that year, though a few publications came out that I'd lain seeds for the spring before while still in Chicago. I detailed my days and thoughts in one of the many Mead composition books I kept through college and beyond. I felt like I was treading water, and I really kind of was. I would turn 26 the next spring and have a crying fit in the DMV parking lot over my sorry financial circumstances. A year later, around Thanksgiving, I would put in my notice, and move with only a mattress and a few pieces of furniture to the apartment I still live in now. To the job I just left a couple years back and ultimately the life I enjoy now. 

It would be several years until my first book or chapbook was published. More years until my experiments began in visual art. 1999 was more a year of floating. I remember I was determined to complete my first book by my 25th birthday that spring, and oh what a book it was, thankfully gone with the floppy word processor disc it rode in on. It was also the year of my first real journal acceptance and publication (that was not a subscriber's issue, vanity anthology, or related to a college lit mag.) I wrote a lot of poems in the spring (some survive in my first chapbook, The Archaeologist's Daughter) but turned my eye toward fiction in the summer. By fall, work/life balance made it hard to write at all.

Many of the films we are seeing this winter,  I caught in the intervening years on DVD or streaming, but just as many not, but in their age, they feel like remnants of a time that doesn't exist, of a world that we only remember existed a certain way, but then again, maybe it never really did...