What were the 90's like for you?

[Tokis-Phoenix]

I've been musing a lot over the past, just at one of those philosophical stages in life right now, think about the good and the bad.
And i was wondering, what were the 90's like for you? Were they good times, sad times, bad times, auspicious times, confusing times, happy times etc? The era we left behind, was it better than the times we are living in now, for you personally...?

 

[Tsuyoiko]

Most major things in my life happened in the '90s. I left school and lost my virginity in 1991. After studying for my A Levels at college between '91 and '93, I started university in 1993. I met my husband in '95 and moved in with him in 1996. I graduated and got married in '97. We bought our own house in 1998 - ten years here this year! My first full time job began in 1999. So, it was definitely the most eventful decade for me!

 

[Haruspex]

Was born in 1990, in the crumbling USSR.
Around 1992 my family moved from Armenia to Hungary.
1995 I changed kindergarten, the next year I went back.
1997 I entered school, the same year I received my first Playstation (obviously a psx [not to be mistaken for a psone]), as a result I threw away all my toys.
1999 Changed school, for a Waldorf one.
2001 received my PS2.
200something, went to high school.
2007 my grandmother died. Received my PS3 and PSP.
2008, just became 18, and turned out to have myopia in my right eye, though only 0.5 dioptria (just a slight short sightedness).

 

[Flashjeff]

The 90's? Hmm! Good stuff, bad stuff, boring stuff:

1993: My mother passed away at 58 (bad stuff)
1996: Retired from the U.S. Navy after 20 years of devoted service (good stuff)
1999: Went to work for the federal government, still there today (boring stuff)

Nothing really spectacular. All things considered, the 90's went by in a blur.

 

[Sensuikan San]

Curiously, in spite of my age, for me the 'nineties were "interesting" to say the least:

Got downsized - lost my job. (I wasn't alone.)

Wife had same thing happen to her - same month!

Sold up house and home - moved whole family across Canada to West Coast, eventually became re-established in career, started second career to go with it and founded website.

Lost lottsa cash - but survived! (Have the bulk of it back now - less inflation of course).

In short - I found out that I had some resilience - and my family had more.

Other than that - the nineties were boring ...... although not so dull as the eighties!

(I was thinking of starting a similiar thread about the 'sixties' - but I think only a handful of members could contribute ....!)

ジョン

 

[Kinsao]

I was at secondary school from 1990-1995, then college from 95-97, art school from 97-98 and university from 98-2001... so I guess the '90s really were the decade in which I grew up totally from girl to woman! With all that, a *lot* happened to me in the '90s! The most eventful decade of my life so far, although the noughties will probably go down as the happiest and the most interesting in other ways.

 

[kirei_na_me]

The 90's were great. Well, I'd say up until about 1997. Everything went to hell after that. I might not think that if my husband hadn't come along...

Anyway, I was in high school during what I think was the best part of the 90's. From 1990-1994 I was pretty carefree. High school sucked but it was great. I ditched lots of posers for a few true friends during that time. I had lots of weird relationships with the opposite sex, but never took any of them too seriously. It was a time of low stress. My life was a piece of cake then. I just cruised through, not knowing how much I'd appreciate it later.

Also, who can forget the absolutely fantastic music of the 90's?! In my opinion, it was by far the best era. We had the grunge bands at their heights. Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, etc. Also, rap was the best it ever was and would ever be. Tupac, A Tribe Called Quest, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Wu-Tang Clan, etc.

There were also some of the greatest movies made during that time. The Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump, The Silence of the Lambs, The Professional(Leon), Goodfellas, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Se7en, even Bram Stoker's Dracula. The list could go on and on.

So, to me, that was a great era. They don't make 'em like they used to, sonny.

 

[dreamer]

Pretty good and bad moments of my life.
I went from primary school to middle school, lost my innocence as I started interacting with the world around me and came to became who I am today.
That's also about then that I learned about racism and discrimination (the hard way) as well as misery in the world.
I guess I'll specially remember all the TV-shows that were broadcasted around this time as well as a couple of other minor events that lead to me meeting my best friends.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

For me the 90's was a mixed lot, times of great happiness as well as great sadness.
Early 90's: my father died at the start of the nineties, so that was obviously a very hard and depressing time. However a year or so later i started a new school, which was far better in comparison to my old one both in an educational and friendship sense- i made a lot of great friends there and became very popular and did quite well with my education.
Mid 90's: My relationship with my mother started to become noticeably strained, although she had got over the worst of her depression from my fathers death, she had turned into a different person who was controlling and often not very reasonable (she has been like this way ever since at least to a certain extent). I started to get bad spots and started getting bullied at school for this.
Late 90's: Went into a new school, full time boarding. Never had a great start there and things never really improved, i was far away from home and my old friends- i got bullied a lot for my appearance (spots, which despite all that i tried, never really went away during those years), which often made me very depressed.
In the end i ended up getting expelled from school in the last few weeks of senior school after having a fight with some girls which picked on me. Despite the misery of being at that school, i left with pretty good grades (passed most of my GCSE's with good grades, even had a few B's and an A etc- however my mother put no end of shame on me none the less for being expelled.
During my hardships at school, i had become increasingly more absorbed int video games (which also caused me grief from the other girls, since it wasn't that common for girls my age to be remotely into video games back then, but on the bright side they did help offer me some escape from my problems back then etc).


So things were pretty up and down in the 90's for me- great times and hard times. I never had much of a childhood after my fathers death, but i ended up despising being a child anyway and wanted to grow up as quickly as possible. But i do have a lot of fond memories of my early teenage years despite all of this, although perhaps not as many good memories as i would like to have.
After my expulsion from school i moved to Australia and lived there for a while, i had been left severely devastated by my expulsion from school and the conflict in my family back then, however after moving to Australia i decided to pull myself together and make a fresh start. I became a lot stronger, more mature and wiser (and my skin cleared up too), and when i eventually moved back to England, i made a fresh start and went to college. My college time was one of the best times in my life, it was a complete reverse experience of my previous school experience- i made a great deal of friends there and was quite popular and dated a few guys etc. This was one of the most important times in my life, because it gave me so much hope and greater confidence in so many area's of my life . I met the guy at college who would later become my fiance, and we have been in a happy relationship always and are still together today .

I think music in the mid to late 90's is great stuff, both with western music and Japanese music- there were also a lot of cool movies, video games and fashion too in the 90's i think. I think the late 90's were pretty good times for society in general, 9/11, the Iraq war and Labors downward spiral hadn't happened yet, the economy was in better shape and i think people were generally a lot more optimistic about life and the future in general than what people are now days.
Now days there are so many issues and problems going on in the world which affect everyone's lives and which also seem to only be getting worse or more numerous- during these times, its always tempting to look bad in a sentimental and philosophical way at the era's we have left behind. There will always be hard times to experience, but as long as you have some good memories, you will always be able to find hope and be positive, and ultimately survive .

 

[tada]

I pretty much lived my entire childhood in the 90s, and IMO the 90s was so much better. It had so much cooler fads (teenage mutant ninja turtles, trading cards, super soakers, rollerblades, etc.) Also, much better music than this decade (though pretty much any other decade's music I prefer to this one... I hate hip-hop).

This country was in much better shape too. Gas was only about $1.00 a gallon, we had a much better president, and things just didn't suck. Seems like every time I watch the news these days, I get depressed. Another major reason why I want to move to Japan; these problems are only US-related.

 

[ChibiSara]

I was born in the 90's. It had good/better music, relatively good TV shows and great games. I mean, name one game made on this century that's great but isn't a sequel to the awesome games made in the 90's. Things were a lot better too, but it was kinda racistic time in Finland.

 

[Otenba]

Bullied, beat up, traumatized, sent/kicked out from place to place, making mum cry, yearning for a pet, being betrayed, set on fire, finally getting a few too many pets, moving,...
In short: they sucked.

 

[Jericho Desu]

I was born in 1986 so I was basically raised in the 90s. Had loads of great times, friends, wrestling (WCW/WWF), discovering anime for the first time, youth clubs. There were bad times too from around 1999 in secondary school because of bullying and such, but mostly everything was positive.

I used to love fridays the most, because after school me and my best friend w/ whoever else would go to McDonalds, then we'd go to his house, play video games, watch wrestling and finish it off with the weekly anime movie at midnight on the sci-fi channel. Great times that I miss dearly.

 

[bakaKanadajin]

The 90's in general was probably one of the biggest parties ever in recent human history.
This was following the cold war and the fall of the wall, and before the war on terror started. Since the previous turn of the century it's the only time I can imagine where there was no over-arching, fear-inciting spectre of doom hanging over our heads or if not that, then no major war being fought.

1910's - WW1/The Great War
1920's - Really no clue here, not a historian, but it's called the Roarin' 20's by some so maybe it wasn't too bad?
1930's - The Great Depression
1940's - WW2
1950's - Cold War begins
1960's through to mid 80's - largest accumulation of nuclear weapons ever. Cuban Missile Crisis etc.
1988 - End of 'communism', no more impending nuclear holocaust for a little while.
1990's - Desert Storm a huge success, Democrats in, smooth sax-playin Clinton in office, let the good times roll
2001 - War on Terror/NWO - cycle of fear starts all over again with a fresh push by the Neocons.

So yeah, 1990's, I was a teenager (I was born in 1980 on the button). So for me it was a fairly care-free time in the greatest sense. Home was a happy, secure place, food on the table, no looming global recession or terrorists, big brother hadn't swooped in yet, Toronto wasn't nearly as violent as it is now, oil was cheap, ozone layer was improving, yep yep yep.

 

[Homerduff]

Born in 1989, I mostly remember the late 90's. I know that elementary school was actually a great time (at that time, I probably had a different opinion); there were the many soccer games that were played during playtime and as of the very late 90's, the hysteria of a phenomena called "pokémon" took place in our school. If you did not have any Pokémon cards, you were a loner period. Eventually it got banned on our school cause pupils made fake cards and people argued a lot about it.

I think what comes to my mind when I think back of the 90's is:

- Playstation 1 and Game Boy
- Pay-per-minute Internet and my first click on a website ever (pokemon.com)
- Power Rangers
- Pokémon cards
- Friends I don't have any contact with no more

 

[GodEmperorLeto]

The 1990s were like the 1960s without the idealism. It was, at least on the East Coast of the US, the cultural descendant of the social upheavals of the 60s. Movies like Wayne's World only accentuated the mythical connection we had to our ancestral decade. Thirty years later, a time of sex, drugs, and music emerged. Unlike the 1980s or 1970s, music meant something again, but not idealism and peace, like the 60s. No, watching civil rights give way to reverse racism, blaxploitation, gangsta rap and Rodney King changed us. Our newly freed mothers stepped out of the kitchen and into the workforce, leaving us to be raised by MTV as children. Peace was a lie. The universal harmony promised by the enlightenment of marijuana, LSD, and other recreational drugs had given way to the reality of Pablo Escobar.

What the 90s was about was nihilism and ennui. That being said, it was a wonderful time to be alive, nonetheless. I hated middle- and high-schools, but I loved the music, the clothing, and the general grunge scene. Rap was a revolution of sorts, and artists discovered the poetics of meter with Busta Rhymes and the Wu Tang Clan. I was young, and had nothing to fight for, but I wanted to fight anyway, and there was Kurt Cobain, telling me that I should go ahead and fight, just as long as I knew that there really wasn't anything worth fighting for, because it all didn't really matter. Boom.

The 90s went south, though, and inevitably gave way to the 00s. Music died. Rappers stopped talking about thugganomics and instead started preaching the glories of "bling-bling," cars, money, and women. Music became canned and kitschy, and no one has the testicular fortitude to write a song about corporate abuse and distortion of music like Nirvana's "Rape Me" anymore. I remember when Blink 182 came out with Dude Ranch. Years later, I heard "Say It Ain't So" and was disappointed. Music had become canned, happy, and appealed to the lowest common denominator. The younger generation stopped listening to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and the Grateful Dead like we had in 1995. Nobody remembers the Who, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. But we had. We remembered, and they had inspired us. We missed the blissful happiness of hippyism and the social struggles of the 1960s so much we erected a temporal monument to that decade's ultimate failure with our own empty imitation of it--an imitation that was aware of its status as faded simulacrum, thus making it superior in its nihilistic perfection. Our president was impeached for lying about getting oral sex from a fat chick. That was probably the greatest moment of the entire decade--anyone who truly knew, with the knowledge of a poet or a prophet, realized then the empty meaninglessness of it all, the postmodern ennui that permeated our blissfully ignorant existence. We were the center of our own little mosh pit. We had Fight Club and Clerks.

My God, I miss those times.

 

[justin]

I can sum up the 90's as: high school sucked.

 

[kirei_na_me]

Speaking of the 90's, some friends and I recently saw the greatest grunge band ever, Pearl Jam. It was great.

What's not great, however, is using my BlackBerry Curve to post this message! I sure do miss my computer!