Year memeage.

[squeefulfish]

So, that year meme. bluedevi gave me 1996. Anyone wants to play along, comment and tell me what year you were born.

The year started off with me doing Bold Things with Christoff, which wasn't a bad way to start the year. We'd been going out for all of four months at that stage and I was utterly smitten. I do that a lot. He was the first gamer I kissed, but far from the last. I was on Christmas holidays from college and looking forward to the next grant cheque arriving.

Advanced Diploma in Communications (Film and Broadcasting) was the unwieldy name of the course. DIT Aungier Street was then a horribly new and sterile feeling building. The only other non-business related course there was the journalism course, and they seemed to spend all their time in their fancy computer rooms. There were no society things happening there in the evenings so very little reason to hang around. My classmates were for the most part the sort of people I wanted to have little to do with. We tolerated each other, but I'd already learned that I didn't need to go to all my lectures and had started blowing some of them off in favour of going to the cinema or wandering round galleries and museums. Sometimes with Christoff, more often alone (his course had attendance taken.) At the time I was living in Perrystown with my grandparents, being so unused to any ways of the world that I couldn't be trusted away from family. The fact that I was painfully shy didn't help either, I don't think I ever contributed during class discussions and had a habit of turning bright red if anyone asked me anything. Purple if they asked me something I didn't know the answer to.

The whole of my school life I'd coasted and aced everything. I didn't need to work. Why would I? I was super clever and knew it! So I didn't work at all during first year. Except on my photography projects. I had to buy a 35mm manual SLR for project work, spending a fortune (or £155 olde monies) on it and a few accessories. I used to spend ages composing shots and would occasionally take the day off college to go and take photos around Dublin. Working with slide film is something I still don't see the point of, I love prints and being able to hold and smell a photo. I passed the year by the skin of my teeth but didn't really care anymore. Still went back for more in second year and though I loved fiddling round with the bits they kept giving me to play with the seeds of "this isn't for you" had been sown. I went to even less lectures in second year, though I think redbrick may have had something to do with that. I got hooked.

This was also the first year I got to play round with an 8 track audio recording studio. Then later on in the year the 32 track was mine. I roped friends in to help with radio projects, paying them in beer as thanks.

Ahh beer. 1996 was the first year I got drunk. I'd often drunk before, but had never been drunk. Not really. And certainly not to the extent I drank one night in October. mr_wombat had moved into a house in Artane with a bunch of other brickies. At this stage I was somewhat addicted to redbrick. I'm still amused that almost as many people still know me as Sarah Fish as they do by my birth cert name. But anyway, there was a party to celebrate the new house. I spent most of the night sitting at the bottom of the stairs drinking vodka on an empty stomach and kissing boys. Bad Sarah! I still have a bit of a scar on my back from the damage done by the pebble dashed wall when I decided that kissing boys wasn't enough. Surprisingly enough when I confessed all to Christoff the next day he was none too impressed and that was that.

At the party I met a bunch of new people in real life for the first time. Including some guy called William who seemed sweet and nice and stuff. Kissed him a few weeks later and that was me smitten again for the next two years. We'd spent ages arguing over what "written in between the spaces in between the lines" meant. Two days later, on my birthday, he bought me a beautiful white fluffy teddy bear. I decided the teddy was to be called Baby and carried it everywhere with me for the best part of a week.

I was still fairly involved in Guiding. Or at least, with Rangering. I didn't want to have anything to do with Brownies and the like and being a Ranger was kinda fun in that we didn't have to actually do anything but got to go camping. Which I think I only did once that year, down to Cork for Ventact where the first order of business was to tell the whole camp that IGG members weren't allowed do this this this this or that because insurance wouldn't cover it. The train down had been fun, mostly thanks to the singing with cartographer. We bought beer and sat drinking it while being Mammied at for not having consent forms with us to say that we were able to swim 50m and that our mammies had said that we were allowed go. At the ripe old age of 18 this amused us greatly. My main memory of that weekend was arguing unsuccessfully for more beer on the train on the way back. The guy in the beer and food getting place had been told not by one of the leaders to serve anyone with a neckerchief and he was sticking to that. I was less than happy at this. Bah!

Over the summer I worked on the Student Summer Job Scheme in the Droichead Arts Centre. Lots of capitals there. This was the first year I was at the Drogheda Samba Festival, only going because I was getting paid to be there. The music made my ears hurt but bits of me I wasn't sure I knew were there enjoyed the sensation of music travelling up through my legs. Earning the princely sum of three pounds an hour. Which was a massive amount considering my summer job the previous year paid £1.81/hr. It was something to do for the summer that gave me a bit of pocket money because my grant covered me while I was in college. Most of it was handed up to the household at the end of the week. I did get to keep enough to allow me to go to Galway for a weekend to visit Alan. I don't think we did much except chat and I think I read a lot of Sandman.

cartographer visited a bit over the summer and I went to Kells a bit, too. Once while she was in Drogheda we went to an exhibition that was on in the arts centre. Huge papier maché vulvae protruding from wardrobes, a man painted all in green (even his hat) staring at them through two bottles of beer. And another one of some dolphins. That were pulling a chariot of some sort. The title of the piece was "leading Ireland forward with a porpoise."

It was the first year in over a decade that I didn't go to Rugby for a month over the summer. I'd started to realise that the family who live there had different views on some ideas that I was starting to explore in my head. Like maybe I wasn't just confused when I was in school and maybe I did like girls. And maybe I wasn't just interested in boys. But that was something I didn't think about too much, because the thought of kissing girls was just too terrifying in a way. So I put that to the back of my head for a while, then talked to William about it one night and stopped being terrified.

Oooh, this was also the year I got my first pair of green docs. From Shoe Rack (or whatever it was called then) on Wicklow Street. They cost £45 and were my birthday present from the parents.

I started reading Pratchett, I read a lot of Wilde, I bought my first ever CD player (never really bothered buying any CDs though) spent the Fridays of the first half of the year canoodling in cinemas, occasionally actually watching the movie. I still loved movies. I wrote some long letters. I fell out of love and back into it again with someone else pretty damn quickly. I was a size 18, but a fairly healthy one, even if I survived mostly on chips and milk. I spent a LOT of time out in DCU. A lot more than I spent in my own college. But that made things all the more fun.