“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 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 my brother for not having a Guangzhou Hukou so we went to some privately-run paid one, 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.

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, 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 it 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, usually someone was there to pick me up at dismissal. 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.

Teachers had meter sticks to “displine” “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, and teacher wrote stuff on the blackboard.

I think summers we go back to our ancestral village? Dad and mom were from different vilages and I think usually I go to my mom’s village, cuz that’s where my maternal grandmother lives.

Mom told me that maternal grandfather took me to the stores and had ice cream… 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 the blurriness of the memory, and leaving there 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… 😭

It’s when I went from a freelance perpetually broke dork to a full time and well paid dork with a career. That’s also the year I met my now GF and mother of my children.

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

I was in middle school, just discovering retro game collecting. I got tons I’d NES, SNES, and N64 games for pennies on the dollar, compared to today. It was a terrible time in terms of school, but a wonderful time in terms of exploring my hobbies.

I had just met my best friend at the time. Finding someone with as much anxiety as me was helpful.

I was in college for my second year, prior year I had tried to work full time but work dicked me over thinking since I had “3 days off” I could work more the other days. Those three days were for classes, Wednesday for doing classwork for Thursday. I worked my ass off to ensure I had a schedule work could more easily schedule around then they pulled this crap. I had a breakdown at work and promptly put my two weeks notice in. Time goes on and work dries up due to 2008 so finding part time work willing to work around your schedule was hard when you had families who needed ANYTHING were going for as many hours as possible.

I still had a decent gaming computer, ate modestly well, and had plenty of time for course work with leisure time. Though I was lonely a lot, I started becoming a more social creature in college. It was an awakening of me realizing how much trauma I was carrying, how hard I was to live with, my political views and beliefs hitting the asphalt, and many other things. I was holding on for deal life just trying to figure myself out while also going to college.

In that time I wish I had stayed in touch with a sister of mine more for assistance. We’ve reconnected after college and she learned how rough it was for me that she would have offered help in just food on occasion if she could. The financial collapse didn’t really touch me, I was too busy surviving mentally to worry about it much. But the after effects lasted long enough that they were still felt by me out of college.

I was basically in a crisis of self the entire time, realizing I couldn’t go on with how I was raised, it was wrong, and I needed to change but that was very difficult.

Man, 18 years, it’s wild of me to think of what I’ve lived through before people your age were born. Some good, a lot bad. How I was unguided because my parent’s generation were just “tough, deal with it!” types. Why when I meet younger folks who have questions I answer them and try to provide my experience to see if it helps them. Yall really do need it in these trying times.

That month I left active duty military after 11 years, moved my family, and got licensed in my home state to do my job. I had prepared quite a bit and had family help, but it was still a rough life transition for all of us.

By that spring when everything started to settle down and go a bit smoother, the housing crisis set in. Everything got more expensive quickly. I remember worrying I wouldn’t be able to afford fuel for my long commute. I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to support my family.

Somehow we held it all together, but it was a stressful fucking year. Despite all I never regretted leaving the military…it was either that or go back (again) to secure Halliburton’s oil interests in Iraq.

I was 15 so pretty awkward. Might have started to do more serious exams that would determine whether I went on to higher ed. Main concerns would be getting served in old man pubs underage, getting invited to as many parties as possible despite being moderately antisocial, and indulging in any contraband I could get my hands on.

Happy Birthday.

Only one person mentioned Obama, so I’ll put it in.

2008 was only 40 years after MLK was killed, so you had a lot of people who’d seen him when he was alive. I knew people who didn’t want to watch on election night because they were so fraught. They couldn’t even believe he’d gotten as far as he had.

I was working in downtown Brooklyn, in an area with a lot of Black people. The most you saw was the occasional poster, and he was usually part of a group with MLK, Malcolm X, and other icons. I never saw any of the giant flags that Trump lovers fly.

This is another thing I noticed. In the Bush years you’d see a lot of skulls in fashion; in the Obama years there were more peace signs. That’s my personal experience in NYC, so take it with a grain of salt.

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.

2000-2013 were the best years of my life. Don’t get me wrong things were really good before 2000 for me but those 13 years were the best.

My wife and I had great jobs that gave us everything. Good money, fun work, great work life balance. Also we loved were we lived. Everything was great. We enjoyed our kid playing sports, Video Games were really taking off, we did an annual summer vacation to the Outer Banks of NC.

The three of us had really good circle of friends.

Things were just bliss.

The first half of 2008 was okay. I was a year into having my own place, was dating a lot, and traveling multiple times a year. Going on your first solo vacations as a young adult is a pretty dang cool thing.

I was still new in my career and was building my adult life. I had a job lined up in Chicago, but it was with a financial company, and the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman, and the whole economy got the offer pulled that September.

I remember being very excited for the election. I actually got to go see Michelle Obama give a speech in the jazz district here in Kansas City, and the line to see Barack Obama speak at his Liberty Memorial campaign stop was so long they had to cut it off for security reasons. We sat on one of the hills and listened to the speech, and he was elected by a large margin.

In hindsight, 2008 was the last year I had any real hope for the future.

Obama was supposed to be the Anti-Dubya, but he turned out to be a conservative fascist too. The banks were rewarded with bailouts and bonuses for crashing the economy, and to this day, only one person’s gone to prison for it. I now just assume each new year will be incrementally worse than the last, which while bad for my mental health, has been great for my financial planning.

Part whirlwind, part most stability I’ve experienced in my life, and part adjusting to a new norm.

My life in the mid 00’s was… Interesting. Mrs Canopyflyer and I met in 2004, got married in 2005, moved 400 miles for her job in 2006 and baby #1 was born in 2007.

So by 2008 I was getting used to:

1. Being a newish husband.

2. Being in a completely new city where I knew no one.

3. Being a new father.

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.

January 2008 I was failing as a student, failing to work enough to support myself, in debt to my roommate and sliding my way towards a stint of homelessness that thankfully would only last the summer.