Musing on the nineties

I don't know why, but I have been thinking of the nineties recently. It is the decade when I spent all my teenage and my early adulthood, and yet it is in history almost a non-event, stuck between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the new millennium, which of course started with 9/11. Looking back at it, the nineties were a time of insouciance.

It is difficult to explain the atmosphere of a decade you went through. The feeling of decade can be best illustrated through its musical environment. I never cared that much for its music, although I remember fondly listening to Metallica's Black Album with my then teenage friends. I was not and I am still not a big fan of Metallica, but I loved some of the songs. It seemed that it was the only contemporary thing playing, the only thing I remember of the early 90s anyway. I started listening to Pink Floyd then, which might explain partially why the music of the time did not make a lasting impression on me: I was two decades late and couldn't care less. It went on like this. The group I was hanging around with spent evenings singing bad songs they barely understood, repeating the song ad nauseam. I didn't like the people I was hanging around with, to be honest, not most of them anyway, but I am still friend with some.

You can see that I am not always nostalgic about the nineties. I was not very popular at school (read: considered way too geeky). Even some of the teachers did not like me much. The only time when I got thrown out of a class was in high school, when I laughed a bit too much and too loudly of our religion teacher. He was an ignorant, mediocre, Catholic sort of man, not fundamentalist but full of naïve faith, therefore he was popular, but I just couldn't stand the dogmas he could not himself grasp. The educational system was still deeply Catholic, and although I still had faith I was starting to grow a dislike for what I considered a illegitimate authority. There was also a history teacher who did not like me, even though I was a good student. I was probably too good for her own taste. There were too many ignorant teachers around, it quickly got on my nerves. Only a few were downright bad, but it was enough to drive me mad. I remained unpopular among my peers until I reached cégep, where I had an easy ride and had great fun until university. It was a time of insouciance, as I said.