I'm living in a 1992 headspace

I recently rediscovered an old diary from 1992, back when I was 17 and very, very unsure of my place in the world. And after reading it through, it's a little remarkable how much I hide my anxieties behind a rabid obsession for comic books. 

It was my last year of school, and there is an ongoing thread through the entries where I have no idea what I'm going to do in the next year, and it's a heavy fucking thing to lay on a 17 year old. 

I have no aspirations to go to university like all my other smart friends. I try out for a tourism course at polytech and I try to get a job at a TV and video store, and I fail miserably at both. There is, inexplicably, some talk of joining the police or becoming a teacher, but there is a glimmer of hope - I make vague motions of going to a journalism course and give up on it far too easily, but I will be back there in 2004, and doing the course was easily the single best decision I've ever made in my life. 

I'm just obviously so scared, because I just don't know what to do, but I also start working with my dad in a factory that makes and packages animal dripping, and I have actual money for the first time. I go on and on about how my bank account has too much money in it, the entries are just saturated with an obsession with cash, and it's laughably small amounts - I'm incredulous that I will make more than $120 a week. 

And it's all going on terrible, terrible comics. This is, after all, 1992 and there are a lot of terrible comics to buy. Some of them I have actually held onto - there is a tense period early in the year where I'm really not sure if the last two issues of the Infinity Gauntlet are going to show up at the local shops, and that's the biggest disaster in my life. 

They are all I seem to care about. There is one bit where I go to Dunedin for an interview at the polytech for a tourism course down there, and I write that I got "sick of talking to boring girls" and went to the local shops to load up on Superman comics, which kinda sums up exactly how much of a loser I was. 

1992 was a big year for me in other ways, our family shifted from Washdyke to Temuka, and that might not mean shit to anybody else in the world, it changed my fucking life, and every day I'm doing stupid shit with my best mates, and carving out new friendships that mean a lot to me today, (even if they do sometimes take a while to give you your Big Dave comics back).

The diary is, of course, painfully adolescent - there are some bits where I genuinely go into 'nothing I ever do is right!' moaning, and there is some outright hatred of my younger sister that I genuinely do not remember at all.

But I do remember that Infinity Gauntlet obsession and I still do have those comics, and issues of the New Warriors and 2000ad and the Justice League and the Nth Man that I got at the time. The rest are long gone, and so is that 17-year-old kid who didn't know shit about the world, but had very strong opinions about the Guardians of the Galaxy.