The nineties, it seems, got away from me. Personally, they started with living in Edinburgh with my newlywed spouse. We had no television and no money, and limited time to finish my degree. Then we landed at Nashotah House for the remainder of the decade. Our daughter was born, and we settled into the role of new parents as the world went on around us. The internet hadn’t made its way to that part of Wisconsin and television reception was quite poor. Now bear with me as I’m trying to reconstruct things. Twin Peaks ran from 1990 to ’91. We were in Scotland at the time and had no television. Northern Exposure (’90 to ’95) started a few months later, and was still running when we returned to the States. We began watching it because family recommended it, mostly on VHS. Some family members had watched Twin Peaks, but it was darker, and we opted for lighter fare when we could see TV. (I hadn’t undergone my horror reawakening yet.) Then came Picket Fences (1992 to ’96), which I still haven’t seen. The X-Files, original run, broadcast from 1993 to 2002. What a decade to lose!
Northern Exposure and Twin Peaks had some things in common, I noticed as we watched the latter, but then they ran at about the same time. It also seems Twin Peaks and The X-Files shared some secrets. I can’t say about Picket Fences, but it seems that speculative elements infiltrated these nineties shows. What’s more, they all received critical acclaim. I would feel like I lost much of the nineties, except that I was having a great time being a parent. Although Nashotah House rubbed me the wrong way, I was employed doing what I had pictured myself doing. Wisconsin was a beautiful state and offered lots of outdoor opportunities, particularly when it wasn’t forty below outside. What I really lost was pop culture of the nineties, living in a monastic setting.
I recently discovered that I’d also missed much of the music of the nineties. I’m not a radio listener. Too many distractions—I can’t listen to music when I write, let alone with some announcer talking. I don’t listen to music when I jog because I find the natural world so interesting. It occurred to me just a few months ago that I had very little knowledge of 1990s rock. (Not the preferred genre at Nashotah.) Some of it is pretty good, I’m discovering just now. Like a typical academic, I began to shut out the outside world when working on my Ph.D. Now I spend my time trying to catch up. Not that I have much time to watch television, or listen to music, but I hate to miss something that everyone else seems to know about. Then, of course, after the X-Files, Lost ran from 2004 to 2010 and we didn’t catch that either. Maybe I missed the first part of the new millennium as well…