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We Were Only Freshmen
My search for the true meaning behind a ’90s hit song
In 1997, The Verve Pipe’s “The Freshmen” hit the charts, gripping JNCO-wearing, Y2K-bug-fearing listeners from its weary opening statement: “When I was young I knew everything.”
In 1997, I was 10 years old. I had frizzy hair and wore denim shorts and tourist T-shirts and had suddenly grown taller than all of my classmates. I lived in a brick house in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in a small Texas town. No one I knew had a cell phone or a car phone, though I had seen Jerry Seinfeld use one on TV.
A year or so later, a man would roll up to our house and install our first dial-up internet connection. These cables leading from our computer to our modem and from the modem into the wall would come to define my young years. The internet expanded my social circle beyond the cliques of my school, beyond the highways and gated communities of my hometown.
Gradually, the digital world opened up, like heavy clouds, raining information down upon…
