One night last week, I sat up at 3 a.m., as I am wont to do, writing an essay. Suddenly, something on TV caught my attention. It was one of those Time-Life commercials for a decade's worth of music in a convenient, $19.95 (in 10 payments), set of CDs spanning the 1990s. "The 1990s?" I thought. "Is that an era now? Is that a period?"
Sure enough, that K-tel-esque compilation had all the standards. "Ice Ice Baby," "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Wannabe," even that song Salt-n-Pepa played on "All That" that one time.
Why the distress, you ask? Because I, like many of you, am a child of the '90s. I grew up wearing my curly-shoelaced Light Ups, skipping Pogs over at my friends' houses while watching the Crag get bigger and bigger with every episode of "Guts."
I know all the words to the "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" theme song and can remember when we thought Mark McGwire could hit a ball that far just because he worked out a lot. We would go to school and work on spelling and history, learning how to name all 42 presidents and all nine planets. We would eagerly await the day when our class was signed up for the computer lab so we could hit those rectangular Macintoshes and play MathBlasters.
We had never heard of "SparkNotes" and actually read "Where the Red Fern Grows," "A Wrinkle in Time" and the other books assigned to us. In fact, when the book fair came along we'd take our parents' $20 and spend it all on Goosebumps, Captain Underpants, Pokemon strategy guides and the occasional triangular Nickelodeon pencil.
We'd then make sandwiches and hide under that box in the basement with Copernicus, our imaginary buffa... no? That last part was just me? OK moving on.
Yes, my friends, it was a different time. We were at war in Iraq. A major professional athlete retired and then came back, all to great controversy. Windows released a series of operating systems within a few years, each fraught with bugs.
Still, it was only 10 years ago! Is that decade of decadence, discovery and Crystal Pepsi already distant enough to where we point out menopausal women that have "'90s hair" or "'90s glasses," jeering like we did at that janitor with the hook in middle school? Was the age of Clinton really that long ago?
True, Vh1 did release two retrospective series of "I Love the '90s," but I challenge you to watch one episode of "Tool Academy" and take that network seriously.
Alas, I think the problem lies within, within myself and the rest of my Millenial brethren. My generation is reaching the crossroads of adulthood, torn between "I can't wait until..." and "remember how much better it was when...". Things are changing and, for the first time, we're stopping to realize it.
Maybe this doesn't have to be sad. Maybe we don't have to keep seeing our childhoods as something we'll never get back. Maybe, as we get older and our memories of that time become more and more idealized, we can hold them as something to strive for. I don't know about you, but I'd like that.
That and a day-long marathon of "Tool Academy."
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