I bought the DVD set of My So-Called Life, and it’s brought about a weird revival of adolescence in my life.
Katy started out watching the DVDs on Saturday afternoon, and by Saturday night, there were about five or six of us parked on the couch, watching and reminiscing about how everything used to be a BIG FUCKING DRAMA! that nobody else could possibly understand.
Especially not your parents. Except they had their own weirdo dramas of their own, that you didn’t much care for unless they effected your BIG FUCKING DRAMA! of a life. Every little decision you made, every Geometry quiz you failed, was the end of the universe.
You thought you knew everything, but things kept creeping up on you to remind you that you didn’t: The sudden realization that everyone…has sex! The math teacher…has sex! The english teacher…has sex! And they could have sex together! Except, eeew.
You couldn’t really go many places or do many things, so you made shit up. So after we watched, we ended up participating in yet another ritual of wasted youth: Going out in someone’s borrowed car and getting food at ridiculous hours, then driving around aimlessly.
The section of life we’re going through right now is another profoundly uncomfortable period. We’ve finally gotten comfortable with school, and now we’re ripping ourselves away to go someplace else and get paid to do the same shit we’ve been paying to do.
We’re leaving a lot of our friends, meeting new ones, trying to figure out what the hell we’re all doing with our lives, and if our dreams can become reality or will forever remain wishful thinking. It’s Adolescence II: The Revenge Of Your Hopes And Dreams.
And then you look back at things that remind you of your first crack at adolescence, when an unsightly zit, and not a missed rent payment, was your biggest problem.
And you laugh, because the older you get, the more you realize you don’t know. When you were 15, you had it all figured out. Now that you’re 21 or 22, you realize how much shit there is to know in the world, and what a hilariously insignificant slice of it you know.
But at least now, you can drink to forget about it.