Text by Carina Calin
Image by Michel Nguie
There are many reasons why I miss the ‘90s. My life was the hardest it could get back them. I was being fed by mother, but then I was being fed by my grandmother, and my other grandmother, I used to run on Nintendo marathons with one of my best friends that is now having a baby. As in a child. What the F happened to time?! I was being great at being my greatest fan, altogether with my dad, and the fuss around Spice Girls and Kurt Cobain’s death. Contrast intended. The end of the world meant getting your toys busted and being sent to bed. A pretty awful sentence for any child out there still.
Today I wake up and pray I make it through taxes and dick pics on the internet.
It was a good time for mainly everything starting from dial-up, that went on fire and killed our parents, to Playboy magazines we all waited to surf through after our parents left the house, to grunge rock – which reminds me how much my mum hated that period of my life, and I can’t really put a blame on her for that: bruised knees, chippy black nail polish, and boys that used to leave love messages way to late for a teenager to be allowed to take them anyway. My dad was proud though. He would wake me up at 7:30 in the morn to go to that horrible place called school. If I knew back then adulthood is worse than detention, I might have probably chosen different. But in all wiseness, mornings were backed up by cassettes with NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, Britney and Christina, that grew into Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Goo Goo Dolls , Oasis and No Doubt. I still sit still and listen to Gwen’s Don’t Speak and remember crying while dancing after my first heartbreak, on the dancefloor of this house party, where I think I probably had my first round of beers and my first round of silent treatment from my parents the next day.
In all series of events, I also remeber feeding my Furby M&Ms which turned, as you can expect, horribly dramatic. But nevertheless more dramatic than VCR fucking up VHS. Or getting the wrong toy on a Happy Meal you have waited nearly a month to have. Or losing the butterfly hair clip and losing all the respect in front of your Mariah Carey Sorority. Because. Because life wasn’t always fair in the 90s.
Of course, we all had a very different cup of what the 90s looked and felt for each and every one of us; songs and televisions shows that now plunge me into enthusiastic nostalgia related to Al Bundy and how HOT Christina Applegate was back then, to Jenga, to spin the bottle and your first kiss on a New Radicals song, GAME BOY, pizza, milky pens and how crazy you would get when your ran aut of gel that you would put the tip of the pen on your tongue and hope it would draq another line over the D you got in math and covered in wannabe graffitti, Tamagotchi that died so many times you wondered if you will ever deserve nice things as an adult – which still makes me question why I feel about kids exactly how I felt when Britney and Justin broke up. And Ronald.
There’s a force molding around you as years pass, well, almost in case of any person trying to grow up, a force that re-shapes the world you live in fundamentally. Even if the stiff presence of any new age is present in almost any kind of culture, with media making kings and queens out of couch potatoes, where our hopes and dreams are more hormones trooping all over swipe left or right, where all our aspirations are easy to be downloaded off torrents, I wonder what Dickens would think.
Probably „don’t look back in anger”.
