Ten Things I Hate About You: A snapshot of my youth

I have a confession to make; I despise ‘80s teen flicks. I mean the soundtracks are great-ish but the movies do nothing for me. For me if Molly Ringwood is in a movie, it’s off faster than Jude Law’s pants at a Victoria Secret fashion show. I don’t get them and I don’t think I am supposed to; they are campy and trashy and allude to a world I will never know anything about, being a teenager at a time when I was still in diapers. It always seemed to me that the teen genre got better as I got older. An advancement in the field if you will; a sort of work in progress that was ever evolving and that, lucky for me, neared perfection right around the time I hit puberty.


This theory looses validity, however, when you look at the movies geared toward teens today. I am, just for a moment discounting anything involving vampires, werewolves, or wizards- not that their lives and afterlives aren’t important but I really doubt anyone ever thought to themselves, if only I found the right supernatural man, and I know he’s out there somewhere, everything else will fall into place. On second thought, many probably have but I don’t have time to get into that kind of crazy today. I’m talking about things like High School Musical, Camp Rock, or anything that involves Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, and the dreaded Justin Bieber. High school is not about everyone signing together and embracing the differences because deep down inside we all just want to dance and watching such crap makes me want to scream, “Where are the mean girls? Some dude better start talking about stealing a girl’s virtue soon before I vomit.”


The truth is no decade’s movies were better, they are just what I knew which is why, if you were born in the ‘70s you’ve lived a John Waters life and for people like me, you know what it was like for the students in Ten Things I Hate About You (not the TV show.) I wore those clothes, I listened to those songs, and most importantly, I grew up with those actors. I have dealt with academic staff members who are just as incompetent as Ms. Perky (sitting in her guidance office ignoring students while she works on her sex novel) or as uncaring and self involved as Mr. Morgan. I fully believed (who am I kidding, still believe) that two of the teachers at my high school were hooking up in the TV closet and my best friend once injured herself in PE because the teacher read a magazine while we taught ourselves Tai bo from a video. While it is true that a cute foreign boy never hijacked the PA system and serenaded me in front of the student body (clearly this was because I went to all girls catholic) I did see a fist fight that not only matches Larisa Oleynik’s but might even beat it.


So while I can’t understand the sex appeal of Charlie Sheen or Judd Nelson and just plain can’t understand Bieber, it doesn’t matter, you can keep your washed up or future burn outs because I will always have Patrick Verona, and he will always be too good to be true.