Whenever people perform stupid stunts on TV, they typically include warnings advising those of us at home not to attempt them. Don’t ride your BMX down an abandoned waterslide. Don’t light your little sibling on fire then use bubbles to extinguish him. These things are typically obvious no-nos to anyone with a baseline IQ. But, as tends to be the case with warnings, someone did try it, a lawsuit ensued, and now we need a warning.

Really though, as my favorite writer Chuck Klosterman has pointed out, the warnings need to come on things that teach us about relationships and expectations, like Coldplay and John Cusack. There are simply things that, while wonderful on film or in a TV show, simply wouldn’t work in real life, fun as they may seem.

A movie I would contend is one of the most fun of the past 20 years is Sandra Bullock’s Miss Congeniality. This story of an ugly duckling FBI loner turned drop dead hot Miss United States pageant participant (It’s not a beauty pageant, it’s a scholarship competition!) is one I still quote regularly and back in the day, I took a freeze frame of Sandra’s hairdo during the interview portion of the competition and told her to do my prom hair that way.

I’ve always idolized Sandra Bullock. She is a producer in addition to an actress. She is hilarious and never apologizes for it. She still gets cast as a leading lady but isn’t conventionally gorgeous or model thin. She looks beautiful in the most normal way possible. She adopted the most adorable baby, she is close with her mother, and she is pretty much all I want to be in life.

A recurring theme in Bullock’s movies is that her male counterpart realizes that the vapid bimbos they’ve been dating are no comparison to the substance Bullock’s character offers. This is the case in Two Weeks Notice, The Proposal, Forces of Nature, and I’m sure there are more. It is a charming thought, someone realizing you are wonderful just the way you are, but Miss Congeniality is a little more realistic about matters. Let’s be honest, it takes a team of highly-trained aestheticians to get the very hot Benjamin Bratt to notice Bullock’s character, Gracie. The film tries to show how this isn’t just about grooming, it is about Gracie learning to love herself for who she is and give herself the time and attention she deserves by doing things like flat ironing her hair and avoiding carbs.

I certainly appreciate the honest of Miss Congeniality and, while the sequel may suck, I will say I adore the fact there is no romance in the sequel, just two women working together. Even this is too dangerous to try at home though. You can be as thin and gorgeous as you’re capable of being and, if a guy hasn’t expressed interest in you before, he very well isn’t going to post-make over either. And if he does, do you want to be the person whose significant other finally decided to give you a chance because you look a little hotter? Knowing deep down you have to put this amount of effort forth in order to keep them because the message has been made crystal clear: you aren’t good enough the way you are.

So while the makeover has been at the heart of several great movies, it rarely works out in real life because it is more complicated than a single scene in which the person is simply seen in a new light by their paramour, who noticed what they’d been missing. But plenty of pop culture moments suffer the same problem–in the moment it may be wonderful and romantic, but taken in a larger context, a good majority of these cinematic romantic gestures are super creepy.

If you broke up with John Cusack and he showed up outside of your house in the middle of the night blaring a boombox, well, first you’d ask where the hell you get a boombox in this day and age, and then you would call the police. Because when you look at the plot of Say Anything and you look at the plot of the Mark Wahlberg vehicle Fear, they are kind of the same story of a guy who gets way too attached to a girl way too fast, they have trouble appropriately displaying their affection, and they develop adversarial relationships with the parents.

In other words, grand romantic gestures are usually a really bad idea. While my brain cerebrally understands it, my heart still swoons every time I hear “Your Eyes”. I love the romantic sweeping scenes of classic movies. Meeting at the top of the Empire State Building, proclaiming your love invoking hell fires and holocausts, roping your girlfriend’s grandpa into helping pull of a big surprise like they do in Meet Me in St. Louis, all of these moments melt my heart.

Which is no surprise why I quickly took to the quirky show about the bowling alley attorney who moved back home to win over his high school sweetheart Carol in the little-watched but much-loved Ed. Out of context, Ed Stevens is the creepiest dude imaginable. He kissed a chick he once knew, then bought a bowling alley to be near her. Much like poor Felicity, who changed her college plans because of what one dude wrote in her yearbook, Ed was just too much, too soon.

In the pilot episode, Ed shows up at the school where Carol teaches alongside her boyfriend of seven years and he is wearing a suit of armor and bearing a bouquet of flowers. This is harassment, no other way to really argue it. But it is damned adorable.

Another time, shortly after Carol and her boyfriend broke up, Carol is awoken by a noise on her roof. Is it a predator? A rapist? Nope, it is Ed throwing waffles on her roof, a continuation of an inside joke designed to cheer her up, so yes it is creepy, but it is a little bit endearing.

The further removed I get from my teen years, the more I think of Ed Stevens as a creeper, but there is something about him that makes me love him in spite of all this weird behavior. And while I wouldn’t actually want these things to happen to me in real life, there is one gesture of his that I will always hope happens to me someday.

In the third episode of the first season, Ed and Carol are trying to be friends, but Ed is still pulling out all the stops to win Carol over. He has a third party deliver her a VHS tape. Some of you may not be familiar, but there used to be places where you could make your own music videos. You could stand in front of a green screen and lip sync along with a song while the background made it look like you were by the ocean or riding on a magic carpet. Imagine a low rent version of Rebecca Black’s Friday.

Anyways, Carol pops the tape in her VCR and finds one of those music videos with Ed brandishing a pink inflatable electric guitar with clouds floating by in the background. He then lip syncs with every ounce of earnestness in his body Chicago’s You’re the Inspiration. I wish I could say I am not so weak-willed as to find this adorable, but I stand by what I said my junior of high school: if a guy ever did this for me, I would need one hell of a reason not to marry him.

So far, the Chicago-singing suitor hasn’t shown up. Instead, I have a string of what ifs and not quites and what was I thinkings. And, like most people, I’ve had my share of unrequited love. It would be nice to believe that pouring my guts out would result in a meaningful relationship, but as someone who tried it once only to have it result in a super awkward couple of months, I have to advise against people planning their own version of the pick me, choose me, love me speech.

When I was younger, I would try to explain to someone I liked how I felt and, if they didn’t fully reciprocate (I’m a real pro at kinda dating people btw), I would try to convince them I was worth it. My mom told me something that always stuck. “You don’t want to be with a guy you have to convince to like you, Jessica. They should know on their own.”

She was right, but I was still sad, so I would retreat to my room and listen to a song like Vertical Horizon’s Everything You Want on repeat. During my most pathetic moments, I would cry sing my way through the power chorus when the protagonist shifts from talking about the other guy to himself, proclaiming how he is “everything you want”, he is the right guy for her. I would wonder why my version of this song didn’t work.

This is why songs and movies and shows like this need warning labels. They are great for what they are, which is catharsis. You want to do these stupid, ridiculous things and you know they will have stupid, ridiculous results, so you act them out singing Vertical Horizon on a loop. That way you don’t show up on someone’s doorstep with a wilted waffle, a strange monologue, and a restraining order. These aren’t meant for us to replicate in our real lives. They are grow up fantasies, fairy tales really. Miss Congeniality is just The Ugly Duckling. Ed is a literal knight in shining armor. And the power ballad Everything You Want is for when we’re feeling more beastly than beautiful. Would you ever grow out your hair and let a stranger climb it? Get roofied by your stepmother after breaking and entering into a house full of miners? Didn’t think so. Treat these like you would Sleeping Beauty. They are great stories and sometimes have some metaphorical real world application, but it is not safe to try it at home.

But seriously, the one exception is the inflatable guitar. Cause I’m still holding out hope for that tape.

I adore Katharine Hepburn for a lot of reasons, but one in particular is this quote:

“We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers – but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted to change you’re the one who has got to change.”

Growing up, I was actually taught the way Hepburn wanted people to be taught in that you need to blame yourself first, then only when given enough evidence to the contrary can you place the blame on someone else. It wasn’t something anyone in particular taught me, I just tended to pick it up from TV and books where the lesson often is placing blame anywhere but squarely on your shoulders is a bad thing to do.

This has been an incredibly useful mindset for many facets of my life. In school and at work, I do my best to get everything done with as few excuses as possible. It has made me a skilled editor, as I don’t really pull punches if I think changes can improve things. I may be the bad guy, but I am my own worst enemy, so adding a foe or two to the list doesn’t matter that much.

I know many people, myself included, who have been in jobs they can’t stand. They come up with excuses to stay, place blame on others, and ultimately keep suffering. This is why the movie Office Space stands up so well over the years. Mike Judge’s comedy is every white collar worker’s dream—admitting that the system is stupid to your superiors, acknowledging you pretend to work a lot of the time, and beating the shit out of the printer.

It may seem like a mundane comedy, but at its heart, this movie is a fantasy about being able to take control of your situation and turn it into something positive with virtually no repercussions. Whether you’re a waitress lacking the requisite flare or a middle manager at an IT company, it is up to you to fix your situation, your crappy boss, and your crappy job.

In reality though, sometimes you can’t just walk away from something you hate. It is one of the other defining differences between Xennials and Snake People. My parents raised me to believe you should be grateful for any and every job you are offered. Your job sucks? It’s supposed to. Nowadays, I constantly see people a little younger than me talking about how your work should be something you love, as if it is a requisite of employment that you not only get paid and get benefits, you have to be emotionally fulfilled by it too. While I think we all agree that would be nice, there are still those of us who consider a job a means to pay the bills, not a life-defining decision about who you are deep down inside. Sometimes I have a job just to have a job. For a while I thought my job had to be one of the key things defining who I am. But not everyone needs a career path that brings then more zen than a yoga retreat.

Those of us who can be a little too complacent can stand to learn something about blaming ourselves for our own misery and taking too much negativity because we feel we deserve it from Office Space though. Just look at poor Milton, who never speaks up and by bearing the brunt of it, only has worse and worse things heaved upon him. It may be satire, but that is how the work place and life really is. The more you prove you are a capable human being, the more will be expected of you. They’ll even take your cake and eat it too.

The more responsibility you shoulder, the more it seems easy to place the blame upon yourself. This is one of Buffy Summers’ biggest flaws on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’ve spoken before about late-season Buffy and her emotional struggles, but really from the time she was told she is the one and only slayer, she has heaped the literal responsibility of the entire world on her shoulders. So, when things go poorly, she blames herself. When people die, she blames herself. And when all she wants is a break like going to homecoming, she gets taught a lesson in the form of vampire mercenaries trying to murder her. When she decides to finally let a guy in and care about someone and have sex with him, he literally turns into an evil monster hellbent on killing her and her friends and the only way she can fix it is to murder her first love herself.

If Office Space is a fantasy about shirking responsibility, Buffy is a horror story not about monsters and vampire, but the unrelenting unfairness of adulthood. Milton’s series of foibles may be funny, but they aren’t that far removed from Buffy Summers, who is stuck with a gig she never asked for and constantly has to sacrifice as a result. Difference is, Buffy can’t quit being the slayer. In many ways, her situation is blameless. She didn’t get herself into this mess, but she can’t get out of it either. For those of us used to putting all the blame on our shoulders, these situations are way worse than a soul-sucking job. You know when you’re Milton that, should push comes to shove, you can say enough. When you’re in a jam you’re desperate to get out of but there is absolutely nothing you can do except put your head down and keep going, you try to figure out if there is some cosmic reason you’re in the boat you’re in, which only makes things tougher.

What is great about Buffy is creator Joss Whedon’s unrelenting honesty about how cruel life can be. I know, it doesn’t sound great, but as a show that was at the heart of my high school viewing, being reassured by this show that, yes, things are often hard for no real reason, so don’t feel like you are to blame for it is exactly what I needed.

While I am with Hepburn in the sense I would much prefer to have a friend who tends to blame themselves too much rather than too little. I find it is much better to be too self-critical than too self-assured, or else you’ll end up with too many evenings like the one described in Lit’s My Own Worst Enemy. While the song is mostly about drinking too much and blacking out, the sentiment that we kick the living shit out of ourselves from time to time resonates with sober people too. Even though I put the blame on myself for a lot of things, I still end up making stupid mistakes and know I am making them as I do it, but sometimes you just can’t help yourself.

While Drunk Jess (yes, I consider her a person unto herself) can do some dumb stuff, her complete disregard for consequences can be helpful from time to time, as she can be more forward, more assured, less guarded. Most of the time I rue her existence, but like any good worst enemy, she certainly challenges me and my life choices and, in the end, what doesn’t kill me with alcohol poisoning makes me stronger.

That is the best part of being a self-blamer. As you scrutinize every facet of your being all the time, you try and get better. When I go through a break up or I change jobs, I will exercise more, write more, read more, all in an attempt of self-betterment in case the reason behind the problem is me. I wish it could be like Office Space and I could just scream eff it and be done with the things not working in my life. But seven or eight viewings of all those Buffy episodes reminds me that, like Buffy, I can train all I want, shield myself and prepare as much as I can and, while I can try to prevent myself from being my own worst enemy, I am never going to be able to stop bad things from happening and there will always be instances where there is no one to blame.

I’ll be the first to admit that I probably let fear play too big a role in my decision making, but I like to believe it is a fault a lot of us have. I used to not worry so much, which is a wonderful side effect of youth. In my younger days, I viewed decisions from the perspective of wrong or right. Nowadays, I realize that framework only leads to quite a bit of frustration, as decisions are more easily grouped into easy and hard and further divided into worth it and not.

At its core, Good Will Hunting is really a movie about fear and decisions. You have a kid (yes, kid, you may be shocked to remember Matt Damon’s Will Hunting is supposed to be 20) who had all the potential and intelligence in the world. With that know-how, you would think finding a way out of a working-class life with no parents, a criminal record, and only one friend he can actually rely on would be a piece of cake. It seems like an easy decision to take advantage of his photographic memory and propensity for math and make something of himself.

Xenophobia, the fear of the unknown, is a very real thing for some people though, Will included. I am related to several of these people. When I took a job that required a lot of international travel, my mom asked me, “Why do you want to go to another country? Everything you need is here in America.” My grandparents couldn’t understand why I would go to college all the way in California when I could’ve gone to Western Kentucky University for free. Minus the eff bombs and the thick South Boston accents, they are Will Hunting and his band of misfits.

I’ve always loved this movie, but I used to have a problem with the ending. Will chooses neither a life in South Boston nor a life among the math elite, but instead heads off to California, “to go see about a girl,” and it always seemed a bit like a deus ex machina moment for me. Like Will never had to make a real tough decision because the answer is true love. Congrats Will, it’s not your fault and you get to go hang out with Minnie Driver in San Francisco. You think you’ve made a breakthrough in therapy, but here you go running away from the big decision again.

Now that I am a little older and the leaps of faith I made in my younger years are harder to get off the ground, I realize how tough it was for a closed off person like Will to have enough faith in another human being to be there, to be worth it. In fact, of the three options, this one isn’t the easiest, it is probably the hardest. It is pretty easy to figure out if a job is for you or a living situation is for you. When you meet someone and they aren’t like anyone you’ve met before, you aren’t sure If these new feelings are a sign to run or a sign you’ve hit the jackpot.

A good chunk of people tend to live their life trying to keep big changes to a minimum, not realizing they may be doing themselves a disservice in the long run. Going through each day not making any changes seems easy in the moment, but it is also how you end up with a job, a spouse, a life that is simply okay, but is certainly not what your dreams were made of. It was easier for Will to believe he didn’t deserve to be loved too. Sure, he was setting himself up for a lonely life, but at least he knew it was coming and there wasn’t a chance to get his heart crushed again. You underachieved, but your soul survived intact.

There are people who are okay with that kind of life, who would rather take option A than get devastated again. There are people who are willing to make the occasional big decision and take the chance that it is worth the risk, and there is the cast of the David E. Kelley show The Practice. If you remember this show, the lawyers of Robert Donnell and Associates chose a career in which these tough decisions were a weekly affair. You might also remember that these characters are virtuous and awful all at the same time. If you haven’t watched, imagine the characters of Scandal in a law firm. There are certain things they value most, like lost causes and doing something wrong in order to accomplish what they think is right. The initial premise of the show was that the firm was kind of like Robin Hood, defending deadbeats and drug dealers in order to keep the business going and allow them the time and money to defend more noble causes.

It’s a weird kind of idealism this show espouses. They make the decisions look a little tough, but in the battle of protecting the innocent or potentially getting disbarred, they opt to possibly ruin their careers pretty much every time. Jimmy Berlutti ends up at the firm because he forged loan documents at his old job to keep them afloat.  Bobby Donnell (Dylan McDermott) in particular has  a crisis of conscience every week, but it is never a choice between right and wrong, really. It is a choice between right and righter, and it sets an awfully high bar for how much us viewers have to be willing to heave ourselves upon the sword for a good cause. Or, as this scene illustrates, throwing your friend under the bus.

The really difficult decisions though are not the ones in which two paths are clear and you need to pick one. The really tough ones are the ones where you can’t even take action until you figure out what it is you need to choose to do in the first place. Will Hunting has a grasp on his emotional issues, but he subconsciously chooses to push people away rather than take a risk and let someone in. He is aware, but until Robin Williams’ character causes him to break down and let out all those emotions that come along with his thoughts, he can’t really accept that he has to make a decision about letting people in.

Whenever I hear the old Sister Hazel tune All For You, I get a bit of a smile on my face. As music came out of the melancholy haze of grunge, a glut of incredibly cheerful songs hit the airwaves like Deep Blue Something’s Breakfast at Tiffanys, Chumbawumba’s Tubthumping, and the rise of Third Eye Blind.

All For You fits right in that mold. It is a fairly simple love song really, but I always enjoyed how it was a story of a guy who finally realized what has been staring him in the face all this time. He tried to find somebody else besides this one particular girl, but in the end, “all the roads, they lead to you.”

It is a romantic conceit common in romantic comedies, the idea that your best friend or the person you never thought of in another light or someone you were once with but never fully got a chance to give it a good try is the person for you. There is usually a very obvious moment where eyes get bigger, where eyebrows raise, and the protagonist literally takes off running to tell that person they were wrong.

While the song isn’t exactly complicated, it does depict a more realistic portrayal of how this happens. It isn’t an a-ha moment, it is a period of thinking you might feel a certain way, trying to deny you feel that way, trying to decide whether these feelings are worth the risk, and hopefully, the elation that follows when you take the risk and it turns out right.

We get inundated with this elation, this moment where you make a decision and it works out like you hoped for. There aren’t a lot of pop culture artifacts in which someone makes a huge mistake they can’t recover from. Another Matt Damon vehicle, The Talented Mr. Ripley, comes to mind. It also reminds me how many people, including myself, have a hard time watching what is a well-made movie because seeing a guy descend into something he can’t fix is uncomfortable and depressing. We as a culture like those movies and TV shows that affirm us that risk is good, but we need the occasional Will Hunting or The Practice episode to at least remind us that decisions are rarely easy, consequences are real, but there are some things are well worth taking a chance on.

I was 13 when I begged my mom to let me see my first R-rated movie in the theaters. She wanted no part in taking me, so she made a deal with my big sister. If Debbie was willing to take me to the movie of my choice on one night, we could see a movie of her choice on another night. She agreed.

That is how my first R-rated movie in the theaters was Stephen King’s Thinner.

Don’t worry, I am not going to talk about Thinner today. I am going to talk about the movie I picked, which was Sleepers. If you’re unfamiliar, the movie is based on an allegedly true story published by Lorenzo Carcaterra about how he and his three friends were sent to juvenile detention as kids and were molested by the prison guards, only to get their revenge years later.

You very likely have never heard of this thing, but at the time it was one of those movies that screamed, “Look how important I am! Give me an Oscar!” First of all, there is the cast, which included Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, Minnie Driver, Billy Crudup, Bruno Kirby, Brad Renfro (may he RIP) and Jason Patric. It was directed by Barry Levinson of Rain Man fame, and it was about some serious subject matter handled with the utmost seriousness so much so that the movie begins with the narration, “This is a story about friendship that runs deeper than blood.”

The only Oscar nom it got was for original score, which is fantastic by the way. The movie isn’t bad, it just isn’t exceptional in film history, but I was obsessed. I ended up sitting through this nearly three-hour film a total of four times in the theater. This isn’t exactly a movie designed for repeat viewing, but this was the time in my life where I became obsessed with the Oscars and more serious pictures. The fact the first half of the movie featured four attractive boys around my age (this is where Renfro came in) didn’t hurt, but it was more about proving that I was growing up and my taste was growing up too.

Let me be clear here—my tastes still and will forever always veer towards these kinds of movies. While some look forward to the summer slate of action movies, I can’t wait for Christmas time and the onslaught of Oscar bait. But this was more than just a simple enjoyment of a film. I told people for a good three or four years that it was my favorite movie (though it would be usurped by a movie released just two years later).

I don’t know if other people put as much thought into favorite movies as I do. I want to make sure it isn’t just a good movie, but representative of me and my taste. I can’t say my favorite movie is Billy Madison, even though I’ve seen it at least 20 times. It will always be a drama. It will always have names associated with quality attached, and it will always have to be one that is somewhat underrated be it at the box office, in the oeuvre of a director auteur, or critically misunderstood.

Sleepers fit the bill of all three, so even though citing a movie about kids getting molested has its own set of pitfalls, if a 13 year old told you it was their favorite, you have to assume they aren’t exactly basic. Like most adolescents, it may reek of trying too hard to be different, but I didn’t care. In all sincerity, this movie is an interesting watch if you’re a fan of flicks like This Boy’s Life, The Basketball Diaries, or mob movies in general. It is a mobster movie, a courtroom drama (my all-time favorite genre), a family drama, and a prison film with a little Stand By Me thrown in for good measure. It may overreach at times, but better to aim high and come up a little short than never try for anything, right?

Similarly, wouldn’t you rather something that has degraded in quality stay past its prime rather than be cut short too soon? This is why shows like Homeland, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, House, and West Wing were on the air so long. Once you find something good, it just seems much easier to stick with it even if it starts to kind of suck rather than go seek out something new. You can acknowledge it isn’t the same (I pretend Buffy Season 7 doesn’t exist), but there is still a sentimental love for it in your heart.

I think no one would argue that ER didn’t stay long past its prime, the last bastion of NBC’s Must-See Thursday line-up. I was not one who saw it through to the end, opting out around the time Kellie Martin’s tenure on the show ended. But in its heyday, I ate that show up, fully invested in just about every character on the show, each of whom had their flaws, but were ultimately loveable.

I don’t think people really give ER enough credit when it comes to looking at the history of serious and prestige television. The credit goes to HBO primarily, but when you think about how hugely popular this very serious TV drama was and how it managed to discuss several issues that were previously unmentioned on TV, you have to give it and its police counterpart, NYPD Blue, a tip of the cap. Alan Sepinwall acknowledges this in his popular book The Revolution Was Televised, pointing out that the show, which did not dumb any of the medical lingo down for the audience, but proved there was a huge and insatiable audience for sophisticated adult drama.

Now, the adult version of me claiming Sleepers is my favorite movies runs rampant amongst my adult peers. They claim to love the most pretentious, dramatic shows they can find to prove how grown up and sophisticated they are. I like plenty of them too, and most of these people sincerely enjoy the shows they are watching. But now that the marketplace is so saturated with these serious shows, the stage is set for more shows trying way too hard and offering way too little like the second season of True Detective. I had many friends see it through to the end, but if you Google “True Detective Backlash” you’ll see what happens when the pretentiousness becomes too much for most to handle.

Sometimes though, this open wallowing in your own importance works marvelously. Such is the case with Smashing Pumpkins and their dual-disc album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I mean, just look at the name? It is a beautiful album that was showered with Grammy nominations, went platinum ten times over, and spawned five hit singles.

If you want to see a pretentious music video, watch Tonight, Tonight, which is an homage to a movie most film school nerds are familiar with, the silent classic A Trip to the Moon. As I said earlier though, when it comes to picking favorites, I hate picking the obvious, so my favorite Smashing Pumpkins song has always been 1979.

It is a bit on the nose, I’ll give you, but it is a song about adolescence written about a year front man Billy Corgan was 12 years old during. The lyrics were always a little mysterious to me, but it nonetheless captures that pent up frustration of feeling like you’re ready for more than what the world is offering. The video, showing kids pissing the day away around their neighborhood is how a lot of us spent our adolescence; biding our time until we got to be adults and live life our way. Until that day, we just tried our best to act like adults. For some kids that meant experimentation, drugs, sex, and rebellion. For less rambunctious kids like myself, it was about watching, reading, and listening to the most important things we could to prove to ourselves and those around us that we were ready for the serious matter of being an adult.