Perhaps it is the passing of Chad Batista, or perhaps it is writing so much about the past these past few weeks, but I keep reflecting on people in my life who’ve died. Not just the close relatives, the ones like Batista who I only really knew in passing and seemed fine, but if you knew them well, you’d probably realize they felt trapped and wanted out.

Then I came to 2004 and my favorite sports movie of all time, Friday Night Lights. I first saw the movie as part of the most popular class at USC taught by noted movie critic Leonard Maltin. He would bring in movies that were about to be released in theaters along with someone from the film to speak on it after the screening. FNL was one of our movies, and our guest speaker was Billy Bob Thornton.

One of the kids taking the class was Lee Thompson Young, who was actually watching a movie he was in. He played “Boobie’s back-up’s back-up” who is thrust into a starting position after the star running back Boobie Miles is injured. You may know him more for his TV role as Jett Jackson. I just knew him as Lee, who was friends with a few of my friends, but definitely not someone I would consider a pal. The only time we really spent together was at one freshman assembly where we ended up sitting next to one another. He enjoyed wisecracks as much as I did, so we traded jokes back and forth during an otherwise boring presentation.

Two years ago, almost to the day, Lee killed himself. He wasn’t my friend, I hadn’t seen him since college, but I remembered how happy he seemed all the time, and that kind of got to me. Had he been depressed all that time? I will never know the answer. Reports say he was bipolar, but who knows what was going through his head, save for himself.

When you read descriptions of depression, one of the descriptors that gets used a lot is “stuck”. People feel like they’re in a situation with no way out. I’ve mentioned before that country music centers around this small town depression a lot. There are plenty of people who are content with the small town life, but for others, it is a confining thing, growing up in a place you are desperate to get out of.

Really, the whole notion of the American Dream is predicated upon improving upon your position in this world. For the players on the Permian football team in Friday Night Lights, the means to an end football brings them runs the spectrum. Some, like the fullback (Garrett Hedlund) know this is as good as life is probably going to get for him, while others, like back Boobie Miles, have been working their whole lives for football to save them from their lot in life.

I’ve complained many times in the past that movies and TV just have a hard time getting small town life right, but FNL is very much the exception to that rule. Much of that kind of life is very similar to city life. You hang out with friends at bars and restaurants on the weekend, you are generally proud of where you come from even if you intend to get out of there as soon as you can, and there are customs and places that will always make you feel like you are home.

It isn’t a romanticized wonderland, but it isn’t the pit of awful some shows make it out to be. Let me clarify, I didn’t come from a small town. I grew up in the city people in small towns traveled to on the weekends. Our Friday nights in high school were spent at the football games too, but we were mostly there to support our marching band, who was midway through one of the most dominant stretches in Kentucky band history.

The TV show version of Friday Night Lights touches on the pressure that comes with being the one who is supposed to “get out”, but there is not a scene in that TV show that holds a candle to the scene where Boobie realizes he isn’t going to the NFL, let alone a Division 1 college football program. This was the guy who had his own big dreams and the big dreams of an entire town heaped upon him, so it isn’t just about personal success, it is about the pressure of letting other people down besides yourself. If this scene doesn’t convey you just how hard it can be to have your ticket to a better life ripped to pieces in front of you.

The closing credits of Friday Night Lights informs you just how many guys ended up staying near the town of Odessa, Texas. Like I said, it is the life for some people, but for spunky teen detective Veronica Mars, getting the hell out of Neptune, California is one of her top life goals. Her first is to figure out who killed her best friend Lily. That mystery is the central storyline of this show’s first season, which I would rank as one of the top five individual seasons of television I’ve ever seen. Watching Veronica try to make it through the back half of high after being excluded from the in crowd in the fallout from Lily’s death perfectly complements seeing Boobie fall from grace in FNL. Veronica is at the bottom, trying to work her way up and out. There are few moments where she gets sad and cries because she’s simply been burnt too many times for life to faze her anymore.

I was introduced to this series by a friend, Jenni, who said I had to watch because Veronica was me. At the time, I hoped it was mostly because I too made the occasional Outsiders reference. In hindsight, I can see how she made the connection because I tended to be the girl on her own a lot during college. I had several groups of friends. There were those I lived with, those in film school with me, those in our community service fraternity, and others I amassed through classes. In that respect, I very much remain Veronica, as I never seem to be at the heart of many social groups, but stuck on the fringes of several.

Stuck probably isn’t the right word, as I choose not to get too close, which is the same choice Veronica makes over and over again. She spends the first two years of the show patiently saving money, patiently putting up with crap, and each time that skin just grows thicker and thicker. She has her soft spots, like her mom and her two primary paramours, but for the most part she assumes her friends will let her down. Even her BFF Wallace abandons her at one point.

She was supposed to go to Stanford, but with the show getting an unexpected third season, she stays in Neptune for college. The series ends with Veronica backed up against a wall, but instead of her sacrificing herself for someone, it is the one person she can rely on who throws himself on the sword. She avoids the serious trouble and, according to the movie that came out last year, transfers to Stanford, gives up the private investigator life, and moves to New York to become a lawyer.

Sounds great, right? But the movie proves that even people like Veronica can go home again, and when she is back in Neptune, she finds herself questioning her life choices. While some criticize the film’s structure as being too episodic, I found the whole thing rather perfect, because it acknowledges that those who do try to “get out” often feel just as stuck.  You inevitably end up doing things differently than you thought, you end up somewhere you didn’t expect, and the notion of being home where everything is so much more familiar sounds pretty great.

Considering I was just beginning my adventure outside the confines of Kentucky when Keane’s popular Hopes and Fears album came out, it makes sense I was so drawn to their most popular song, Somewhere Only We Know. The whole album is really a meditation on growing up and how it comes a lot faster than you expect. This song in particular is about that longing for something in your life to be fixed and stable. When you’re younger, your parents, your siblings, your house, most of these things are not going anywhere. As you hit college, friends disappear, your parents become a more remote part of your life, and it feels like absolutely nothing is static.

It is a very thrilling feeling in your 20s, the idea of complete fluidity, but as this song notes, eventually you look around and the “simple things” are gone, some opportunities have forever passed you by, and all you want is, “something to rely on.” The guys in Keane were still in their 20s when they wrote this song, but it’s a feeling I think many in our 30s understand, which is that walking away from something or giving something up at this point in your life is so much harder than it used to be because this could be the end of everything and you’re not gonna get another chance to fix it.

But even in my 20s the idea of crawling into a familiar space with someone who understood where I was coming from was an incredibly comforting idea, especially on those days when I was feeling a little bit stuck. Because wandering around the barren landscape Keane describes in their song can be frightening, and a touch overwhelming when you’re going it alone, looking for somewhere or something to make you feel a little less stuck. And, as the song notes, sometimes you get tired of all that looking and wonder if maybe the place you felt stuck in is the home you belong in after all.

Whether you stay close to home or venture out, I think we all understand that feeling of being stuck. Just remember that sometimes when people feel this way, asking for help is harder than it may seem. If you don’t think there is any way out, why bother asking someone for a favor? So keep in mind that sometimes you need to reach out and, sure, sometimes you may feel a little silly that they are fine, but better that than being stuck for years wondering if you speaking up might have made a difference.

I have a bit of a reputation as a miser. Some of it is founded as, I’ll readily and proudly admit, I am a pessimist with no intention of ever changing my outlook on life. Scientific studies have been done to show that, for some people, being a pessimist is actually a helpful way to manage anxiety and stress. I do not see the good in everything because I pretty firmly believe there are things out there that are just not good. While I admire those that think every day is a gift, I can’t relate to it. Some days are struggles, some days are tests, and there are plenty of good ones mixed in too, but there are some I would certainly have done without if given the chance.

While I am very openly a pessimist, that doesn’t mean I am incapable of optimism, happiness, and joy. This whole blog series is really a giant love letter to the pop culture that helped shape who I am. While I often have things about them I find lacking, I still love and appreciate them. That is something I find a lot of people, especially in poker media, don’t seem to understand. You can like something or somebody just fine, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find places to criticize and try to improve. I am an editor at heart, so it will always be in my nature to critique.

Even so, I am still capable of that feeling of joy, that feeling which exceeds happiness, that rush that makes your heart feel like it is bubbling over and you smile so hard it hurts. Sappy as it may sound, it is not unlike the airport sequence of the oft-criticized movie Love, Actually. I will certainly criticize the glut of crappy ensemble romances like Valentine’s Day, He’s Just Not That Into You, and New Year’s Eve that came in the wake of this film’s success, but I am not on board with the number of people who criticize this Richard Curtis film as calculatingly sweet and saccharine enough to cause tooth decay.

Maybe I am just a marshmallow on the inside, but most of the six or seven stories in this film bring a smile to my face a dozen years after the movie first hit the big screen. Yes, I like many others, can’t really buy that Colin Firth’s character, a writer, would ever fall in love with a person who can literally not communicate with him because they don’t speak the same language, but the story is nonetheless funny even though deeply flawed in the logic department. Several of the stories are really just occasions for jokes, be it the nude stand ins or the geeky guy Colin who finds drop dead hot girls in America thanks to his accent.

Others are more modern fables, like the little boy in love with the little girl in his class. He does what all naïve young people do when trying to impress someone: pretend to be something you are not. He learns the drums, he puts himself out there, and he is rewarded with a first kiss and a role in one of the more memorable Christmas music performances in film history.

The one that always gets me to beam and tear up all at the same time is the one with Andrew Lincoln (pre-Walking Dead) and Keira Knightley. Lincoln’s character can’t help how he feels about his best friend’s new wife, Knightley, and he does his best to stay away until she figures out what is up and calls him on it. Rather than do the selfish thing and pursue her, he puts the love of his friend and the friend’s marriage to the girl ahead of himself, and he does so oh so adorably with poster board and a portable CD player.

You’ve probably surmised I am a bit of a sucker for unrequited love and cinematic grand gestures (I’m still waiting on that Chicago music video), but one so selfless takes the cake for me. I smile to see someone rewarded for their own sacrifice (and you can save the discussion that real sacrifice would never be saying anything, cause if he never said anything we wouldn’t have a movie). I tear up a little thinking he won’t end up with the girl, but I remain filled with joy at the thought of him getting what he wanted, and a simple kiss being more than enough.

So sure, I can be a sucker for the sugar-coated rom com moments, but I have to defend my miser street cred somehow. I do this with Arrested Development. I was early on this bandwagon, tuning in to watch each week around midway through Season 2. The episode delivered 22 minutes of hysterical nonsense as the Bluth family proved how awful humans can really be. Even the straight man, Michael (Jason Bateman) is kind of a terrible person, seducing a blind woman and an MRF, ignoring his family during times of need, and aiding and abetting several crimes over the course of the series run.

These people are horrible, selfish human beings and I love them for it. It is something I think Lena Dunham and Girls can take a cue from. My issue with that show is that everyone is terrible, horrible, and boring, so I really just want them to shut up and go away, hence, I don’t watch the show. It is when characters are horrible and endearing that the real comedic magic happens.

It isn’t just that this show reaffirms my faith that, in general, people kind of suck though. In fact, it has a very high opinion of its audience, as it will call back to small gestures from episodes aired weeks earlier or in a different season altogether and very subtly put them back into play. There is no wink wink, nod nod, nudge nudge, it is just left there for viewers to discover, and the feeling of catching it when it comes out of nowhere is a feeling of remarkable joy in addition to funniness. When they come at the rapid-fire pace of Arrested Development, you basically spend 22 minutes with your mouth agape at how these people can make every second so funny.

The fourth season is one I tried to like, but never could get into. I think in many ways, the constraint of being on a broadcast network like Fox helped this show immeasurably. It is in moments where you feel stuck that you can come up with the most creative solution, while in situations where the possibilities are limitless that oftentimes the results are mediocre. See? I am an optimist. I just took the worse of two situations and presented it as the better option. Or does that just reaffirm I’m a pessimist? I digress…

Sometimes I need a break from myself for, as you can see, I am constantly questioning things, criticizing myself and others, and worrying about things both in and beyond my control. Frankly, it can get a little exhausting, but that is what solo living room dance parties are for. I have an entire Spotify playlist of the songs I cannot help but get up and dance to when they are on.

One song is a solo dance party jam for me now, but in college, it was generally performed in groups. I was at the University of Southern California when Dashboard Confessional was peaking as a rock band and my friends and I were among his loyal faithful. We saw him in concert, we bought his merchandise, and we constantly played his music, especially the song Hands Down.

If you aren’t around precisely my age, you probably don’t know this song, but Dashboard’s Chris Carrabba says it is his best song. Unlike the sad emo hits you probably associate with Dash, this song is three minutes of pure, unadulterated happiness, the kind that comes with young love. In college, we would mutually agree to study dance breaks and my friend Stephanie and I would sing and dance to this song, loudly shouting the lyrics and exuberantly jumping up and down. When we weren’t studying and just hanging out or eating somewhere, our most cynical friend Vince would even get in on the fun by yelling out, “My hopes are so high that your kiss might kill me,” and we would retort, “So won’t you kill me. So I die ‘appy.”

If there is a single song I associate with my happiest memories of college, it is this one. It would score the montage of us saving up our meal plan to buy and eat four pounds of Runts while planning the world’s best love song mix CD, the time we tried to cook a “family” dinner and Steph bought steak instead of ground beef for our pasta dish, the time an intense pillow fight sent our friend Trevor to the ER, the Wet Hot American Summer parties, the trips to the low rent coffee shop for their off-brand “Zappacinos”, the time our friend was so intoxicated she insisted on only communicating in French, and all of those glorious football games.

There are songs that I associate with college that aren’t so joyous, but this is the one that no matter where, no matter when I hear it, I will stop, smile, and realize those were some pretty awesome times. Sure our hopes were high on how things would turn out and no one killed us with their kiss, but even though adulthood may have not been quite as exciting as we expected, I am still pretty sure we’re all going to die happy with the lives we lived.

A couple of people have asked me how I find time to write so many words about movies, TV shows, and songs of the past for this series. They also ask what my process is or how things get picked. Here’s the lowdown:

I know myself and know that I can neglect my personal page very easily without some sort motivation, so I have to create projects for myself like my Lenten 40 blogs in 40 days project, my classic movie adventure of 2013, and now this survey of my life through the lens of pop culture. So I came up with the idea. The next step was picking what to write about for each year. Over the course of a couple of hours, I mapped out 31 years of stuff picking not based on any theme, but based on what struck me as something meaningful to my own life.

When the day comes to write about a year, I start thinking about the three things in context and see if I can come up with a theme or through line to tie them all together. You’ve seen where I’ve stretched a bit, but most of the time I am surprised at how well they fit together.

Sometimes though, I get stuck. It happens to every writer, and it’s really not as fun as the movie Adaptation makes it out to be. If you haven’t seen it, my friend referred to it as the weirdest movie he’s ever seen. As story goes, the movie came out of Charlie Kaufman’s case of writer’s block trying to adapt the book The Orchid Thief, which is a pensive tome about searching for rare flowers, not exactly an action blockbuster. In the film, the screenwriter, a fictional version of the writer of the actual movie, Charlie Kaufman played by Nicholas Cage (like I said, it’s weird), struggles with writer’s block, resorting to screenwriting seminars, stalking the book’s author Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), and committing several crimes along the way.

My writer’s block is much less adventurous than Kaufman’s. In the movie, it is a beast, spiraling out of control, eventually leading to total mayhem, while mine rarely makes it off the living room couch. It usually involves falling down the Wikipedia rabbit hole or playing too many Sit N Gos online. As a writer though, the movie my friend could only sum up as, “Nicolas Cage, a swamp, alligators maybe? And a lot of weirdness and something about writing,” is something as relatable as a break up or a job interview. When you’re stuck on what to write, you come up with a list of remarkably bad and out there ideas, most of which will never be shared with anyone but yourself. If you look through my recently watched movies on Netflix or what I’ve been buying on Amazon, you’d probably think I was a little strange, but when you get in a headspace where you feel like you are stuck in one place, you’ll do anything you can to get out of it.

For Toby Ziegler on The West Wing, writer’s block is bouncing a rubber ball off a wall. The characters on this show about the executive branch of the government deal with much bigger problems than writer’s block. Other things are constantly transpiring that make President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) and his staff feel like they are stuck, be it the bureaucracy of the government, a deadlocked Senate, or having to give up one goal in order to achieve a more important one.  That’s the beauty of Aaron Sorkin-penned stuff though, the constant discussion and debate that results in these “stuck” moments.

While Adaptation focuses on how these moments and ruts can make you crazy, Sorkin, who is often one for idealism, likes to roll around in the mess and get a little dirty before emerging with an answer that is so good it is well worth the time and frustration. Even though I politically disagree with a lot of what Sorkin believes, I admired at how he let the other side speak eloquently (you’re my girl, Ainsley Hayes and I’ll love you forever, Christian Slater).

He sees these blocks as opportunities, and they have resulted in some of the most iconic moments of the series. When the President is starting to falter in his decision making, erring on the side of caution way too often as campaign season nears, the team hits a wall before four words changed everything: Let Bartlet be Bartlet.

What is simultaneously funny and sad about Aaron Sorkin and The West Wing is that it is his personal blocks that lead to some of the largest points of criticism and the downfall of The West Wing. It is inevitable when you write thousands and thousands of words that you use the same turn of phrase more than a couple of times. Heck, I’ve written less than 20,000 words in this blog series and I’ve already harped on ideas more than once. Sorkin though, has a peculiar pattern of speaking, so when he repeats himself, it is glaringly obvious, as indicated by this supercut (which, coincidentally was shown to me by the same guy who finds Adaptation incredibly weird).

The other issue was that when Sorkin hit the wall, he also hit the drugs pretty hard. When you are writing every episode of a 22-episode series, it is inevitable you’re going to burn out. Because he was so nervous to share the workload, he turned to drugs to keep him energized and motivated to push through those tough stretches where the ideas just don’t show up. As a result, he headed off to rehab and the show was turned over to other people after Season 4, leaving just a shell of this near-flawless in his wake.

As a writer, moments like that give me pause. I certainly don’t think I will turn up with a coke habit, but I do wonder if the emotional and mental strain that comes with writing day in and day out is something I can handle. If you’ve read my blog before, you know I open up quite a bit on this thing. It isn’t for some people, which is why my mom gets annoyed and constantly asks, “You aren’t going to put what I said on the internet, are you?”

When you feel like you have things to share though, you have to learn to get past the fear and just put it out there. Instead of quoting something trite and overused like, “Dance like nobody’s watching,” I instead present Jimmy Eat World’s A Praise Chorus, which might very well be the anthem for this blog series of mine. With lyrics like, “Stick around, nostalgia won’t let you down,” and “I’m on my feet, I’m on the floor, I’m good to go, all I need is just to hear a song I know,” I get a nice little emo kick in the ass about the fact that there is virtue in putting yourself out there.

The song is the third (and least known) single off Jimmy Eat World’s breakout album, which was originally titled Bleed American, changed to Jimmy Eat World in the wake of 9/11, but now goes by its original title. Like Rockin the Suburbs, it is one of those albums that was so integral to my college experience, it is impossible for me to ever forget it. While my favorite song of the record will always be If You Don’t, Don’t, A Praise Chorus is one of those songs perfect for college kids, as it rallies you to go out and try the new and unfamiliar, yet couches it in a slew of song references. In essence, it is a song about not just experiencing something in a song or a book, but going out there and seeking and experiencing the feelings that come with listening Crimson and Clover or Our House to make your life worthy of its own song. It is a rally cry against simply repurposing pop culture like you’re Jurassic World. It is about taking something familiar, doing something different with it, and pushing yourself out there beyond the wall of blocks your mind has constructed in order to make sure at least a little part of the world you live in is distinctively yours.

Scoring My Life Archive

I’ve mentioned before that my sister and I have an agreement to watch a show neither of us are particularly fond of anymore called The Strain. There is a character in the show that appears to be in his early 70s. In Season 1 it is revealed he is a Holocaust survivor and I didn’t think too much of it. My sister and I were watching some of Season 2 together and he reveals that he is defying aging and is actually 94 years old.

Both my sister and I needed a minute to think it through and, yeah, we probably should’ve realized a guy who was maybe 20 during WW2 would be damn near 100 now. It was such a common thing when we were kids for some of our friends to have grandparents that were Holocaust survivors that the idea one would be very much alive and kicking today felt so normal. Really though, kids today will go their whole lives more than likely never meeting someone who experienced the Holocaust or was a WW2 vet because most of them will have passed on.

So once again, I refer to difference between Millenials and Xennials and which way those Xennials lean. Many of my friends had close relationships with grandparents or other relatives who still had a couple of decades of good years in them. While we were not around to experience what happened during WW2, we got to hear firsthand about what happened on and off the battlefield. Meanwhile those just a few years younger than us had grandparents who were kids during the war and couldn’t tell us about why we fought and just how horrifying some of those important battles could be.

When Saving Private Ryan first came out in theaters, many veterans from that war walked out about 45 minutes into the film. It wasn’t because it was bad or the depiction of the storming of Omaha Beach was outrageously incorrect. They walked out because it was too real, bringing back memories of their own experiences in the service that they weren’t prepared to relive. I was a teenager at the time, but watching this movie in the theaters brought me to tears several times over. Watching the movie certainly didn’t make me understand the experiences of my relatives, but it did help me to understand some of the burden they bore by not only fighting for our country, but suffering the memories of the horrific experiences alone, unwilling to burden others with it.

They are called The Greatest Generation by many, including myself. These principled people put others before self, learned to live with what they had, and appreciated everything that was given to them. I admire them greatly and my heart holds a special place for their era. I don’t know if it is nostalgia when you long for a time you didn’t experience, but as someone who thinks the early 1950s are the greatest time for movies ever, I don’t know what else to call my infatuation with the era.

I was genuinely infatuated with Saving Private Ryan. To this day it ranks in my all-time top five. Every time I watch it, even now, I get a little misty-eyed, especially during the scene in which the group’s medic dies. After being shot, he is trying to instruct the guys how to help him. As they tell him where the wounds are, he realizes what no one else does, that his liver has been hit and he is going to die. Like WW2 vets, it is a horror my brain can comprehend, but I can only imagine how it would’ve felt.

I had that personal connection, but people younger than me who watch this movie now will not have such an experience. I imagine it’ll be more like when I watched The Passion of the Christ. It puts a historical event in context in a very visceral way, but you still feel somewhat disconnected since there is no one in your real life to anchor the feelings you’ve experienced in the movies. Movies are great to watch just to watch, but when you can use them to connect with someone in a way you couldn’t before, it is a surprisingly fulfilling experience.

Like my sister and The Strain, I tend to watch some oddball shows in an effort to connect with my mom. Lately when I am home, she will call out to me during the part in Columbo episodes where he smarmily reveals who the killer is so I can watch with her. My mom has no interest in serial television and she isn’t a fan of gruesome murder and crime, so she skips the procedurals like Law & Order or CSI.

It is no wonder then that when ABC launched a quirky little show that amounted to a procedural about dating and falling in love that both my mom and I fell head over heels for it. Before he was Ari on Entourage, Jeremy Piven played Cupid. Not metaphorical cupid like a matchmaker, Cupid cupid. The general premise is that Cupid pissed off Zeus or someone up there and they sent him down to Earth without his powers and told him he can’t get them back until he gets 100 couples together. His psychologist thinks he is insane and the audience never quite knows for sure he is who he says he is, which is its own amount of fun, but the weekly romances were exactly the kind of procedural our life as missing.

The show, which was kind of destined to fail when it was condemned to a Friday night time slot, never quite got the critical acclaim I think it deserved, though it did develop a cult following. Nowadays, shows like Say Yes to the Dress, The Millionaire Matchmaker, and other reality shows have somewhat filled the void of the relationship procedural, but none have that quirk and charm of this short-lived show. I like to think much like I was a few decades late for a time I think I would’ve thrived in, this show was about five years too early, as the proliferation of scripted TV shows recently discussed on NPR’s pop culture blog probably would’ve resulted in this show ending up on a niche cable network.

A show like Cupid was too high concept to really be timeless. Much of contemporary pop culture ties itself a little too closely to the time period. Many shows aren’t built to last anymore. Reality shows sum this up the best. If you don’t catch them on their initial run, you’re hardly ever going to see any reality competition show in syndication because once people knew who won, the interest dried up immediately.

Many songs are suffering the same fate, especially in the top 40 world where lyrics name drop other artists, TV shows, and current events. In the late 90s, punk and boy bands were dominating the charts tying themselves to the era with their sound, but there was an artist who paved the way for Taylor Swift by crossing over from country to pop who hit the charts doing very much her own thing. Shania Twain’s Still the One is a timeless kind of ballad that is just as compelling today as it was 17 years ago.

That is, so long as you keep the song out of context. When she wrote it, Shania was deeply in love with her producer, Mutt Lange. In 2010, he would leave her for her best friend. Ouch.

When Shania started her show at Caesars, I went with some friends. While not a die-hard Shania supporter, I like a lot of her songs, especially Still the One. However, knowing the story behind the song, I couldn’t help but get a little sad when we reached that portion of the performance. There are a lot of inadvertently hilarious moments in the show, like when she performs some songs on what appears to be a post-nuclear fallout cheetah planet.

For Still the One, she comes in on a white horse, fog rolls in. She gets off the horse and proceeds to sing the song to the animal, as it magically follows her around the stage. (Begging the question of logistically how this is accomplished. Do they spray her down with carrot juice or something?)

It’s intended to be beautiful, but my mind went to her failed relationship thinking to myself, “You had a husband to sing this song to forever, but now the only one to serenade is your horse. That’s pretty depressing, Ms. Twain.” This song, which is so lovely and doesn’t need any context to resonate with anyone who has ever been in love has been tainted by context.

That is what happens the more you know and the more something gets connected to a place, a person, or an era. A movie like Saving Private Ryan or a simple love song can make you feel so much more than taking in things sight unseen. For the movies, something that resonates in your head can be felt in your heart, while a song that always stirred up feelings will get you thinking about the who or why and get the song stuck in your head with more than just the melody.

When people talk about the defining teen movie of 1995, they tend to talk Clueless. It makes sense. The modern-day take on Jane Austen’s Emma stands up as a good movie 20 years later, it was a hit at the time, and really captured the cultural moment that was the Contempo Casual/grunge/Ska blend that was happening around the time.

I love Clueless too, but there is another movie from 1995 that I associate much more strongly with my adolescence and that movie is Empire Records. I actually didn’t see this movie until 1997 or so since it was a huge bomb in theaters, but developed a massive cult following on video. There are plenty of people like myself who think both movies are great, but there is a sentimental attachment to one or the other that I think might be one of the litmus tests for where on the spectrum you land between Snake People and Generation X. People have been observing for a while that there is a mini-generation between the two. Some call them Xennials, I just call them me and my peoples. Within our generation though, there are people who tend more towards one generation than the other. Those who lean Snake Person tend to prefer Clueless, while those of us who are more Gen Xers at heart live every day like it is Rex Manning Day and opt for Empire Records.

If you’re not familiar with the two films, let me give you a quick summary of each. In Clueless, Cher (Alicia Silverstone) is a well-meaning but self-absorbed and kind of unintelligent popular girl who takes a hapless loser and turns her into a well-groomed cool chick. In the end, she realizes that life isn’t always about status symbols and tries to live a more purposeful life and be a better person that she likes and stop worrying about whether or not other people like her. As a result, she remains super popular, gains even more friends, and gets to make out with Paul Rudd. If this is what you got for being a little less selfish, I am pretty sure most of us girls would by vying to run United Way right about now.

In other words, it is a lesson about how popularity isn’t everything. The moral of the story is if you are truer to yourself and kinder to mankind, you will be rewarded with a better life.

Then there is Empire Records, which is another movie about how living up to expectations isn’t all it is cracked up to be. But rather than spin a yarn about how great your life can be if care more about others, it readily admits your life probably sucks a little, but guess what? So does eveyone’s life. It is how you make the most of it that matters. Just look at the chicks in this movie. Most will tell you that Debra (Robin Tunney) is the coolest girl in the movie. We know she is cool because her wrists are bandaged from where she tried to slit them the previous night and she shaves her head in the record store bathroom. We know Gina is a cool party girl who puts up a good façade about enjoying how hot she is and the advantages that come with it. And then there is Corey (Liv Tyler) a super studious goody goody who wants to lose her virginity to Rex Manning because for this Type-A girl, even her deflowering has to be perfect.

The real scene that puts on display just how effed up these chicks are is when Gina admits she banged Rex even though she knew Corey wanted to, so Corey gets upset and takes it personal. In response, Gina, to borrow a poker term, reraises all in, goes and fetches Corey’s speed from her locker and proceeds to fling the pills at her lamenting Corey’s, “perfect, perfect future.”

It’s not just the girls either. The guys include a shoplifter named Warren, a kid who gambled the store’s deposit away in Atlantic City, two stoners who hallucinate they are playing with the band Gwar, and a too cool for school guitarist whose band is so lacking in street cred he is actually willing to let Gina front their “Damn the Man, Save the Empire” concert on the roof.

Damn the Man, Save the Empire really sums it up. This is a movie that asks teens, “you think you’re weird and screwed up? Well, can you beat this?” While Cher’s dilemma amounted to a failed driving test, a bad grade, and accidentally dating a gay guy, the stakes are much higher for Empire’s teens and the outcome is not so rosy. Sure, they keep Empire going, but Gina is still a promiscuous girl with Daddy issues. Corey is still gonna be on diet pills. Lucas will still feel nothing. But they got through today. So there is that, which you take, you build on, and you keep going.

Clueless is the Snake Person POV while Empire is for the Gen Xers in all of us. I sure wish Paul Rudd was in my future, but the teen in me bought into Empire’s view of the world more. Don’t expect much and you’ll be okay. You’re a little screwed up, but we all are really.

If that is the movie Snake Person/Gen X litmus test for the tweener generation, then I think The Real World is the TV version. If your quintessential season of this MTV reality show is the original Las Vegas season, you are a Snake Person-leaning sort. If you hear the show’s name and your mind immediately goes to Pedro, Puck, Pam, and Judd, you are a Gen Xer at heart. The Vegas season was a turning point for the show (which has now been on the air for more than two decades btw). Gone were the earnest attempts at learning about different cultures and people or starting a company or volunteering with kids. This was a season about partying and living it up with minimal responsibilities, save for a job “promoting” the nightclubs at the Palms, which is basically a license to party.

It reminds me of this growing trend of parents supporting their children after college for a couple of years. This was something my mother made abundantly clear was not an option, even if she wanted to, as we had no money. College was our safety net, then we had to get into the real world. Such was the case of the early Real World casts. Have you ever paid attention to what kind of jobs these people had? Judd worked for a nationally-recognized newspaper. Pam was a doctor. Pedro was the foremost lobbyist for AIDS and HIV awareness. Corey was the slacker because she found a job at a high-end department store. This is not an affront to the Vegas cast at all, it seems like the show required you not to have outside employment in order to be on the show, but shows you what passed for The Real World in 1995 compared to 2000.

In old school Real World, Puck got thrown out of the house because he was disrespectful. Now, you get thrown off The Real World if you commit assault. This is how lax standards have become. I mean, check this out. Can you just feel the earnestness oozing through the camera?

Speaking of earnestness, I am still not sure where Hootie and the Blowfish lands on my litmus test. I think your reaction to Let Her Cry might determine whether you are in the Xennial category at all. Because let’s be honest, most Gen Xers were a little too old and way too cool to listen to his light rock jam band and most Snake People came of age after Hootie had peaked and was already a punchline. But if you have a non-ironic sweet spot for Darius Rucker and crew, you’re probably a Xennial, a kid who missed out on all the ennui and jadedness of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the crew, but still too skeptical to fully believe we’re all special, that the world is great, and that we are all destined to end up with Paul Rudd.