Four Easy Ways to Relive the 90s

Phew, finally off the bus. School’s over, and as soon as your Lisa Frank backpack hits the floor, the Power Rangers are taking over your living room. Between commercials for Kids Bop and the next episode of Wishbone, you’re busy having the fight of your life. Pokémon sleeps for no one. While these staples of the 90s might seem decades in the past, here are four ways to relive those golden years quicker than you can connect with dial-up.

These people know what's up, homie.

Gear Up

Hold on, Alex Mac. Before you shrink into the metallic pool and slip into the 90s, there are a couple of supplies you’re going to need. Grab your denim scrunchie to hide your twenty-something bed head and venture to the nearest grocery store (preferably via Razor scooter). If your local market doesn’t have a fancy vintage food aisle, just head for the snacks, junk food, and no regrets.

That’s right – throw body-consciousness out the window. If only for the day, you’re a kid again. You have the metabolism of a hummingbird and need to keep your energy up for all of the couch-sitting, recess, and mindless GameBoy activity you’ve got planned for the day.

While some of our most beloved snacks and bad foods have fallen from the shelves – Oreo O’s, Dorito 3D’s, and cartoon-imprinted Eggo waffles – thank goodness there are still some golden oldies that have lived on into the 21^st century and survived the health food trend.

First, get the sugary snacks in the cart. Your afternoon cartoon fest wouldn’t be complete without Dunkaroo’s, Gushers, Fruit Roll-Ups, and Pop Rocks. Grab all that and a bag of chips and a box or two of Bagel Bites.

Get Outside

Remember when you used to practically live on your bike/rollerblades/skateboard/scooter? Prior to your current set of wheels (and adult responsibilities ) life was sweet, and staying outside in the afternoon was a must unless Pokémon was on.

Before that sugar high you’re riding drives you straight into the ground, grab a kickball and some friends (who preferably also grew up in the 90s). Hacky sack and Bop-It are also acceptable, and if the weather permits, get out the Slip ‘N’ Slide. Remember, all of these activities will be better the more times you repeat “as if,” “jiggie with it,” and “rad.” And if you manage to double-dog-dare one of your homies, you’re the honorary 90s kid of the day.

Use Your Resources

Ok, so some might consider this cheating, but the Web (which is this new thing you’ve probably never heard of) has a lot of great opportunities to rewatch all those Nick toons, melodramatic Disney teen-dramas, and every Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles battle you could ever hope for.

If you’re really dedicated, see if you can find a copy of Netscape and YouTube the shit out of some dial-up noise.

Now that you’ve got your snacking down, your cholesterol up, and have probably pulled a muscle, it’s time for the entertainment.

Netflix has many cartoons on instant view, if you’re looking for a quick, legal way to get your Nick fix. Wind your way through the morning classics with some Rugrats, Rocko, and Hey Arnold – all of which are on Instant View.

As a child of the 90s, you know how to dig up what you want out of the internet. You grew up with this stuff. You’re an old pro. Classics like Clarissa Explains It All, Daria, and Beevis and Butthead are out there, just waiting to be watched. Strut your 90s tech-cleverness. Retrostatic.com also has a ton of old commercials and TV intros for your viewing pleasure, and don’t forget about the piles of 90s hits on YouTube. Line up your Beanie Babies and sing your heart out to some Spice Girls.

As you ease into the afternoon, go out with some good clean, family-oriented Full House and Growing Pains… because you know you still have the theme songs fully memorized. Admit it.

If you’re a diehard going for the full experience, ditch the Internets. There are still a handful of 90s shows still on the air. While the jokes in The Simpsons might have changed a bit since it started, it’s still going strong.

Nick at Night claims to show older shows, but Family Matters might be the only show not from the 2000s. Scary, isn’t it? Teen Nick has also carved out some air time for old classics.

Get Supa Fly

Why did everyone on TV in the 90s look so frumpy? While the 90s might not have been the best decade for fashion, we all remember it fondly. You might not want to go outside in your pink paisley shorts or Osh Kosh overalls. The light-up LA Gears could maybe stay.

One designer that we’re all familiar with is still making her mark. She was funded by everyone’s school supplies, rainbow lunchboxes, and patterned Trapper Keepers – Lisa Frank.

If your eyes can handle the fluorescent colors and multitude of cute cartoon animals, everyone’s favorite tacky trendsetter has a website where you can stock up on office supplies that will surely make your co-workers jealous. Too embarrassed to flaunt Lisa’s pens, stationery, and endless rolls of stickers? No problem, dude. She’s also got apparel that’s perfect as a nostalgic nightie.

Going Local

So, for anyone who’s following my blog or ends up stumbling upon it, I’m now employed at GoLocalWorcester, which is awesome. Getting paid for what I want to do? Hell yeah. Here are the first two stories I’ve done.

http://www.golocalworcester.com/news/122-children-at-sullivan-middle-school-are-homeless/

http://www.golocalworcester.com/news/censorship-issues-on-clark-campus/

The Boyfriend Trend

Last week, I was doing something I usually do when mindlessly procrastinating – window shopping with the help of my internet browser. (I hope everyone picked up on that play on the word, “window.”) I never actually buy clothes online, but I love browsing around. I’m always too worried it wouldn’t fit just right. I’m kind of picky.

I came across one article of clothing that I particularly liked… so much that I was tempted to break my rule of never buying. The $80 price tag was the first thing that pushed me away, but that was not the end of my distasteful reaction of the jacket… or “Boyfriend Blazer” as the designer called it.

This brings me to a realm of clothing that has been problematic in my mind – the boyfriend attire that’s not actually for your boyfriend or anyone with a boyfriend. Where and when did this odd trend start? The all-knowing source of Wikipedia pointed me in one direction. In 2009, “…when actress Katie Holmes was spotted in public wearing Tom Cruise’s slouchy jeans after a Broadway rehearsal…” the trend really took off.

It all comes from females borrowing their boyfriend’s shirts, pants, blazers, etc. and making your wardrobe look one size too big. I guess modern fashionistas are ignoring the fact that some females have been dressing like this for decades.

But this idea is brilliant in concept. Women want comfort, but in order for them to buy into it, it needs to have another persona attached. Of course it’s not cool or acceptable for a woman to want comfort over looks for no reason. Now, they have one – in order to look like they have a boyfriend. Thanks, H&M. I’m all for clothes that are comfortable and male-inspired. Let’s mix things up a bit… but do we really need to call them “boyfriend” clothes? Can’t we just accept an androgynous trend coming on without ascribing it to our boyfriends?

More than just running errands

This past weekend, I needed to go shopping. Usually, this is merely a question of how much effort my roommates or I feel like putting out; do we really feel like making the trek to Trader Joe’s for the better options or am I content with Price Chopper? (To add further complexity, I got a gift card to PChops for Christmas.) But this weekend was different. This weekend, I found myself farther out on Route 9, past the Trader Joe’s, past the other Price Chopper. I found myself in another world.

This is ridiculous.

The sun was dimly setting into the less than vibrant horizon, but I could still make out a huge hill in the distance. We drove over a small bridge, near a BJ’s gas station. A bulk grocery store having expanse into the market of gasoline is strange enough to me, but it gets far stranger. Fancy streetlights (not just the orange mercury vapor ones) lined the four-lane road that continued and wrapped around the hill on our right. The hill was clearly manmade and towered next to the cars parading past. The only thing that gave its prominence any competition was the structures to come.

Ahead on our left was one of the largest group of subdivisions I’ve ever seen. They were shiny and new, yet horribly flimsy and repetitive. All I could think about were the lyrics of “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds… except these boxes were less little and more ginormous. As we made the bend to the shopping arena, I groaned. Northborough Crossing is like its own city. Put in a school and a hospital, and have Wegman’s set up a P.O. box, and you’re all set. I wondered if there are any tenants in that apartment complex that work shifts around the shopping plaza and never have to leave.

According to an article in the T&G, the plaza has 2,400 parking spaces. The Wegman’s alone is 138,000 square feet.

The ridiculousnessness.

Now, I had been in a Wegman’s before in upstate New York, but this Wegman’s is something I had never before encountered. I was expecting something like Whole Foods – pretentious and trying way too hard to offer more of an experience than Wal-Mart while still serving the same purpose.

We entered… and I nearly had a panic attack. Besides being a Whole Foods on steroids, our local Wegman’s also has a whole separate Market Café area. Here, customers can get food on the spot to eat or order to go… that is, if you can ever make up your mind. We got a plate and filled it with some incredibly hodgepodge foods ranging from naan to broccoli salad to steamed asparagus. There was Thai, a pizza place, sushi, an entire vegetarian bar… It was ridiculous. I’ve felt like a glutton before, but when I realized that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to eat food or buy it first, I really hit rock bottom.

The moral of the story: go to Wegman’s but be prepared. This one’s a doozy, and its surroundings are just as perplexing. Just make sure some time has passed since you last read 1984 or any other books on futuristic dystopias.

…and other things technology has stolen

It was a tremendously risky thing to you. You were literally placing your deepest secrets in the hands of your peers. Literally. Vital information crossed the room, and we were all so sure no one knew about it. While keeping things under wraps, sneaking them across classrooms, and making sure the teacher didn’t notice used to be something only the deft and courageous tackled, passing notes in class is a thing of the past.

I’ll let that sink in for a minute.

Think back to elementary school. You’d spend a significant amount of time writing it out. Gel pens were high class. Your ordinary sheet of notebook paper would look like an origami masterpiece by the time it was ready for its trip across the classroom.

How many times did we participate in this ritual? Getting caught, that kid who would read it before it got to the right set of eyes, the anticipation of getting a response to the “Check yes or no” love letters.

In dawned on me recently that passing notes in class may very well become a thing of the past. A coworker joked, “Yeah, we’ll be saying ‘Back in my day, we passed paper notes to each other.’ Now they’re all texting.” And it’s true.

The scariest part though is how quickly it’s happening. We haven’t been out of grade school for that long. Sure, we all want to pretend we’re adults by now, but when you count the years, it really wasn’t that long ago.

Kids are also getting cell phones at a much earlier stage in life. I got my first cell phone at 16 when I was going on a trip separate from my parents for two weeks. I didn’t know what to do with it, and I hardly ever used it. Only after high school did I really ever need a phone other than the chorded phone in my room at home. My niece just got a cell phone for her birthday. She’s nine. She will never know the joy of passing a note across the classroom. Between that and her Nintendo DS, she’s entertaining herself via screen most of the day… but I digress and will end this snippet before sounding too much like an old person way ahead of my time.

Why yes, I am a beer pong champ. Funny you should ask.

My coconspirator, Alumni Editor, Gwen Walsh seems to come up with topics for her weekly editor’s corner like magic. Over winter break, I thought she was having email issues; I had not one, not two, but five separate emails from her, all titled “EC.” Somehow each week, she experiences some incredibly interesting event that comes out of nowhere. This week, I think she has a run for her money.

Yeah, it's totally a sport.

Wednesday afternoon. I still have no topic for my editor’s corner. Sure, I’ve encountered many interesting ideas and concepts in my classes this week. I could write pages about Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent or the importance of companies exercising transparency. But that’s not nearly as interesting as what happened to me later that afternoon.

While sitting in my room, catching up on work and reading, I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize. Usually, I’m apprehensive, but I went for it. “Hello?” A slow, staggering voice on the other end: “Yeah… Hi… is this The Scarlet?” Yes, I am the student newspaper incarnate. How can I help you?

After a few exchanges, the caller’s point became clear.

The bumbling, twenty-something was asking whether we cover off-campus events. While I told him not usually, I am open to the occasional opportunity to open our pages to happenings in the community, if I think students need to hear about it. What did this guy have to pitch to me?

“Yeah, I’m working for a business, WorldPong.com,” and he proceeded to inform me about the national beer pong competition happening in Atlantic City. “It’s not about the drinking, really, but about it as a sport… So, what’s the party scene there? Do people do a lot of partying?” I stifled my laughter and answered his questions.

This guy wanted me to do an article… not an ad or a mention… an article about their “sporting event” for beer pong. Really? We might not be the most focused school in the world. We might not all spend every evening in the library. We all enjoy house parties, but I honestly can’t see many being interested in a full article about beer pong, can we? (If you are, you now know the website to visit.)

“So, uh, you’re probably great at beer pong, right?”

I nonchalantly told him it comes with the title of Editor-in-Chief: yes, I am Clark’s beer pong champ. If anyone would like to challenge this, I’ll see you in Atlantic City.

Still reading? Seriously interested? Worcester’s round in the competition will be held at Jillian’s at 6:00 p.m. the 22nd. The first place team at each tournament will win a 2 night hotel stay at the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City. Go for it.

A World of Advertising

I hate flying home for the holidays. The ends justifies the means, so I do it, but the whole process of getting to the airport, being practically strip-searched in front of strangers, and having to hold a jumping jack pose while being electronically scanned is just ridiculous. I feel like it probably couldn’t get much worse.

When I finally get through that headache and am sitting in Logan’s kind of crappy terminals complete with hotel reject carpeting and linked chairs reeking of hospital waiting rooms, I take the free Wi-Fi gladly. I can waste some time on Facebook, keep mom up to date with my safe traveling, and see how much warmer it’s going to be when I’m home, and finally in the door.
This season, however, BMW wanted to make my life a little more ridiculous. Boston Logan, an airport that always prides itself on its free Wi-Fi for guests, now has BMW introducing the service. On their login page, the option for free Wi-Fi is only available if you take a survey or watch a video. Granted, I did write this in the meantime, so I wasn’t so subjected, but c’mon… Now, not only do I have the adverts blasting in my ear, on TVs and the intercom, but also on my own computer when I’m trying to get your free Wi-Fi? Enough already!

MTV at my university

http://clarknews.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/hollywood-and-reality-television-come-to-clark/

It’s all about who you know

Stats of geographical source of LinkedIn members.

As graduation is getting closer, and I am forced to consider a “real” life after college, there’s one word that I can’t shake out of my mind: job. While “loan,” and “adult” are also high contenders, I’m finding myself increasingly thinking about what the hell I’m going to be doing for a living.

In the process of stressing out about all of this, I’ve started using LinkedIn, a website that is best described as Monster smashed together with Facebook. Sure it offers some really useful tools like hosting a spot to showcase your abilities and your resume. You can also become a part of groups that are relevant to your field and seek out potential jobs. Moreover, LinkedIn shows just how much we are defined by those we know, especially in terms of today’s job market.

One of the major parts of LinkedIn is connection with others. Past employers, fellow employees, family members, and college friends all add up to make your network. You can see what they’re doing, where they work, and who they know. It’s a very socialized version of job hunting, visually revolving around people instead of skills or job titles.

While I do think it’s healthy to put faces to resumes, it’s a weird environment.

Just like any other social networking site, you’re selling yourself. LinkedIn is your own arena to make yourself look as employable and knowledgeable as possible and to show how many people you know.

What are interesting to me are the differences between LinkedIn and other social networking sites. As with Facebook, users of LinkedIn can post things of interest, have a profile picture, and get updates about their connections.

When I first started using the site, however, I felt strange using the same practices as I would on Facebook. I didn’t want to use my same profile picture. Why? It’s not like my Facebook makes me out to be a crazy college party animal; in fact, I look pretty subdued in my photo, but for some reason, it just didn’t seem professional enough to use as my picture on LinkedIn. What am I supposed to use the posting for? On Facebook, I usually post articles about politics or videos that satirize the whole situation. I might send someone a link to an irrelevant cute cat picture or post my photos from a recent trip. Does any of that seem like a good idea on LinkedIn? No. So what do I do with this feature?

Funny how function of a website – even within the parameters of social networking – determines how we use and perceive it. It was also funny to see how hard all of my peers try to sell themselves. Yes, that’s the point of the game, but that doesn’t make it any cooler to play it.

Join LinkedIn and you'll look just like all of these happy professional people. Yay!

Future Clarkies won’t need to worry about the SAT

This time four years ago, there was a huge, blue paperback College Board book on my desk. It sat there for months, as those three letters, S A T, menacingly stared back at me. Did I ever do a single practice exam? No. I sold it to my neighbor and probably blew the money hanging out with friends after school.

Yeah, you remember this book.

I’m sure my dad wasn’t very happy about that, but preparing for the SAT just wasn’t something I wanted to do. I wanted to get a score I deserved, not one I crammed to get.

The test was just as annoying as I had anticipated. Waking up early, still in a groggy state, I drove to my high school and did what I had to do. I wrote about some pointless topic for 25 minutes and put arbitrary numbers into formulas.

The scoring system confused me, but apparently it confused others even worse; the kid next to me accidentally skipped a bubble, sending him into a fit of erasing that took more time than we were given. Redo.

The essays were also stupid. I recall one about yawning. Really? I’m getting up at the crack of dawn to take a test that’s going to make me read about yawning? What kind of maniacal people do College Board hire? “Even reading about yawning can make you want to yawn,” it said. Thanks, SAT.

When I got my scores back, it took me a while I figure it out. The year I did them, they had just changed the procedure for no apparent reason other than to make it harder for me to figure out if I was happy or not. My final reaction – meh. Not great, not bad.

I remember my AP English teacher telling us about someone she knew who graded the writing portions during the summer. They don’t give them enough time to read them and are told to just glance it over, read the first and last sentences and give it a number. This shocked and frustrated me to the point of doing a presentation on the shortcomings of standardized testing my senior year. Apparently I was onto something.

According to fairtest.org, nearly 900 colleges are now test-optional, Clark soon to be one of them. Yep, high school you didn’t need to freak out at all. They’re pretty much pointless.

Clark’s online news hub recently issued an article about their decision to go SAT/ACT optional by fall 2013. Due to a study by the Admissions office and faculty, the school has decided to put more emphasis on the student’s performance in high school, strength of the high school, character, class rank, and outside activities.

President Angel was also quoted in the article, saying Clark’s new LEEP (Liberal Education and Effective Practice) program will work in conjunction with this decision. Don Honeman, dean of admissions and financial aid, believes that this fits well with Clark’s more hands-on approach to critical thinking and will foster students’ work and engagement with faculty and other students.

Retrospectively, I still completely agree with my position on standardized testing. It’s biased and encourages a narrowing of the curriculum. Students shouldn’t be taught to test well on a test to get them into college. They should be taught how to be engaged and think critically about real-life issues and problems. They shouldn’t study something just because it’s something on which they will be tested, and likewise, colleges shouldn’t base the enrollment process on numbers that can be skewed by so many variables.

While the argument that there needs to be some standard, measurable level of proficiency in such things as reading, writing, and math does hold some ground, there must be a better, more thorough way of understanding this aspect of a potential college student.

I’m just glad I didn’t freak myself out too much about the SAT when I took it.