i don’t believe in guilty pleasures
but there are some things i am kind of embarrassed to love as much as i do, because of the extent to which they are not at all any kind of good. degrassi is kind of like this, but not really, because its suckiness is part of its charm, in that sometimes i’m like “whoa, they have people on this show who can act and make me care about their characters and also i love spinner so hard it’s kind of insane,” and then other times i’m like “oh man pot is bad because it makes diabetic people forget to take their insulin shots and then gets your hot boyfriend kicked out of college? GOD I LOVE THIS SHOW.”but i really mean things like, oh god, sabrina the teenage witch, which is first of all vastly inferior to clarissa explains it all, and also just terrible. like everything that sucks about the 90s, is what that show is. but there was like a year or two of my life where i watched it like, fucking daily because all i ever watched was the-n, and when they weren’t showing degrassi or some shows even i could not bring myself to care about, they were showing like eight hundred episodes of sabrina the teenage witch a day. and the funny part of this story is that this all happened while i was seventeen, which is far too old for this.
you know, like i love hey arnold and, oh fuck me, as told by ginger? am i admitting this in public? yeah okay i love as told by ginger, although i got really mad at them that time that they did some bullshit holiday episode and ginger’s assy deadbeat dad came back because if there is one cliche i hate, it is the cliche wherein asshole parents magically stop sucking all of a sudden, like that’s one thing that makes veronica mars so awesome is that her mom is a shitty shitty mom and then she just keeps being a shitty mom and it sucks and is painful but also true. that’s one thing the fucking baby-sitters club got right, that kristy’s dad never came back after just walking out one day when she was little, and she was basically like “it sucked, but fuck him.” and then there was that weird spinoff series i read like five books even though i was too old for, where he showed up all “i’m getting married, come hang out with me” and this is hard to admit but actually ann m. martin or her ghostwriter handled that legitimately well, with one of kristy’s brothers being like “woo, dad’s back” and another one being like “dude fuck you for abandoning us and now just pretending like we’re all buddy buddy and shit” and kristy being like “um you’re my dad and i love you but this is fucking weird to pretend like we haven’t not-spoken in ten years.”
but so, nickelodeon cartoons i’m way too old for, i am 100% down with this. fucking animorphs, i am forever down with, because they are so awesome that it makes it even more annoying when they suck and/or make no sense because it’s like, you know maybe if this hadn’t had to be a monthly kids’ series this could have turned into something even more amazing. like how many YA series invite young readers to ponder questions like “to what extent can you blame someone for following their nature” and “is the killing of innocents justified in pursuit of the larger goal of defending your cause” and “no, seriously, do the ends justify the means? do they? if the ends are like, the salvation of humanity? but the means are like, killing a shit ton of innocent people?” not fuckin baby-sitters club, that’s for sure. these are not the kind of things i am talking about.
but sabrina the teenage witch. that show is just kind of terrible. and yet! i bet you anything if i had a tv and it was on, i would be watching it all the time. like the time i spent an entire summer, when i wasn’t doing anything else (which was reasonably often), watching VH1. i have seen, i’m pretty sure, every episode of “i love the ____s” that has ever aired. most of them multiple times. WHAT IS MY LIFE.
also, what is my life that i’m here like I CAN’T BELIEVE I’VE WATCHED MICHAEL IAN BLACK MAKE FUN OF VANILLA ICE, REPEATEDLY, instead of i can’t believe i’m dropping out of college. i don’t know. i’m weirdly okay with that fact. both the dropping out, and the fact that it no longer concerns me, because i’m decent enough at not worrying about things i can’t worry about anymore, unless it’s people not liking me, or me being some kind of failure at something. and also the fact that i am more weirded out by how many hours of my life hal sparks has played a role in despite the fact that i have never seen an episode of queer as folk.
the point of this entry i guess is that i have a bunch of annoying emails to send, wrapping things up here, and also i should pack, also i really, really hate thanksgiving, like it was my least favorite holiday even before i was old enough to get how absolutely abhorrent it is on every conceptual level, and i would rather be watching sabrina the teenage witch than doing any of these things, even though it is a terrible, terrible show and not even as fun on a wacked-out 90s fashion level as clarissa (i am pretty sure, in some complicated indirect way, that clarissa is partly responsible for my current-day love of bright colors, doc martens, patterned tights, and general sartorial weirdness. YES, SECRETLY I THINK OFFBEAT 90S FASHION IS AWESOME AND I WANT IT TO BE SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE TO DRESS LIKE THAT ALL THE TIME), but i’m sort of a grown-up so probably i should get to it
but on the other hand there’s like half a season of degrassi for me to catch up on, and if the government is going to force me to take a holiday, you know. maybe i can multitask. we’ll see.
listen, stop calling sabrina the teenage witch a terrible show! it entertains, doesn’t it?! ;)
