Step 3: Try to stop self from screaming “YES!!!” when mother offers to throw you baby shower.
Step 4: Begin immediately fielding calls from everyone you’ve ever met asking if you’ve registered yet.
Step 5: Mention to your husband in passing that you should really register soon.
Step 6: Half-heartedly attempt to register one night but get distracted by Dawson’s Creek marathon on Netflix.
Step 7: Finally sit down to register after death threat from cousin.
Step 8: Begin reading the product reviews.
Step 9: Stop reading product reviews when blood starts spurting from your eyes.
Step 10: Say screw it and start picking things based solely on color and how many adorable dancing giraffes it features. Then eat an entire bag of Cheetos and take a nap. You’ve earned it.
To normal people, that statement probably seems pretty benign. But to anyone (re: girls) who grew up in the ’90’s, that statement means that life outside of our couch has now become non-existent. It means we now have 128 episodes, which roughly equals out to about 5,504 minutes, (oh yeah, I did the math) of ridiculous, overly articulate, teenage angst right at our fingertips. Which means working, sleeping, eating and even breathing if it wasn’t involuntary has now taken a backseat to catching up on the lives of all those wacky Capeside kids.
I’m not proud of this. I wish I was stronger. I wish I could disentangle the show from my nostalgia and make fun of it like the rest of the world.
And I really wish I still didn’t think a 16-year-old Pacey Witter was hot.
But I’m not. And I can’t. And he still is.
The good news, however, is that even if loving this melodramatic 90’s teen soap is lame, the fact can’t be denied that pretty much everything you need to know about life is hidden somewhere within those 128 episodes.
Which is why I’d like to present the following, which I like to call the Tao of Dawson:
Oldest friendships are the best friendships. They’re also the friendships that will royally eff up every future romantic relationship you ever have should they involve someone of the opposite sex.
Aspiring filmmakers are SUPER whiny.
Everything that happens at age 15 is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED AND/OR WILL EVER HAPPEN!!!
Sex is not something to be enjoyed. It is something to be over-analyzed, dissected, elevated to impossible heights and be a never-ending source of despair (both when you have it and when you don’t and even when you kind of have it but not really because something interrupted it).
Most mainstream ’90’s music was SUPER whiny.
Katie Holmes used to be much more humanoid.
Free-spirited blonde chicks do not fair well in life. They end up in rehab, in the looney bin or dead.
Getting drunk, especially when you’re underage, is bad but sometimes you have to do it in order to move the plot along.
It is apparently possible for a teenage boy and a teenage girl, both chockful of raging hormones, to sail around the world for three months alone and not have sex. Also, parents are totally cool with the fact their teenage son has a ladder outside his window that his female teenage best friend uses at all hours for sleepovers.
Everything that happens at age 17 is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED AND/OR WILL EVER HAPPEN!!!!!!!
Even overzealous religious and borderline racist grandmothers can change their stripes.
If your spouse cheats on you, then you divorce them, then decide to get back together, remarry and have another kid after almost two decades after your first kid, you will die a horrible death shortly thereafter.
Being gay in a small town SUCKS.
Being clinically pyscho can be fixed in just a few weeks.
Everything that happens at age 20 is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED AND/OR WILL EVER HAPPEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Chick Writes Stuff 