When I was a teenager I would tape every episode of 90210 every week and then watch it over and over until the next week and then watch them over and over and over until the next week and on and on forever. My dad thought I was a ridiculous person. He knew the best way to punish me to was to take away one of my obsessions for a week and then watch me melt down for seven straight days. It was the worst.

One time I got into trouble for who knows what and he took away 90210 for a month. Holy crap! I had to be creative about having my mom record it for me at her apartment so that I could watch it over there or at my friend's houses. My grandparents didn't have a VCR and my mom had no idea how to set hers so I was on my own for this espionage. My dad even knew that I had these backup plans but he knew that not having it to watch over and over all week was enough punishment. Also, having to rely on my incredibly unreliable mother was like the punishment to end all punishments.

I also, when I was around 13, papered my bedroom walls in magazine images of boys that I had crushes on. I mean, floor to ceiling papering of faces (Dylan got an entire wall, obviously). How creepy is that when you think about it? I'll tell you- It was so creepy. So many eyes were staring back at me and yet I thought it was the best. I got totally addicted to buying Bop! and Big Bopper and TeenBeat magazines. I spent all of my babysitting money on them and agonized over them every month even though the same information was always in them. When I was older I found a stack of magazines in my closet and figured out that I spent something insane like 300 dollars on magazines in a year. That is a lot of babysitting.

My dad thought my bedroom was also ridiculous but he kind of chalked it up to "teenage girls are nuts" I think and just decided to ignore it. (After this phase, I drew band logos all over my walls and that was also a terrible idea. Wait! Then I painted over that with bright lime green paint on all four walls. God, I was dumb.) Friends of mine at school created a code for how to talk about boys at school that we found cute so that no one would know who we were talking about. It's crazy what hormones can do.

It has occurred to me that there is nothing in my life today that is important to me as everything seemed to be back then. If I miss a show, pretty much any show that I love, I don't really care beyond slight annoyance. I don't collect anything or have intense crushes on anyone. I don't listen to the same record over and over again thinking that I am the only person to understand it's greatness. I don't think that a bad day at school means that I will never get a scholarship to college and then my life will be over before it even starts.

In most ways it's a relief to not feel everything so powerfully anymore but sometimes I wonder if it's bad that I am not that passionate about anything. Am I hardened and bitter now that I've lived through more things? Do we all become functionally brain damaged when we're teenagers? Have I numbed completely to life? A fake person on a television show used to have the power to break my heart and now it's rare if an actual human being that I care about can do that.

Tonight at a bar, Karen (who is in town for a job) and I were blatantly hit on by a dude who hilariously opened with "you girls look like you love excitement, like you're wild." Hilariously, we were talking about Bain and Lillie when he walked up (Karen's kids). Wild!! I told him he was incredibly bad at reading people. When I was 13 a mundane day at home could be a rollercoaster of emotion and an exciting joyride through laughter and tears but nowadays I'm lucky if I meet a friend for a drink on a Saturday night. I mean, I could just as easily put on pajamas and read a book, you know?