I was born in the year 1998, on the cusp of the turn-of-the-century. I was, by technical standard, alive in the nineties, however, I don’t necessarily feel I can necessarily consider myself a “nineties kid.” I feel disconnected from the warm memories of Dunkaroos and brightly colored windbreakers, from an age of glamour shots and pagers. My generation was considerably different; I got my first cell phone in the fifth grade when most adults were still adapting to the pocket-sized portable devices. I grew up watching New Wave Nickelodeon: shows like "SpongeBob" and "The Fairly OddParents," which numbed the mind and started the trend of calling my generation of kids inattentive and easily distracted (True? Perhaps, though I hate to stereotype). Point being, I am not a child of the nineties, and neither are my fellow 17 to 22-year-olds, and we can’t miss that which we never really had.
I don’t remember anything of the nineties. I was not yet out of my pampers for most, if not all of it. Aside from a few passing memories of being tossed up in the air in a swimming pool and throwing up a tuna fish sandwich- one of my earliest memories, unfortunately- I don’t remember much of anything before age three. That being said, my memories don’t really come to form a clear picture until I was right about kindergarten age, and by that point, it was 2004 and the nineties were, quite literally, a thing of the past. 2004 was a time of tiny lipgloss cell phones and George Bush. These are my first memories, and so, for as long as I’ve been impressionable, I have been completely and utterly under the upper hand of the 2000s.
The year is 2017. I am 19-years-old, currently submerged in a BuzzFeed article shared by one of my classmates who feels there are "17 Things That Only Nineties Kids Will Understand" that she claims to "understand." Among the list are TV shows like "Daria" and "Doug," and boy bands like The Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. These are perhaps things I saw as a kid, but never was the culture projected directly at me. Sometimes I caught "Rocko's Modern Life" on Nicktoons Network, but I don’t look back at it with a feeling of nostalgia.
I don’t feel nostalgic for something that wasn’t really a piece of my generation. I don’t look back at stirrup tights and big goofy sweaters and think I remember when we wore this, and I miss it! When in fact, I don’t, and I hardly remember such a time. On a side note, the nineties were absolutely ridiculous. I can’t help but get the feeling that everybody feigns nostalgia for the nineties because they are trying so very hard to justify their horrible choices in fashion, music, Crystal Pepsi, etc. I don’t understand why kids my age feel nostalgia for a generation they weren’t a part of, and more importantly I don’t understand how.
