It takes a great deal of pathos to quit the thing you’ve dedicated virtually your entire life to becoming good at. There are a great many reasonably principled human beings who would eat every plate of shit their benefactors pushed their way if it meant securing themselves a successful dream job, justifying it in a variety of ways. “They’re

dealing the cards and I’m on the player’s side of the table.” “I’m just paying my dues.” “Every career sucks sometimes.” In pursuit of whatever American Dream we have for ourselves, many of us would grin, bear it, and wipe our mouths.

But there comes a point where enough is enough. The minutiae

of the daily grind and the excessive amount of administrative politics have a way of wearing down both our bodies and minds in ways we can’t imagine when we’re 12 years old and throwing a baseball or playing Tiny Tim in a local theater during the winter holidays. Once you’ve reached the peak of the highest mountain, you realize . . .

‘hey old lady/you’re so old/tell me about the ‘90s’ – unnamed Girls Rock Chicago band lyrics, as related to the author by their bandmate

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It’s no surprise that ‘90s nostalgia is everywhere right now. My teen decade was the ‘90s, and we were big on the ‘70s then – I remember wearing my dad’s threadbare decal tshirts everywhere with bellbottom corduroys or thrifted slip skirts or polyester tennis skirts, nostalgic

for the decade I was born in that I couldn’t remember anything about because, you know, I was a baby. Teen nostalgia is particularly fascinating to me because it asks us to recall a time only known to us in photographs and hazy early memories, a time marked by its past trends. The gauche becomes trendy again through these revised and rosy lenses. We rarely have complicated conversations about Operation Desert Storm, or about the signing of NAFTA and CAFTA, or the emergence of mass HIV education and the

battles fought to get there, and so on. Chain wallets? We can talk about those. Nostalgia asks us to remember our gentle personal foibles. It does not like the messy and complex.

(Most media does not like the messy and complex in general, of course. The messy and complex does not generate clicks. It is particularly dangerous to ad revenue to ask us to look at ourselves as truly fallible. To be fallible is to be, on some level, both complex in a way that nothing an advertiser can sell . . .