I grow old, I grow old.

Lately I've been listening to a whole lot of Pavement, partly because it takes me back to those halcyon days of the late 90s when I was probably cooler than I am now but didn't know it yet, and partly because Stephen Malkmus is a lyrical genius. All this reminiscing tends to trip me out, though. It continues to blow my mind that I was only fourteen years old the first time I heard Cut Your Hair. Nostalgia always ends with the revelation that you are so much older than you think. It's kind of like the drunk realization one night a couple years ago, Weezer's Blue Album on the stereo, when we realized we'd been rocking out to that record for at least fifteen years.

And now, this.

I hope a lot of you will agree with me that for certain girls who were teens in the early 90s, Sassy was basically the bible. I am not ashamed to admit that I had subscriptions to Seventeen and YM too (the latter mostly just for that Say Anything column with all those mortifying stories from readers, all of which seemed to involve a tampon becoming dislodged while trying to make out with a cute lifeguard), but when Sassy came in the mail, I actually read it cover to cover. My best friend Allison and I would hang out on her waterbed (why doesn't anyone have a waterbed anymore!) and pore over every issue. Thanks to Sassy, my 13 year old self knew what a zine was, who the Lemonheads were, and why Reese Witherspoon was actually supercool back in 1992. Most importantly, though, Sassy was the only magazine that didn't contribute to my eating disorder. Instead it taught me about riot grrls and getting angry instead of shrinking away into a bikini. And I know I'm not the only girl who feels this way. Peep this shit if you don't believe me.

Anyway, I cannot believe that the Kurt and Courtney cover story came out seventeen years ago. SEVENTEEN. It was a few years before Kurt Cobain actually died, but still. We're coming up on the fifteenth anniversary of that milestone too. Where do the years go? One minute you're in your friend's backyard, listening to In Utero and mourning the death of an antihero, and then suddenly you're sitting at your desk, pretending to do your job, reading a blog about a moment in time that seemed so real and so full when it happened that you wondered how you'd ever get past it. Strange times, my friends. Strange times.