Eighties nostalgia has been a thing now for a while. The longer madras dresses stay in fashion, Jason Bateman keeps on existing in public, and people clothe their children in Bruce Springsteen t-shirts, the greater the risk you run of being outed as the ankle length denim jumper wearing homeschoolee you once were. Now you can tell me it doesn’t matter—you’re an adult now, you’ve got a good job and a membership to Film Forum. And anyhow, what kind of a person would judge another person for missing eighties pop culture references? All I can say is you’re absolutely right. Only the petty and small minded would judge you for a decade spent memorizing the books of the Bible in song form and being slain in the spirit. But sentiment works powerfully to soften minds and morals. Can you trust in the iron intellect and virtue of your friends and coworkers? Maybe. No one will judge you for remembering when the Spandau Ballet performed Les Sylphides. Or probably not to your face. People won’t like you any less and it probably won’t end your marriage if you have to ask who Phoebe Cates was, but they may subtly begin to exclude you from certain conversations on the grounds that you wouldn’t be interested and pretty soon you’ll find out about parties only the day after they took place and next thing you know you’re be getting passed over for a promotion and your kid will somehow fail the entrance interview to the only preschool capable of catapulting him into the only private school worth going to and an advanced degree in something combining philosophy with whatever makes him happy and a lot of money to support you in your old age. But if you’re okay with that, that’s cool. In fact, it’s downright worthy. You’re like Christian’s friend Faithful from Pilgrim’s Progress. Only you probably won’t be martyred for your highmindedness. But just in case it seems like you might be, here’s a bit of the information you’ll need to pretend you popped by Vanity Fair on your way to the strictly Unitarian suburb of the Celestial City you’re obviously trotting toward.

First, you need to realize that there’s no way you’re ever going to understand what everyone saw in those John Hughes movies. The guiding axiom for all that stuff is that you had to be there and you weren’t. Just change the subject or run away. There’s no point in trying to endure them as an adult. Know that attractive outsiders pouted in detention and chopped at their clothing with scissors. No one wore long denim skirts or culottes and everyone appeared to have remarkably permissive parents. I think. I haven’t actually seen any of these films from start to finish. But take heart, from here on it’s pretty easy. There was no internet to splinter youth culture into hundreds of subsets they way it is today. Pop culture was dispensed to everyone but you via one of three indistinguishable TV stations. There were more than three radio stations but you don’t have to worry about that since they all played the same thing and radio was so insidiously prevalent that in a pinch even you can quote song lyrics knowingly. You may not know who sang Take on Me, or what they meant by it, but nonetheless you probably know every word if you ever stepped outside your clock radio-less house to buy a toothbrush. And speaking of broadcast media and stepping outside the house, if you had a Grandma and spent any time with her you may have seen MacGyver. No, don’t get excited. That allusion is a doubled edged sword. Use it with caution. A year ago it would have been strictly off limits, but now it allows you to understand a variety of Saturday Night Live references, which while not exactly edgy gives you enough material to bluff a subject change or laugh heartily without looking around like an ESL speaker trying to blend in. On the other hand, people might think you once watched MacGyver. You’ll have to trust me when I say that in some instances that may be worse than having them know you spoke in tongues.

If you are a fundamentally honest person you may have some difficulty discussing eighties fashion, a subject in which you were undoubtedly conversant, chiefly because the daily ordeal of chastely suiting up as a peculiar people spawned a variety of clothing related fantasies in which you may have: modeled for Seventeen Magazine (arousing the envy of everyone you went to school with), worn legwarmers, or possessed a jean jacket covered in buttons. You were always unsure about the buttons, but you could picture the forbidden jean jacket perfectly—the luciferian tie-dyed antithesis to the shining purity of your denim skirts. You argued long and hard for it’s innocence, but ultimately lost. It did not occur to you to acquire a jean jacket and keep it in your locker. In fact, just imagining such a thing still makes your palms clammy and your heart pound. Let’s forget about fashion. Say something safe about legwarmers and leave it at that. Don’t go near Flashdance, however tempting.

Remember, any time you’re talking to someone of your own age, you can safely bring the subject round to the cold war. Succeedingsocially.com says that having something you both want to talk about is the key to conversing. Nuclear bombs are that perfect something. Drop one and you’ll hardly have to do a thing, though you’ll have plenty to say on the topic if you choose. I know for a fact, even you cloistered innocents discussed how you’d climb underneath your desks in the event of nuclear war; and, if you knew about it in advance, refuse to do your math homework and defiantly eat the secret stash of Junior Mints in your mother’s sock drawer—retribution be damned! You don’t actually have to have seen The Day After. As long as you went to school with at least one person who did, you should be fine.

Finally, keep in mind that the glimpses of pop culture you got over the years may have created a distorted vision of the decade. For instance, that vivid recollection you have of a made for TV movie where Morgan Fairchild played the lip-glossy lover of a brown haired guy who was trying to kill his wife by making her believe she was crazy—it’s possible no one on earth besides you remembers this. The point is, don’t take unnecessary chances. If all else fails you can do what you did at the time—narrow your eyes and feel superior. It won’t fix the preschool thing, but you and your kid are better off without those Vainglorians anyhow.

I was pacing around a few whiles ago, reading that article in the Times magazine about the NIH and that poor woman who is falling to pieces, and bellowing at the page in front of me. There was so much in that article that seemed wavering and odd. Like this idea of looking and looking for a new diagnosis. Why? I honestly don’t understand. A diagnosis exists as a tool. Approaching it as an end seems nonsensical unless as an excuse to fundraise for Pediatric Restless Leg Syndrome. You arrive almost immediately at a weird continuum where we have to start making proclamations about what a “healthy” body looks like in comparison to a diseased body. So, what does a “healthy” body look like? Structurally perfect in every respect? Free of genetic mutation? Probably not going to drop dead within the year? No complaints? Going to live forever? Able to cheerfully undertake the full catalogue of human activities without pain or madness: defecating, running, reproducing, crying, eating, orgasming, toe-touching, differential equation solving, back handspringing, tight rope walking?

I don’t know why the Times Magazine article reminds me a personal blog entry I read once in which a doctor complained about a list a patient brought to her appointment. The list was written in a jerky, trembling hand and included a handful of nebulous symptoms like dizziness, headaches, back pain, and stomach aches. Anyhow, at the bottom of the list were written a series of nervous and confrontational notes in full sentences, addressed to the doctor. The patient, sounding frenzied, demanded certain lab work and refused to take any more medication. I am inventing some of the detail; I can’t recall it word for word and I don’t particularly want to link to the specific entry because the writer seems like more than a decent person. However, her diagnosis here was a piece of misogynist crap as common and invisible as air. The patient is hysterical (the laden historical translation), she likes being a patient and will never be well. Ah, the bad boyfriend school of diagnosis. If you don’t find me irresistible, you must be gay! Damn, I felt sorry for that poor patient. I imagined her panicky preparation for the appointment, breathing deeply and rehearsing the list of symptoms every magazine on earth solemnly asserts, at the ass-covering imperative of their legal department, you should “talk to your doctor” about; picturing herself standing undressed and un-speeched, just like the previous appointments, sweaty-palmed and acquiescent during the entirety of the six minutes then cursing herself afterward for forgetting to offer the list of clues that would surely have resulted in the One True Diagnosis; deciding it’s a better idea to write everything down so she doesn’t waste the six minutes and the fifty dollar copay again… I feel sorry for the doctor too, but not nearly so much. The doctor is invested with a degree of power unfair to both her and the patient. She carries a license and degree that give a terrifying weight to the indifferent bad boyfriend diagnosis.  I need to come back to this when I have a moment, to try to articulate why I was so bothered instead just pounding away. In the meantime, lest this should read as a doctors suck rant, props to our family doctor, who saved the baby from a lot more pain, and to my father whose dinner table diatribes on everything from hormone replacement therapy, to h. pylori, and what happens when you play on the railroad track, nearly always turn out to be news twenty years later. Though the railroad thing was pretty evident right off.

Is online conversation engendering a return to a more oral culture, where the last word acquires a different kind of importance? Words upon words upon words. Look into history of oral culture and comparisons. See Walter Ong and secondary orality… What on earth did I have in mind when I wrote this? Is this even my handwriting?

What was I doing in either 2003 or 2004 you wonder? Watching TV apparently:

On Sunday night on PBS there was a documentary on the Miss America pageant that was surprisingly interesting considering it was mostly in black and white. It was chock full of feminist historians with glasses, untamed hair, and little-known facts, popping in at intervals to provide commentary on the unholy tale of the little Southern Baptist lady who made the whole event real high-toned by adding the talent component. That was the point at which the girls began to represent scholarship, as they do today.

About an hour into the thing, right as they were getting to the dirt on the swimsuit competition, they cut from Gloria Steinem’s sage mien to Isaac Mizrahi. He’s burbling cheerfully on about how this is by far the most degrading part of the process. How his heart bleeds for those poor young girls teetering along nearly naked in those ridiculous heels…. Long pause… “Although if they have to walk around in bathing suits, it’s for the best that they have to wear heels. Heels make anyone’s legs look so much better.”

Next, the first night and the hind end of Steven King’s Rose Red, a miniseries about a flesh-eating house. “Sixteen bathrooms– and growing!” the commercials intone ominously. There are hours of dialogue in which the protagonist, a sexy young tenured professor of paranormal psychology also with unruly locks (so much frizzy hair on TV!) and her bumbling nemesis, the British head of the psychology department who wants to get her fired and occasionally slips into a Mid-western twang whilst bringing out nuggets like “old boy” or “I say there,” sneer at each other for twenty-minute stretches. Just when you think it’s over, you get some more close-ups of acting. The scene in front of the house where they say “God help us, it knows we’re here” lasts for like twelve minutes. They show each person close-up, then far away, then everyone from the front, then everyone from the back, then they sort of spin around everybody and do a few more close-ups and a flash-back. You should watch it. It’s amazing. But if you didn’t, you can still bid on the props and set on Ebay.

Rose Red herself appears to be constructed completely from Home Depot parts. Not only do the hollow core aluminum doors bang open with suspiciously empty thwumps, but the 200 year old fake-trad “wrought-iron” ivy-covered front gate is operated by a remote control that the beautiful young professor has stuck over the front visor of her SUV. Then I fell asleep. So much for Sunday.

But I tuned in again for the final episode on Thursday. To the untrained eye it appears that nothing much happened in the intervening three days. Actually some stuff happened. We’ve become aware of a flinty streak of academic avarice in the character of the BYP. She cares more about validating her own theories than she does for the unfortunate souls around her. Eventually she gets it in the neck, but not before telling us in a lugubrious voiceover, “We say haunted, but we mean the house has gone insane.” Meanwhile the other characters get killed off, play pool, lose their fingers in supernaturally slamming doors, and drink iced tea from a cobweb-festooned Maytag refrigerator (circa 2001). A pasty-faced young girl with psychic powers is holding the doors closed. She is wrestling with inner demons and stuff as evidenced by her etiolated features and rolled back eyes. Eventually the alive characters go home and come back Six Months Later and it’s pretty much over.

The same Thursday night, sex sold: chicken, Rogaine (Will she feel the same if I’m bald?), Vaseline, and a cruise, but not Polygrip. At intervals the local news previews enticed us to tune in later to find out: what airline may be grounding flights, what the weather will do to your morning commute, and who is returning to pro wresting. I recognized the photo of Hulk Hogan they dug out of the morgue.

The moral of this story is that TV is more interesting than you think it is. Don’t be a snob. Also, don’t try to understand it. With the sound off American TV is a lot like those cryptic Japanese game shows with a lot of inexplicable laughter, pointing, and people falling in holes.