New Kids Suck

I never liked New Kids on the Block. I’m not sure exactly what turned me off about them, as the reason is lost to the mists of adolescence, but I spent 1989­-90 mocking them and rolling my eyes. I never did the dance to “Hangin’ Tough” and the falsetto on “I’ll Be Loving You (Forever)” really irritated me. (I’m very particular about my falsetto: Prince’s falsetto makes me glad to be alive while Frankie Valli’s falsetto is like nails on the blackboard of my soul.)

So in the summer of 1990, I was down the shore with my family and spent my hard-earned Burger King paycheck on a boardwalk T-shirt that said “New Kids Suck.” I believe the shirt was black and yellow neon. We went to the boardwalk and I wore the shirt and got a range of reactions. One kid gave me a thumbs-up. One girl and her family stared at me in disgust. I don’t think my parents were thrilled to be seen with me wearing that shirt, while I assume my brother was amused. This was August 1990, which I remember because Iraq had invaded Kuwait and it was all over the news while we were on vacation. In June, New Kids on the Block had triumphed with their third number 1 hit, “Step by Step” (“Gonna get to you, giiirrl!”). In September, a few weeks after our shore trip, the New Kids scored their final top 10 hit, “Tonight.” Then the backlash suddenly set in, like the chill fall breeze that abruptly ends summer the day after Labor Day. I remember DJs making fun of “Tonight” on the radio. The boy banders had become personae non grata and would never get another top 10 hit.

To sum up, New Kids on the Block get their biggest hit yet, “Step by Step,” in June. In August, I prowl the boardwalk in my “New Kids Suck” shirt, my neon disdain displayed for thousands of tourists to see. In September, the public turns on New Kids on the Block. Now, I’m not saying my T-shirt is responsible for the decline and fall of America’s most beloved boy band, but who can definitely prove that it wasn’t?

Oh Nine

The woman’s voice at self-checkout in the supermarket is usually so even when she reads out the prices to me as a I scan the items. It’s a steady stream of “Six. Forty-three” or “Three. Seventeen.” It’s all in the same pleasant cadence, as if she couldn’t be happier to be totaling my groceries. It’s soothing.

Until I ring up something ending in 9 cents. Then something seems to curdle in the invisible woman’s delivery. If something costs $5.09, she’ll say “five” in a breezy tone. But I hear that “oh nine” with a scrim of darkness pulled across it. She’s clearly unhappy. She’s irritated. She’s impatient. And it’s like the fluorescent lights above me in the checkout lane dim just slightly.

What was going on the day this checkout woman recorded “09” in the sequence of numbers? Why was everything great through “08” and fine from “10” and up? I wonder …

Did she accidentally knock over her water bottle and soak her script right when she got to nine?

Did the person recording her in the studio fart or make some kind of rude gesture, causing her disgusted tone?

Is she philosophically opposed to the continued minting of the penny and thus annoyed that the customer will need 1 cent in change?

We may never know why the number 9 upsets her so. But I hope she’s doing OK. 

To Recline or Not to Recline?

Sometimes I’ll see online or TV debates over whether or not one should recline one’s seat on an airplane. Does your right to recline override the right of the passenger behind you to have a little more space? Since I’ve been known to have opinions I thought I’d offer my opinion on this raging issue:

Conduct yourself like an adult.

This goes for both the recliner and the person behind: Work it out amongst yourselves like adults. There’s no need for binding arbitration or a Bill of Rights on this. Ask before reclining your seat and if the person behind says no, handle that inconvenience like an adult. On the other hand, if you object to a person reclining and the person does it anyway, handle that inconvenience like an adult. It’s the same with who has the right to the armrest. Maybe rather than fighting over armrest access like a World War I soldier fighting over a scrap of territory in France, you should try to cope?

I mean, did you see the video of that guy on the plane who kept tapping on the seat in front of him after the woman reclined? My God—what are you, 8 years old? You really can’t deal with a little less space for a few hours? And if you’re a recliner and the person behind you asks you not to recline, you really can’t deal with having to stay upright? Is it a hill worth dying on? Yesterday at the gym, I saw a panel on CNN debating this issue with an intensity similar to a debate over the Israeli–Palestinian peace process.

“I shouldn’t have to!” you huff indignantly over a few degrees of seat movement. While this is a pretty ironclad counter-argument for an adult to give, let me attempt a response:

Sometimes being a grownup means having to do something you shouldn’t have to do. Someday you might actually have to face having slightly less personal space on an airplane. But you can do it. You can get by and make it through. After all, the Lord never gives us more than we can handle.

Have you no strength?

Freshman year of high school, I had this English teacher, a nun, who everyone thought was pretty mean. She seemed very strict and the atmosphere in her classroom seemed way too tense for 14- and 15-year-olds. This nun permanently turned me off to reading Charles Dickens after making us all read Great Expectations. I’m sure if I could go back today and see things through an adult’s eyes, I would find some wisdom in her teaching style, like you can find wisdom in a lot of things that you rejected when you were young. Anyway, I once took a multiple-choice test for her where we had to fill in the little bubbles with our No. 2 pencils. I had apparently not pressed hard enough on the pencil and the answers were very faint. In the margins, Sister wrote, “Have you no strength?!”

Well, Sister, let me tell you something about strength. Strength goes beyond the mere pressing of a pencil on paper. It’s about what’s in your heart. It’s about being able to get up every day and face the trials before you—whether they be mean English teachers or hateful coworkers throwing produce at you in the lunchroom—with a spine of steel. So, Sister, you can’t measure the strength of a person by how dark that graphite smear is on a multiple-choice freshman English test. The most feather-light pencil touch can belie the most adamantine heart. I am a strong person, Sister. I am a strong person and no comment in red pen on the side of my 31-year-old test can take that away from me.

Redress of Grievances

Hey, did you know you can petition the government for a redress of grievances? Well, you can! I’ve made a bit of a habit of this in the last few years, sending positive and negative emails and letters to our elected officials. This is because I have a love of stationery and apparent free time on my hands.

I’ve written to thank my Delaware senators and congresswoman for their focus on issues I care about and implore their help for other things. I emailed Kirstjen Nielsen to protest kids in cages at the border (God, I did such a literal jig of glee in my living room when I found out that bottom feeder got fired!). I emailed Bill Barr to remind him he’s the head of the Department of Justice and not the president’s lawyer. I emailed Mitch McConnell to tell him to take a break from confirming Heritage Foundation picks for judges and actually address election security. I wrote letters to the president about the impeachment and other things. I assume nobody read any of these.

This week, I’m sending letters to the Republican senators who acquitted Trump in the impeachment trial. I’m going to look up their addresses and indignantly slap a stamp on each envelope. (Some politicians only let people in their state email them, so I’m using paper.) Their aides will probably put them in the shredder before they get to the second paragraph, but at times I feel the only things I can do to effect change in politics are to write something and to vote, so it will be a brisk, fired-up-for-representative-democracy walk to the mailbox for me.

Anyway, since all my readers (really, both) so enjoy when I blab about politics, here’s the text of the letters.

The impeachment trial conducted in the Senate was a partisan sham due to the actions and inactions of the Republican Party.

Republican senators are complicit in a cover-up of President Trump’s attempt to solicit foreign interference in our elections. You voted against hearing witness testimony in the trial. You ignored the Government Accountability Office report that the president did in fact violate the law. You essentially voted to place cotton in your ears and refuse to hear or see what is right in front of you. And you did this in defiance of fairness, basic legal logic and the will of the majority of the public.

This is cowardly. What evidence were you afraid would come to light?

With your acquittal, you are essentially abetting President Trump in his quest to place himself above the law and beyond congressional oversight. This is a man whose theory of executive power is “I have an Article II that lets me do what I want.” And you collectively shrug. Some on the Republican side of the Senate have called the president’s actions “inappropriate” or made some other milquetoast protest. But these are just speeches with no spine behind them.

You have chosen to do nothing in the face of a president who has indicated that he will again ask a foreign country to interfere in our election. This is not leadership; it is weakness. You rolled over.

I don’t know why you voted the way you did. Maybe it was to cling to power at any cost. Maybe it was fear of losing your base. Maybe it was to ingratiate yourself with the president, hanging on like a sycophant.

But your motivations, in the long term, will not matter. History will not be kind to the actions of the Republicans in the Senate. The American people will remember that you faced a president whose view of his own power rivals that of Louis XIV—and you chose to do nothing and instead save your own hide and preserve your own power. And you will deserve that legacy.