Life
11 Things We Wish We Could Change About The '90s
We rave on and on about how great the '90s were, but there are some things we would change about the '90s if we could. Not everything was peachy keen, perfectly applied black The Craft lipstick, and Drew Barrymore chokers. Not all our floral dresses were Shannon Doherty — some were more Elaine Benes on a bad day. And sometimes our "Rachel" hair styles just looked like flaccid mullets rather than the shiny, bouncy style you'd see on TV. That's right: even when we were doing our best '90s, we weren't always doing our best '90s. Add to that the awkwardness of style at the time (at which point I feel inclined to point out brown, metallic-y lipstick), and there's no avoiding embarrassing things from the '90s.
If we had a time machine, some of us '90s kids would surely hop in it and go give our '90s selves a swift slap in the back of the head. We'd also, of course, advise ourselves buy Google.com in the .com boom. The point is, there were lots of times, with hindsight on our side, that we can now see how imperfect the '90s really were. Here are 12 things we wish we could change about the '90s, if we could.
1. The Floppy Male Heartthrob Hair Cut
If we could look back on our '90s heartthrobs and not cringe at the generic, floppy, parted in the middle hair they all had, we'd feel much better about those crushes now. If we could go back, we'd definitely try to convince them to have less silly hair.
2. The "Macarena"
For '90s children, the "Macarena" haunts your dreams. Imagine how much better weddings now would be without it. You're imagining a better world, aren't you?
3. The Sound Of Dial Up Internet
If the "Macarena" haunts your dreams, then the sound of dial up internet is what you hear instead of white noise when your ears ring. The bane of the '90s was the horrible, nails on a chalk board sound of connecting to the Internet. We would have loved to live our '90s lives with a more pleasant connecting sound.
4. Hair Mascara
It would have been nice to have soft, natural hair in the '90s. But instead we had crunchy, kind of blue-ish bits that looked more like dirty, caked strands than the colored effect they were supposed to have.
5. Ginger Leaving The Spice Girls
How to change the most harrowing event of the '90s? How to go back in time and make her stay? How to unbreak our '90s hearts?
6. Contacting The Front Of All Our Books With Winnie The Pooh Paper
It would be nice to pick up your old copy of Pride and Prejudice and not have to read it covered in Winnie the Pooh contact paper, right? Or any other book from your adolescent years for that matter.
7. Going To The Hairdresser With A Picture Of "The Rachel" Torn From The Pages Of A Magazine
Why did we do this to our heads? Why didn't we realize that actually, constant maintenance went into keeping "The Rachel" we saw on TV big and bouncy? Why didn't we foresee the limp mullets we'd all have instead of the balloon of shiny hair we hoped for?
8. All The Times We Wrote Into A Teen Mag's Advice Section
A '90s child knows that taking advice from teen mags probably wasn't the best choice we made. Looking back, if we could change the way we interacted with the world in the '90s, we'd spend less time looking at those mags like gospel, and instead of sending out letters to them in vain, ask the people around us for advice.
9. Wasting Hours On Ski Free And Minesweeper
You were never going to get past the yeti. And who even knows what Minesweeper is or how to play it, really? These fruitless games wasted a lot of our time in the '90s.
10. All The Money Spent On Beanie Babies In The Hopes They Would Be "Worth" Something One Day
It would save us a lot of face palming now, every time we look at our hundreds of worthless Beanie Babies.
11. Alanis Morissette Swearing On Jagged Little Pill
There isn't a '90s child alive that wouldn't go back in time and have a chat with Alanis about that parental advisory. All we wanted to do was listen to Jagged Little Pill without our parents being strict about it.
