"I'M SO EXCITED! I'M SO EXCITED!" (uncontrollable weeping)

I am a person who thrives on routine. I get up every morning at 6:00, without an alarm. My eyes just pop open; my husband (lovingly) calls this "setting the Kramer alarm." After getting up, I walk into the bathroom, weigh myself and change into my work out clothes. Then I come into the living room and do some sort of work out video which generally involves some sort of groaning and sweating and hopping and a great deal of me saying nonsensical stuff to myself. I work out for an hour and then settle into the couch with a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice. And every morning I turn on the TV and watch one of a few shows. This is my favorite time of the day--I am the only one awake, I have that post work out level of bliss going on, and I can unabasedly watch some very horrible television before starting my day.

The television show is the one place where my routine sometimes alters. Some mornings I watch a 30 minute show from the DVR, and basically that means I watch Snapped, which if you don't know (maybe because you watch good television shows?), is a show about women who snap and kill their husbands. Yes, this sounds like a rather depraved way to start the day (especially now that I see it typed out like that), and to be frank, I don't do it that often, as I've seen a lot of these things and end up only having one on my DVR on Monday mornings. My other options are Sportscenter and Saved by The Bell. Usually, I flip between the two of these, watching a few minutes before my attention wanes and I flip to the other excitedly, loving every minute of my breakfast.

I have a long and lovely relationship with Saved By the Bell. The first time I saw the show, I was about 10 or so, and it was a snow day. I had gone to a friend's house to play in the snow and we came in to drink hot cocoa and warm up. At that time, TBS ran two SBTB episodes at 5:05 and 5:35, and WGN followed this with episodes at 6:00 and 6:30. When my friend turned on TBS on that snowy afternoon, I had never seen the show, and despite my misgivings at not getting to watch one of the movies I saw on their shelf (I remember they had Turner and Hooch which was a big favorite of mine), I soon became enamored with the characters. When my mom picked me up at 6:00, I rushed home and turned on WGN, just as I had been instructed to do. From that point on, I was hooked. I spent the better part of the next 3 years stuck to the couch, eating Chef Boyardee ravioli and learning all I could about high school, ultimately setting up expectations that would tumble down in a messy, sad heap the second I stepped foot into the hallowed halls of St. Paul High School.

The reason these expectations failed so miserably is pretty obvious if you have ever seen even five minutes of SBTB. High school is delightfully messy; the love lives of Zack Morris and Kelly Kapowski are as clean and blemish free as my four year old's unspoiled cheek. There are no strict lines of social class and rank in high school as there are with the pocket protector and cheerleading skirt demaracations on SBTB. Contrary to what Kelly Kapowski would have you believe, you can be stunning and also be quite intelligent. Further, the school athlete is not always a stand up guy with killer dimples who dates the valdedictorian (SURPRISE, I know). And, most importantly, you can't get addicted to, and subsequently ruin your life with, caffeine pills in a span of about 4 days.

This morning's episode was actually a clip show, centering around a time capsule unearthed by the class of 2003. The whole scheme is that the gang (Bayside Class of '93) buried a time capsule containing a video for the lucky class who would discover it 10 years later. I won't even get started on the sheer idiocy of doing anything on a video that you want to survive for any period of time. ANYWAY, the tape is filled with clips and the gang sharing sage advice about how they managed to stay so overwhelmingly pure while attending high school in L.A. All subjects are approached--sneaking into the girl's locker room wearing assorted disguises, dunking the principal in a dunk tank, you know, the usual--and then we get to the VERY special part of the episode where we see Jessie struggle with drug abuse. And seriously, I know Elizabeth Berkley isn't exactly known for her restrained Method acting, but shit ya'll. Homegirl LOST HER SHIT in this performance. You would think she was addicted to meth, crack, and the occasional Dirty Sanchez with the way she was acting. Zack ends up restraining her, while she screams about how she needs one of her little pills, NEEDS IT, in order to go to The Max and sing in some sort of hokey ass singing concert. And, of course, I'm sitting on my couch, clutching my oj, and remembering that when I was in high school, in order to get myself to the point where I could actively participate in something just as incredibly horrible as singing Motown tunes in front of my BFF's, I would have needed about 3 bottles of Boone's Farm and a quick trip to the back seat of my boyfriend's car. NOT SOME GODDAMN CAFFEINE PILLS THAT YOU BUY AT THE DOUBLE KWIK.

All of this just makes me think about the overwhelming insanity of whoever wrote this shit, and just how much I wish life imitated Saved by the Bell. Everyday, I work with teenagers, who, like Jessie, want nothing more than to go to Stanford and fulfill all the expectations of those around them. This morning, I found myself basically begging that caffeine pills be the extent of the lengths they would go to to achieve those goals. Sadly, I'm not naive enough to think that this would be the case. But oh! If it were. Perhaps then I could get a decent night's sleep at night, and not be forced to look at my four year old son and worry that someday I'll have to bail him out of someplace where no one sees just how absolutely angelic his eyes are when they catch the light in a certain way.

So here's to Jessie, and her caffeine pills. Here's to Stanford and singing and geometry and all of the "really hard" stuff those crazy kids had to deal with. Oh, Jessie, you do it best--cry us off...

"I'M SO EXCITED! I'M SO EXCITED!" (uncontrollable weeping into the arms of the man who will someday marry your best friend because you were the smart one, not the pretty one)

Yeah, I made that part up.