Remember J-14 Quizzes?
Plus an reader questionnaire!
Lately I’ve been saying things “rock” a lot and I think it might be a regression back to my teendom. I’ve thought several times about whether or not I can justify buying a purple inflatable chair for my office, or whether or not I can search the halls of eBay for the exact comforter I had on my bed in the 8th grade. The candy-colored-butterfly-clipped-lip-glossed 2000s are so deeply engrained in me and I wouldn’t change a thing about it. Just this week I discovered that Bonne Belle Lip Smackers are still being produced and within 24 hours a Pink Lemonade lip balm was on my doorstep. As I type this my lips taste medicinal and sweet, and my inner teenager is thrilled.
Maybe I’m thinking about being in my teenage years because life felt simpler then. I’ve been trying to keep things as simple as possible as life dances towards being more complicated than it has ever been. I’ve been thinking a lot about teen me, what she knew was ahead of her, and the ways in which she took care of the current version of me. So many of the same things make she and I happy: our friends are still our life, we’re both still boy crazy, and we take great pride in our sense of personal identity and style.
If you are a woman of a certain age, chances are you took endless quizzes in teen beat magazines or in the early days of being ~online~. Those quizzes were my entire personality in middle and high school, and prepared me for a lifetime of self identifying with every personality quiz that became trendy before moving onto the next. It’s funny to think about how one day you’re taking a “Are you happy being you?” quiz (according to the quiz, all the time!) and the next you’re getting diagnosed as an Enneagram 8 (with people pleasing qualities, to boot.) If that’s not aging, I don’t know what is.
My teen girlhood is what made me who I am today, and among other things I credit these quizzes in the backs of magazines to helping make me the introspective and observant adult I am now. For an entire generation of women these quizzes aided in helping us self describe, while showing you that your friends could be completely different. Quiz journeys even showed us how a couple of small decisions could give you a different life entirely. One small answer is the difference between being happy “sometimes” and “not always :(“
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that this practice, of taking these quizzes and observing my results and the results of my friends, made me a more understanding and empathetic person.
Magazine quizzes also turned standing out into a badge of honor. If my results were different from my friends I wasn’t a weirdo, I was an individual who was special and unique because I answered differently on question 3 and 5. This was thanks in no small part to the spin that the quiz writers put on every single answer as you’ll see in the quizzes below.
I think meditating on 2000’s Chelsea is how I ended up creating a reader quiz this week, as a means to control some chaos. My newsletter is my safest space on the internet, it really feels like something thats ours. It doesn’t hold a candle to the J-14, Elle Girl, and Seventeen magazines of our collective youth, but I have made a subscriber quiz that I’d love for you to take! This will help me curate this newsletter more effectively, and answer some fun questions (for me!) like how you found me in the first place. There are only six questions, it will take less than a minute, and it would help me tremendously if you’d take it.
P.S. I find myself positively wistful for the early aughts. There were so many quizzes I didn’t take, so many Spice Girl facts I didn’t learn, so many Bonne Belle Lip Smackers that went uncollected. If you were a pre-internet teenager I have a question for you! Feel free to leave a comment or email me directly! Are there things you thought were lost to time from your childhood? In the collage at the top I included some ice cream desserts that I searched high and low to find. I was able to track down two different kinds of popsicles that I thought I’d made up: Nestle Pebbles Push Ups (with nerds in them!) and Lion King Bug Pops (that had gummy bugs inside!) There was also a television show called Adventures in Wonderland where a teenage Alice visited wonderland through a mirror in her bedroom.
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The Hit Clips player just brought me back to the McDonald's of my youth. The N*SYNC and Britney clips that went with it. Wow.
There was a Disney Original movie called Don't Look Under the Bed wherein the Boogey Man was hot and the main character was a girl with curly red hair. Finally a movie for me. I rewatched it recently and it's.. actually not too bad. Not too good either!
I've been talking about AIM away messages a lot recently. Away Messages walked so Subtweeting could run, so Vaguebooking could sprint!!
When I think back to middle school Kelcie, I think of spiky headbands, those shirts that were really small but stretched out to be a normal shirt size, scented nail polish, and teeny bopper magazines. I framed a picture of Erik Von Detten from one of the magazines and hung it next to my door so I could give it a little kiss on my way out.
Adventures in Wonderland! Yesss. But I fear Swans Crossing is lost to the annals of time. I was probably too young to be watching, but wow. I miss it.