On bottles of some pills you see the ‘Do not take with alcohol’ or ‘be careful driving and shit when you take these pills’ warning. You always see things like TV-MA, this show is intended for mature audiences only, or something like that on shows like Law & Order.

There should be the same kinds of warnings on shows like “Dawson’s Creek” and “My So-Called-Life.” Something akin to TV-MA but perhaps TV-IM. “This program is intended for immature audiences only, back to back viewings of shows like this by a semi-sane adult over the age of 30 will cause you to regress to the absolute worst version of your teenage self and you will suddenly find significant and often poignant meaning in everything. It will all matter and it will be the biggest deal ever. For serious.”

At this time, I will leave out the whole idea that my constant exposure to Dawson’s Creek is making me stupid (to wit: wearing two different shoes to work, crying over the very-special AIDS episode of A Different World, and leaving the keys to Ruby in her ignition). The issue here is that it’s also making me regress. It doesn’t help that I’ve decided to add a healthy dose of “My So-Called-Life” to my dossier of shitty, brain-eating TV. I always dug that show because Angela and I had the same hairstyle and hair color at the same time.

I’m not even sure why these teen fluff-dramas appeal to me so much. Not all of them do. I never even watched a single episode of 90210 and the OC has never held any sway over me. But for some reason I can eat up Dawson and Angela endlessly. Perhaps in some weird psychobabble kind of way, I’m trying to make up for my own shitty teenagehood by watching a bunch of kids whose biggest problems are they all love each other too much.

But this is not my point. My point is that watching these shows, at least tonight, has turned me into a moody 15-year-old girl. I climbed up to the Fortress of Solitude tonight in hopes of knocking out two page of a short story for the Chiliwinkers and instead decided it was of the utmost urgency that I fix my “Fall into You” playlist and fill it with the most melancholy songs I could find (except of course Damien Rice’s “Cannonball” because while I might be a moody teenager she sure as hell isn’t a mascochist, we save that kind of sophisticated self-sabotage for thirtysomething Jodi).

And now I’ve brought myself so far down that my entire upper body is resting on the desk, my head a mere six inches from the keyboard and tears keep shimmering in my eyes. I keep listening to Ben Gibbard’s “You Remind Me of Home” and Marah’s “Why Independent Record Stores Fail” back to back longing for something I’ve never even experienced but am pretty sure that I missed out on.