Remember When These Were Your Biggest Problems in Life?

I arrived 45 minutes late for a recent doctor’s appointment—something I do when I’m in a hurry, since it cuts the time I have to sit in the waiting room down to about 2 ½ hours – and, as always, I immediately looked around for something to read. I have a voracious appetite for reading, which leads me to peruse cereal boxes, advertising fliers, tennis shoe labels, actually just about anything with words on it.

I leafed through their most recent copy of Life magazine, with its bold headline about the recent Allied invasion on the Normandy beaches. I thought that some more recent news might be good, but a quick search only turned up a magazine with news about JFK’s presidential campaign. Seeking anything from the last decade or two, I rummaged deeper and found a couple of things that were a bit more contemporary.

Seventeen and Young and Modern.

Now I must confess to having never read either of these worthy publications, thinking as I did that they were aimed at teenagers. A quick scan of the contents told me differently, however. The “seventeen” in the title apparently refers to dog years, since there is absolutely no way this could be aimed at kids.

First was Motor Mouth: Does He Love You For Your Car? The article started with “My parents just bought me a Ford Explorer”. Does this sound like a girl with the same kind of problems you had as a teenager? Now she’s worried that the “cool guy who hangs around my car might just be using me.” The sage advice in return warned that he might be “sticking around like a bad perm because he just wants to get into your wheels.” Boy does that bring back high school memories, when raging hormones drove me to salivate over a hot girl because of her SUV. Or in my case, her ’39 Rambler.

Next there was The Scoop on Older Guys, which referred to the “tantalizing jingle of his car keys,” and the “indignity of telling him your curfew,” followed by another with suggestions on how to take your gay lover to the senior prom.

The advice columns were the best. There was advice on how to better enjoy French kissing, including the problems of “does he open his mouth too wide?”, “does he cram his whole tongue down your throat?”, and the ever popular “does he slobber big-time?” The advice for that tongue-tied teenager? “Tell him to try touching just the tip of your tongue with his.” If that doesn’t work, opined the writer, “you may not love him as much as you think you do.”

Or the poor girl whose parents walked in while she and her boyfriend were “getting busy,” (No, I don’t think they were cleaning the garage), and she needed to know “how to deal with them”. I vaguely remember a time when the parents would have been asking that question.

Then there was: “My boyfriend wants to have sex. I’m already on the pill, but he doesn’t want to use a condom”. The advice here was that if he won’t wear a condom, maybe the girl’s “jerk detector should start buzzing.” Of course, if her jerk detector didn’t buzz, a couple of pages later there was a fascinating and timely article on how to make stretch marks go away.

But even the most difficult of problems pale next to the woes of a humiliated thespian, which makes me glad these magazines are around. How else could we learn about the girl who was playing the lead in her high school’s Romeo and Juliet, and during a key scene “I let out a huge f…(let’s substitute “passed gas” – after all, we’re not as Young and Modern as these readers).” I do have to congratulate the girl’s school newspaper, however, that ran the headline “Juliet Literally Blew Us Away”.

At that point, I simply set the magazines down and backed away slowly.