Crampy

In a continuing attempt to come to terms with the fact that I once wore, in a completely non-ironic fashion, an officially licensed neon painters cap featuring a handprint on the top, I've been parsing the New Kids on the Block lyrics and wavering between vomiting and a total and complete childhood identity crisis.

If the New Kids were concocted by Maurice Starr for commercial purposes, their second album was downright microtargeted to ages 7-15, down to each synthesized drum beat and slick, one-dimensional presentation of love. For only after we've received a little seasoning in opposite-gender relations can we understand that the premise of "Never Gonna Fall in Love Again" is, in fact, crap. Some girl dumps you? Well, I'll just never be in love again. That's how real romantics deal with it. And, unless one has actually been 50% of an adult relationship, there's no way one would know any better, no matter how much one attempts work through this via one's JamsBio.

Behold the lines of "Never Gonna Fall In Love Again":

How could you play me like a champ, a tramp, a cramp

Girl you did me worse than a food stamp

First of all: A cramp? Second of all... no, never mind, I can't move on from this. "Play me like a cramp?" How does that come about, exactly? Is a great deal of arm-shaking and doubled-over moaning involved?

I want to know if "cramp" came about as a resultant rhyme for "food stamp," because if there's one line in this entire universe worse than the cramp one, it's that. ("That's what I love about Mary Beth," my friends are always saying. "She never does me worse than a food stamp.") I think that's what horrifies me the most about the entire lyric; one had to come before the other, and in the process of completing the verse, nobody stepped in and said, "Dude. A food stamp?"

(Cramp and stamp UPDATE: I am now informed that the food stamp imagery was deemed so awesome, so fresh, as it were, that it was recycled for "Dirty Dawg": "Yo, yo, why you wanna act like a tramp, like a wet food stamp"?)

This, along with any number of musicals, Sweet Valley High books, and Meg Ryan movies quite possibly ruined the first fifteen years of my romantic life.

It's not just about the specific memories, here. It's about who I was, and who I am, and how I'm terrified that one might indelibly shape the other.