Hairspray fumes

I think today's teenagers get a bad rap. Compared to the young women of my generation, the young women of today are absolutely brilliant, practical people who will go on to achieve great things. What am I basing this on? When I was at WCK's school the other day, I noticed that 99.99 percent of the eighth-grade girls styled their hair like this:



It's just a ponytail with a headband around it. That's all it is. And all of them were doing it. It's like they all held a Secret Meeting of Eighth Grade Girls and said, "Look! We're not styling our hair ever again! Let's all make a pact to wear ponytails with headbands around them every single day!" How freaking brilliant is this? It would take about five seconds to do.

I think the reason I'm so impressed is that when I was in the eighth grade, every girl's hair looked like this:



Or this:




Or, if you were extra-fancy, this:



And if you ever did want to pull your hair back in a ponytail, it had to be something ridiculous:


Do you realize how much sleep we missed in the '80s because we had to get up hours before school started to construct our hairdos? Do you know how little attention we paid in class because we were constantly worried that our bangs were falling down? Do you know how many hairspray fumes we inhaled between 1986 and 1993? I never realized it at the time, but now I know we were all sleep-deprived, uneducated, and full of toxic fumes. I think we all have significant brain damage. I won't even get into the way our rolled jeans cut off circulation to our ankles.

But today's girls have it right, and I'm pretty jealous. They're all going to go far.

By the way, I have no idea who the girls in these photos are. I just Googled "80s Hair", and there they were. Poor souls.