I'm home for Christmas and I'm already taking advantage of my parents' cable and HD TV to indulge in one of my darkest and most shameful vices: VH1. I'm addicted to the network's I Love the Eighties/Nineties/Millenium, etc. and all their music countdowns. This all stems from my intense regret over high school. I feel like I missed out on a lot in high school because of my poor social skills and reclusive social life. I can't really blame some bully or tormentor for bad high school memories because it was something I did to myself. Of course, that's an exaggerated and simplistic view that ignores some very good experiences that I had, but I never stop feeling like I could have and should have done more. Watching all these shows is me making up for some vast pop culture deficit I imagine that I have. Especially now since I'm watching 100 Greatest Songs of the 90s. The whole high school complex isn't as bad as it used to be. For one thing, I can watch the Wonder Years without a rage of regret and self-recrimination (But it's never on TV anymore, so what's the point?). Incidentally, this sense of a lost adolescence is one of the main reasons I will never stop loving Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell I and II. I guess this is all my own personal version of the Japanese nostalgia for the countryside life that never really existed.