One of my new favourite places to shop online is torrid.com. Torrid is basically Hot Topic for larger women like myself, and I don’t know how I didn’t find out about them sooner. Granted, they make the kind of clothes I wear when I’m having a social life versus when I’m in my professional life, and I’ve only recently begun having a social life again, but you’d think I would have heard something about them. My one visit to their store in Toledo, about a month ago, was a real eye-opener for me; I’d like to keep going there, but unfortunately the store is in the super-mall east of here that started picking up all the youth-related violence after Southwyck Mall closed down, and I try to avoid going there. That leaves me to shop Torrid’s selection online, which isn’t quite the same thing (especially when it comes to clothes), but it’s been fun to buy new clothes and see how they help open up parts of my personality that have been dormant for a few years.

Of course I get e-mails from Torrid, and in their most recent e-mail they proclaim that "The Grunge Look is Back." Having lived through the original grunge craze back when I was in high school, I can’t call what Torrid is selling grunge — they’re basically using plaid in more modern applications — but nonetheless it does get me thinking back to my high school days, when the popular music scene finally started producing artists whose material I liked (although I moved towards Björk and folk-rock, I did like grunge a lot). I can still remember turning on MTV during spring break of my senior year and John Norris saying that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide; I don’t know if it was quite a Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin moment for my generation, but it was at least close to it.

What really bothers me, though, is that we’re in the last year of the ’00s here, and I really don’t know how to characterize the decade. The ’80s had the invasion of the synthesizers in pop music, Michael Jackson and Madonna, big hair, yuppies, and all the stuff inspired by Miami Vice. (Most of those were the reasons why I got into rap back then.) The ’90s had the grunge look and the Seattle sound, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and the relativistic morality embedded in the television and films of the decade. Coming up on the dawn of 2010 here, though, I don’t really know how to characterize the music of the decade, who the two or three most important artists are, and what the fashion of the decade was. The politics and morality were certainly easy enough to catalogue, but given that I was in college for pretty much the entire decade, you’d think I’d be more capable of knowing what popular trends in music and fashion were. Given that I try to use popular culture as a way to make my teaching more accessible to students, it’s even more troubling that I keep drawing blanks. Maybe I need to wait a few years to see if the culture itself helps define these things, but in the meantime I don’t feel good about my inability to grasp these fundamental elements of the culture most of my students grew up in.