Okay. You know bad is bad when...

• This is the first night in over 10 years that I've had two mai tais in one night. (Peruse the New York Bartender's Guide for the liver-crushing recipe. Or just look here.) Somehow (and fifty pounds later), I can handle them. But just barely.
• I had to improvise with blue curacao with one of them. So the drink turned out to be the color of fungified cement. Yum.
• I tell Quinn that she is SO hopelessly a fashion don't while she's wearing a kerchief with her matchy-match two-piece bikini while she's poolside with her friends. The only members of the Fashion Club.
• Yep. It's a olive drab and kelly green PLAID. Even I wouldn't be caught dead wearing such clashing patterns in the local man's man gay bar, even under low lights, even with drunk guys who wouldn't know better. Did I say gay men? Yeah. Not all of them are fashion mavens, but some of them wear fabulous scarves with their impeccable leather coats.
• Oh, and yeah...Quinn is a fucking CARTOON.
• I'm spewing advice to said cartoon.
• This cartoon, despite catering to college-age kids, stopped being relevant around, oh, 1997.
• Not a mathematician, but let's do the math here. SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO? Oh God...
• God, I'm old.
• I'm trying to persuade myself that my predecessors of decades and decades past regressed into their younger years to...well, for one night, to numb themselves into forgetting an annoying day. Despite the lack of said cartoons.
• La la LA la la...

I should stop now. Before I embarrass myself beyond the hope of recovery.

It's apparently the year of 25 year anniversaries. Three days and twenty-five years ago began one of the most difficult days of my life. In just over a month and a half will commence the 25th anniversary of the most amazing day of my life.

Okay. I really should stop right now. Mark the time. And note the beverages consumed. Also note that it has been over ten years.

God, I'm pathetic right about now. Don't expect this post to last more than a week.

Okay. One more thing. GOD, right now I wish I knew who my birth parents were. Maybe one day.

"There is no aspect, no facet, no moment of life that can't be improved with pizza."

I have just finished watching the last two episodes of Daria: The Complete Animated Series. Oh, and the two hour-long movies, "Is It Fall Yet?" and "Is It College Yet?". And the Mystik Spiral video "Freakin' Friends." And the cast interviews. All in one night. Obsessive? Owned.

My ultimate judgment? Given that it's a cartoon about the trials and travails of high school, it's only appropriate to seal the whole thing with the most symbolic of high school judgments.

A+.

Seriously. This subject matter is timeless. High school angst? Sibling rivalry? Heartless lifemanship? Cliques at their worst? Teenage friendships at their best? First loves (and loves lost)? All handled with the skill of an expert swordsman.

Maybe I'm stuck in a permanently pre-adult, purely puerile (say that five times quickly) point in my life. Maybe I'm just clamoring for the teenage years I wish I could have back, just so I could do them right this time, dammit. But Daria is utter brilliance. I never thought I could be so riveted to a teenage girl's monotonous angst. And I really feel that although it encapsulates the angst of the 1990s high school scene, its theme is truly for the ages.

But then again, I have to think: in high school, I really was Daria...only on the male side of things. My voice was as monotonous as you could get. I was dripping with angst and self-doubt with every hallway corner I turned. I tried to sabotage my first real relationship (first unsuccessfully, then...well, is there a successful way to end a relationship, really?). I never had a faithful sidekick as devoted and cynical and witty as Jane Lane (damn, Daria was lucky), but the friends I did have definitely all fit the bill in one way or another. So I'm really, really biased. (Check that: my first real relationship? She was my sidekick. And I kicked her to the curb. Damn you, sexual incompatibility!)

Looking at the whole series in chronological order, I can definitely see things I never recognized in the past. To wit:

• You NEVER would have seen Daria run up to hug Jane at the beginning of the series, when their standoffishness was central to their characters...yet there you see it, at the end of the series, after Daria nearly gets into a car accident. Daria is human!
• Bribing. Fucking UBIQUITOUS at the beginning of the series. But for some reason, the Morgendorffers grew up, and at some point, money was no longer considered a means to achieve selfish ends.
• Quinn. My God, but Quinn evolved. The snobbiest, most selfish, most superficial kid who always fit in perfectly in the Fashion Club grew up. She found out that learning and being smart is cool. She learned respect and - dare I say it? - sisterly love for Daria. (This, after years of disowning her as some distant relative or other.) She even stood up to one of her peers, calling her on having a drinking problem, even when it meant the end of their friendship.
• Daria herself. I mean, she was so uniformly cynical, antisocial, sarcastic, a loner...you know the type. She totally encapsulated it. At first. But as the series went on, cracks showed up in the wall of cynicism she built around her. She began to acknowledge the love that her parents had for her. She began to show - in more overt ways - her devotion to her friends. She even (begrudgingly at first) reciprocated her sisterly love toward Quinn. And my GOD...she even maintained a relationship with a BOY for awhile!
• Ms. Barch's utter HATRED for the male species - because of a heartless, cruel divorce she endured before the series started. No blaming her here. But it was totally cool to see how the endlessly hypersensitive Mr. O'Neill unwittingly and effortlessly melted this crone's heart...to the point where she was making out with him at any opportunity. By the last episode she was wholeheartedly accepting what she misconstrued as a marriage proposal. Take home: if the man-hating Ms. Barch can fall in love again, ANYTHING is possible. ANYTHING.

But some things that were established firmly at the beginning also remained stalwart to the end.

• Jane. In all respects: her cynicism, her slicing wit, her (nearly) undying dedication to her friendship with Daria. (Aside from that whole boyfriend quasi-stealing mess. Justifiable and forgiven.) LOVE me some Jane Lane.
• Kevin's utter stupidity. Duh! He was the QB, right? And of course, he flunked his senior year. (Yes, this attitude contributed to an anti-homecoming/football screed I published in the school paper my freshman year that all but guaranteed me a pummeling by our linebackers.) (If only...)
• Brittany. Kind of. She did actually grow some semblance of a brain. Somewhat.
• Jodie. God bless her. I really felt for her. So pressured to be the best of the best. Oh, and let's add the pressure of being one of only two minorities at Lawndale High. And she graduated valedictorian, natch.
• Sandi. President of the Fashion Club. Always and forevermore a bitch of the highest order. And no, that is not meant as a compliment. But I will grant her this: she can manipulate better than anyone I've ever known.

Seeing Daria (both the character and the series) just affirms my position in life. I'm intelligent, cynical, somewhat antisocial, somewhat reclusive, yet constantly evolving and learning stuff about human nature. And the fact that a network as influential as MTV found a character and series as non-mainstream and subversive as Daria (see also: My So-Called Life) and could support said series for five seasons gives me hope for persons such as myself. (Of course, MTV has since devolved into a state of putrid swampstank the likes of which Daria represents its absolute antithesis. I mean, MTV hardly shows music videos anymore, right? It's time to pull the plug. Like about a decade ago. We can all live without The Real World, which is, like, so real, btw.) But if Daria can thrive, I can too, right?

Then again, we may never know. The final movie, "Is It College Yet?", showed everyone going separate ways. Daria broke up with her beau, Tom. Brittany promised Kevin she'd wait for him...while crossing her fingers behind her back. All the main characters wound up going to completely different colleges. But a silver lining of sorts: Daria and Jane ended up going to different colleges, but in the same town: Boston. But there ended the season. Maybe continuing to pursue Daria: The College Years might have been pretty tough. Still, given the caliber of what the team behind Daria had turned out, it would have been possible, and possibly very compelling. But the world will never know...just like that damned Tootsie Roll commercial.

God bless Daria Morgendorffer. And God bless pizza.

"Where can I go to see a big good healthy dose of bad attitude?"

Gloryhallastoopid, my prayers have been answered! Maybe six years late, but still...better than nothing, right?

Daria: The Complete Animated Series is being released in May. EVERYTHING. Eight discs worth. Soup to nuts. Pilot episode to two full-length season-ending films. A Mystik Spiral video. A top 10 MTV video countdown with Daria and Jane.

Of course, all clouds must have smoky gray linings, right? The music that made Daria such a perfect time capsule of the 1990s is not intact. It'll be replaced by covers and (as they put it rather euphemistically) "appropriate" generic music. Boo-hiss. But a rather weak boo-hiss. I mean, this has been WAY long in coming, and for Daria to finally be released is major cause for celebration. I may have to have a weekend long Dariathon in a few months. Can't wait.

Daria on YouTube...and DVD?

Two things Daria-related have recently made my universe much brighter. First off, there is a YouTube channel that has recently been updated (actually, inundated) with many episodes of Daria, after a few-month hiatus. Including my personal fave episode. Enjoy, kiddos. (If you're wondering what the big deal is about Daria, check this out.)

But perhaps the bigger news (and hopefully this isn't just another rumor), is that Daria may well be officially released on DVD next year!

No snarky, witty, or otherwise Daria-worthy comments right now...our hero is too involved with the physical labors of moving to a new home to engage his brain in a coherent manner. But I will keep you, my one or two regular readers, updated.

Daria

Oh, my...how the summer of 2004 changed me. Of course, you, the reader, have been assiduously following my blog, and already know of my tiki fetish. But that same summer, I also regressed emotionally back to college. And one of my loves at the time was Daria.

I was lucky enough to find it on The N, basically to the Noggin what Nick at Nite was to Nickelodeon. The N was, uh, edgy enough to show teenage dramas like Radio Free Roscoe and Degrassi (which was a Canadian show apparently too extreme to make it onto syndicated American TV). But I didn't want messy reality drama. I wanted my sarcasm, plain and simple. I wanted humor just this side of Beavis and Butthead. I wanted a cartoon to pander to my basest brainwave frequencies. I wanted to hear Daria Morgendorffer and her indomitable sidekick Jane Lane wax sardonic about life, high school, boys, the popular people, art...you name it, nothing was immune to their withering observations. They said all the things I never felt I could say as a high school or college kid for some reason.

Daria delivered the wicked goods. The show actually was an offshoot of Beavis and Butthead; one episode finds Daria correcting the two moronically chuckling in a museum: "He said master painters." But Daria was too much of a character to be denied a show of her own. Who couldn't relate to being a misfit prone to snarky comments in high school? Millions could. So one day in 1997, Daria and her family moved away from their former home in Texas, settled in Lawndale, and one of the best cartoons ever created began its five-year stint on MTV.

The unfortunate thing about Daria is that chances of it being officially released on DVD are slim to none. The background music was sampled from scads of alternative artists, all from different music labels. The possibility of securing the rights to each and every one of those songs is pretty slim...although in this day and age where Girl Talk can sample hundreds of artists in one single 53 minute-long song and probably not get prosecuted, hey...anything's possible, right? Just don't hold your breath is all I'm sayin'.

The other unfortunate thing about Daria is that it stopped being aired on MTV in 2002, and although picked up by The N sometime after that (albeit in edited form), it was dropped unceremoniously in 2005. It now lives an ignominious existence on YouTube. Still, check the ads on the side...maybe there is hope after all.

But in the meantime, we have websites like this to fulfill our Daria-philia. And my love for Daria knows few bounds. This shall not be the last you hear from me about Ms. Morgendorffer.