It’s my last day as an intern here at CC (tear). And because CC Editor Alex knows me so well, she knows that the greatest goodbye present she could have given me was a piece of 90s nostalgia. My love for the strange/awesome/tacky things of the 90s is well documented. I’m not sure quite why I love it all so much, but 90s kitsch really bring joy to my heart. So what did Editor Alex show me? The commercial for Nickelodeon Magazine!

When I was a kid, this was the most convincing commercial ever – I followed the instructions and got a parent to subscribe me to Nick Magazine. And that’s not the only thing that cheesy 90s commercials convinced me I needed. For your viewing pleasure, here are the top 10 90s commercials you had probably forgotten about.

Garnet is a student at Columbia University in New York City. She is “that person” who starts dancing at a party when everyone else is standing around, and if there were a Facebook stalking Olympics, she would be a gold medalist. She also loves cheesy 90s music, and almost died of happiness when Vanilla Ice retweeted her. Once. Follow her on Twitter @garnethenderson.

I love food.  LOVE. Like a fat kid loves cake. Except I’m the fat kid… and cake is everything edible. I have to have it wherever I go, frequently, and at my fingertips in times of need (which tends to be more often than I’d prefer).

I can especially appreciate food in a lunch box.  Hey, I’m just saying that PB&J is nothing short of genius. It’s probably one of the only foods that can withstand the wrath of school bus floors and humid lockers.

Anyway, since I got myself a big girl job, I had to start packing bag lunches so I don’t blow all my money buying Jimmy Johns every time I go to the office. All that lunch packing took me back to the days when my mom used to pack me lunches in third grade high school.  She would fill up that brown paper bag with such wonderous things.

Suddenly, in my blissful daydream of food – I was bombarded with the greatness that was my lunch hour when I was ten years old.  The nostalgic memories of sitting down with my three-foot-girlfriends came flooding to me like a rainbow of unlimited taste-bud opportunity and goodness.  I want it all back. I want the sugar, I want the innocence, I want my paper brown bag for work filled with all of this:

Click on any delicious and not-so-nutritious treat to get started

With all the crazy sh*t happening in the world today, we here at CC can’t help but think back to the days when the biggest issue in our lives was whether our Mom had put our favorite over-sized T-shirt (with the Coke Bears on it!) in the laundry yet.

Yeah, we’re talking about Elementary School.

And maybe we’re not even talking about the Elementary School of today, because apparently kids are alergic to everything and on mood-altering drugs and having sex at 11. We’re talking about the Elementary School of our youth. Troll Dolls. New Kids On The Block (the first time). Side pony-tails. Dunkaroos. Life was so much fun back then — or at least our nostalgia tells us it was.

In honor of our childhoods, and because we are so. drained. from a week full of political and economic strife, we’ve decided to put together the 10 Best Things About Elementary School. Feel free to add your own happy memories in the comments…

10) Lunchables

Yeah. These things were really bad for us. They were full of chemicals and sugar. Refined and processed. But hot damn, were they good.

9) Cootie Catchers

How many of these could you make in thirty seconds? How many times did you actually believe with your heart and soul that Sean, who sat two desks over, was actually going to fall in love with you because the Cootie Catcher said so? P-U-R-P-L-E…

8 ) Homework That Included Coloring

Booyah. This was the sh*t, right up there with making dioramas out of shoe boxes. Color the 50 states? Sure. Color the different parts of the flower? WHY NOT? Nothing was better than lulling yourself into a zen-like state with coloring and calling it “work”.

7) Skip-It

One time, I Skipped-It around my entire block for an hour. Exercising has only gone downhill since…

6) Yoo-Hoo

Do they even sell this stuff anymore? It’s probably known to cause cancer now, but back in Elementary School, this drink was as valuable as pure crack cocaine from Colombia. You could bargain for anything with Yoo-Hoo, including your friend’s half-baked cookie from hot lunch.

5) Trapper Keepers

If people wouldn’t look at me weird, I would still be using my Lisa Frank trapper keeper from 5th grade. That bitch held everything, even pens. Plus, you could add all the cute kitten and Troll doll folders you wanted to it and it would still close

4) Snap Bracelets

These things were outlawed in my school as soon as they arrived, but the potential to actually cut someone only made them cooler. If you sat in the back of the bus, you could watch boys having whipping contests with them — first one to shed a single tear loses.

3) Anything with Unicorns on it

Unicorns were hip in Elementary School. Especially if they had wings, or were painted in really bright colors. You could have Unicorns on your pens, notebooks, pencil cases, shirt…the list goes on. I can’t own anything with a Unicorn anymore, even though my love for them is still strong.

2) Sharkbites Fruit Snacks

Remember the white ones that tasted like all the colors combined? It was like an explosion in your mouth.

1) Recess

Tackling boys and throwing to the ground without worrying about restraining orders, getting “married” by the tire swing, testing the boundaries of your courage by kicking the tree with the bees in it; recess was pretty much the best thing the public school system ever did for us. I’ve never laughed so hard in my entire life than when I watched my friend Bobby try to jump off a swing, only to have his jacket get caught by the chain, and fly backwards like a rag doll 6 feet in the air. Oh man. Good times.