The self-affirming possibilities of a yearbook quote

I have a strange affinity for early 90’s Saturday Night Live…I suspect it’s because I used to religiously tape the reruns on “E!”   Tape – Not record on  a DVD/hard drive. I taped the 2-3 episodes that aired every weekday and kept a small VHS library in my room.  Sort of like my own Hulu.  This was in 2006/2007, by the way, long after the inventions of both Tivo and YouTube.

Stuart Smalley was an SNL character from the early nineties:

Stuart was one of the few characters Al Franken did and the blunt, effeminate, Fig-Newton-loving man remains one of my favorites.  Obsessed with Twelve-Step Programs, he had his own 2am cable access show called Daily Affirmations with Stuart Smalley wherein he would attempt to diagnose his guest’s problem but would usually end up projecting his own issues on his guest, who usually never had a problem at all and always wound up comforting and reassuring Stuart in the end.  Something about his cringe-inducing honesty/obliviousness/love of Fig Newtons was hilarious to me.  He began every show by looking in his mirror and saying “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it people like me!”

Actually… no one really liked him.  Good for him though, right!?

I was looking over my senior yearbook while visiting home today and was reminded of the fact that I chose Stuart Smalley’s daily affirmation for my senior quote.  I remember spending waaaaay too much time figuring out how to spell “doggone it” for the quote, as if the correct spelling really mattered, as if the correct spelling of the word would somehow prevent my peers from thinking that I (at best) was lame for choosing  to quote a forgotten SNL sketch that no one thought was funny (and at worst that I was a total weirdo with a bizarre personal mantra I felt the need to share with everyone) instead of a meaningful song lyric/cool inspirational quote/inside-joke-phrase.

Of course at the time any one of those three things was exactly what I wanted my quote to be.  But I didn’t listen to music that I thought was cool enough/know any quotes that I thought were deep enough/have an inside joke with anyone that I thought was funny enough.

So I went with Stuart Smalley.  And I don’t regret it.