Your Completely Reliable Guide to the 2000s

Uggs! Juicy Couture! Flip Phones! Mean Girls! The early 2000s was a weird time—too long ago for us to remember, but too recent for us to study in Global. This means that, like me, you have heard your teachers drone on about it countless times. I’m writing this article so that we have a collective database to reference back to the next time anyone’s teacher starts their fond recollections. If you pretend to be interested convincingly enough, maybe you can secure extra credit!

Let’s go through a typical Stuyvesant day in the dinosaur age—the early 2000s—step by step:

From the dawn of time, even as far back as the 2000s, every kid has started their day with their commute to school. Let’s assume that now in the modern day and age you take the train. If we looked back to the ancient setting this piece examines, we would see that wheels didn’t actually exist back then. Ever wondered why your parents complained about having to walk 150 miles to school every day? They weren’t lying! For those who take the ferry today, your fellow students in the 2000s swam to class. Some clueless freshmen, no doubt unaware of the recent developments in seafare technology, still do this. If you ever wondered why some freshmen have wet hair in the mornings, now you know.  

Now you’ve reached school. Perhaps in 2023, you would go on a coffee run. Well, coffee existed way back then, so that probably didn’t change much, right? Wrong! Sources tell me that Stuyvesant students two decades before us relied solely on the juice of old Abercrombie & Fitch clothing. That’s right, the excess of tight long-sleeves and brightly colored zip-ups created a new market that caught the attention of some poor kids who really didn’t know any better. They claimed they could stop buying A&F products anytime they wanted! Rumor has it that they were never the same after the Abercrombie & Fitch juice. Nowadays, some of them work at Whole Foods, selling this same juice and labeling them under a different collection of vegetables each time. DON'T DRINK THE JUICE.

Now that you have been warned against mysterious Whole Foods drinks, it’s time to get to your classes. Let’s assume you’re a freshman. Being incredibly irrelevant and not a real concern of the programming office, you’ve got gym first period. You don’t have to do the PACER Test, but there is something worse in store for the 2000s kids. Something far, far worse: By the time you’re done lifting those enormous blocks they called computers, you feel like that neon 2000s Play-Doh. But who knows, maybe the other classes will be better! Either way, you don’t change out of your gym uniform after class. Some things never change—like freshman hygiene practices. 

So you board a horse and buggy (or whatever they used to get around at that time) and ascend the next few floors to get to your chemistry class. And then—oh no!—it turns out you have a lab today! It’s the hardest lab of the year too! You have to mix just the right chemicals to get that wonderfully deadly, pungent fume of a new pair of Uggs. Suddenly, everyone around you is sniffing their Uggs passionately, hoping to get inspiration somehow. Did you catch a whiff of that?! Was that the scent of Ugg or freshman?? Whatever it was, it smelled like ammonia, so let’s add in some of that. Nowadays, anything even resembling the smells made in that lab would warrant an arrest of every person in the room, but those were different times. 

Now that you’re barely conscious from the Ugg fumes, maybe you think it’s not a bad idea to get some lunch. You go to Gerry’s (Groovy Terry’s), and OH NO. “Inflation is ruining your young adult life,” you think to yourself. Can you believe that your usual sandwich, which cost the already hefty price of 25 cents just the day before, is now 30 cents?! How does one expect a poor high school student to survive with these prices?! 

And so, with a ridiculously overpriced sandwich in hand, you walk home with the knowledge of hours of incoming homework weighing down on you. I guess some things really haven’t changed.

I hope that you now have a sufficient amount of knowledge on the 2000s to humor your teachers. One thing I’d REALLY recommend is to ask them about the dinosaurs and if they remember the creation of the wheel. It’s gotten me so far along my Stuyvesant career, and if that doesn’t help, then you can hold me personally accountable.

Your humble history helper,

Sasha