So Mean Girls Day is fast approaching like Sound Transit’s Light Rail. October 3rd, to be exact.

I’ve been told many times throughout my life that I’m a personalized walking, talking IMDb. When a word, a song lyric, or even a random commercial jingle pops up, my brain can total recall it — sometimes with more accuracy than if you were to #GoogleThatShit. It’s a blessing, occasionally a curse, but mostly it’s just who I am.

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October 3rd

IMHO, 2004 Lindsay Lohan was hotter than Arizona asphalt on a summer’s day. And whenever someone drops that iconic line — “On October 3rd, he asked me what day it was…” — I don’t stop there.

I keep quoting.

“I have ESPN or something!” Or “On Wednesdays we wear pink.” Or “You can’t sit with us!” It’s like muscle memory, burned into pop-culture DNA.

Executive Upgrade Campaigns

The big-box-place-that can’t-be-named hosts Executive Upgrade Campaigns — impromptu reviews of your membership, designed to illustrate the value of upgrading from Gold Star to Executive. But the jarring experience, and the unexpected nature of it, can be off-putting and simply not fun. So… in that vein, the themed days were created for the floaters to dress up and diffuse that standoff-ish stigma.

Well, in the Arizona warehouse I was in, every Executive Membership Campaign that happened to land on a Wednesday carried its own homage: “We Wear Pink.” A little nod to Mean Girls that always broke the ice.

Why So Mean?

What makes Mean Girls so enduring isn’t just the one-liners (though they’re gold). It’s that the movie nailed something real about high school life: the cliques, the awkwardness, the longing to fit in, and the cruelty that can creep in when you’re just trying to survive those four years. It was satire, sure, but sharp enough that it still feels fresh 21 years later. That’s why it keeps getting quoted, memed, and even turned into a Broadway musical!

The movie also reminds me of the friendships that get built around shared fandom. For some it’s Star Trek or Lord of the Rings. For others, it’s quoting Mean Girls at random and knowing someone else will fire back the next line. That kind of shorthand creates connection, long after the movie credits roll.

So as October 3rd rolls around, I’ll tip my hat to Lindsay, Tina Fey, and the whole crew for giving us a film that was more than just “so fetch.” It was funny, smart, and strangely timeless.

And just like Cady Heron (pronounced Katy) calculating limits in math class, I know this much: the limit of how many times I’ll laugh at Mean Girls doesn’t exist.

Next week? I’ll trade pink shirts and Burn Books for eight arms and the ocean deep — explaining why, if I had to be reincarnated as an animal, I’d pick the octopus.