step by step, ooh baby

really want ya in my wo-o-o-rld.

when the spice girls reunited, i got excited for about five minutes and reminisced about receiving their first CD for my hawaiian-themed 12th birthday, where my friends and i danced to 'wannabe' on park benches for awhile before returning to the game of water balloon volleyball my mom had set up.

but the recent news that NKOTB is reuniting is ROCKING MY WORLD. new kids on the block was my first favorite band EVER.

i was 5.

my friend heather and i competed to see who could get their moms to buy them the newest and coolest NKOTB merch. i had the shirts and the socks, but i was seethingly jealous of her sleeping bag, emblazoned with jordan's face, because all i had was a cheetos sleeping bag left over from my dad's days at frito-lay, which led to girls calling me 'crunchy' at every birthday party. (fuck you, gelissa munoz.)

NKOTB laid the ground for all my musical obsessions that would come thereafter: walking into my 9th-grade bedroom was like walking into a backstreet boys shrine (i had posters of nick and brian on the ceiling above my bed, so i could look at their faces as i fell asleep while listening to 'millennium' on my discman), and my freshman year of college my friend jenna and i went on an east coast tour extravaganza to see 311 in three states, implementing a complex transportation plan involving a combination of buses, trains, subways, and taxis so we wouldn't have to stay in any hotels.

but i can never forget my roots and my very first concert, where i fell asleep with my head on my mom's lap before the new kids even got onstage. after all, it was 9pm: way past my bedtime.

so, NKOTB reunion tour 2008: who's with me???