I Might Not Be as Smart as I Look

Kids are often not the brightest or quickest to catch on. My own sometimes seem to be willfully missing the point, or intentionally not getting it. When I get frustrated, and feel harsh words rising in my throat because they are behaving as though they are sharp as marbles, I pause and remember my own experience in what I think of as the Kilt Episode of 1972(ish).

My mother was a fan of kilts and plaid things in general (as you will recall if you read my post that included my description of the Stupidest Halloween Costume Ever Devised at 6:30 p.m. on October 31, or Really,Ever). Many years before the Halloween costume debacle, I owned another kilt, this one in a Royal Stewart tartan (that would be the red one you’re most likely familiar with, for those of you who aren’t Scottish tartan aficionados). It had straps that crossed in the back and buttoned into the waist band in the front.

Because the straps were a double thickness of wool, and because the buttons were stitched to the multi-thickness waist band, getting the straps buttoned was no mean feat. My mom had to do it for me because my fine motor skills weren’t sufficiently developed to do it (I couldn’t have been more than four), and I lacked the strength in my fingers.

Although I probably wore it multiple times, there was one time that stands out and has weathered the ravages of time, wine, and a very minor flirtation with illegal drugs to remain accessible to me.

I was at preschool—it was a Montessori preschool—and at some point during the day nature called. As nature does. I went to one of the teachers, and asked her to undo my straps so I could go to the bathroom.

“You don’t need the straps undone,” was her response.

I remember thinking how stupid she was. I did need to have them undone, otherwise I would be unable to remove the straps. I waited a few minutes, hoping that she would process my request, and realize her response was unacceptable.

I approached the same teacher again, and made the same appeal. Again, she declined on the grounds that it was unnecessary for me to have my straps removed in order to use the restroom. In my four year old way I was starting to get rather pissed off and impatient with this bozo. The straps held up the kilt. I needed to remove the straps to remove the kilt. Parlez-vous Anglais, you idiot?

I would give her one last chance. I waited a few more minutes. Things were starting to get a bit desperate here, so it wasn’t many more minutes. My four year old brain wasn’t much for coming up with new approaches, or finding new angles. I hit up the same teacher with the same plea for sartorial assistance.

“You don’t need the straps undone,” she repeated for the third time.

Really, you twatwaffle? Have I not made myself clear? These buttons are hard. My mom has to fasten them for me in the morning. I might be able to get them undone, but the odds are slim. We are nearing a point of no return here, and if you don’t give me a hand, you’re going to have more to deal with than just some stubborn buttons. I hope you have a mop and some dry undies handy, because we’re going to need them, if you get my drift.

Just at the point when I might have ended up with a nickname like Tinkle Tracy (four year olds are both creative and sympathetic in their nickname assignment), I decided to go to the restroom and try the damned buttons for myself. As I stood there fiddling, it finally dawned on me. What you no doubt have been asking yourself all this time finally occurred to me.

Why did you not just lift up your kilt—since it’s nothing more than a skirt—and go about your business?

So I did. But to this day I am not sure why the teacher, on seeing that I clearly wasn’t grasping what she was implying, didn’t say, “It’s just a skirt—lift it up and go.” Clearly she assumed I was smarter than I am, which is a mistake that many have made through the years. I humor myself she didn’t want to insult my intelligence by giving me so obvious an instruction, or she was confident I’d figure it out on my own. The truth is she came within about 45 seconds of need that mop.

Did you have a wardrobe malfunction as a child? Did you ever have to pee badly enough that you thought you might call someone a "twatwaffle" out loud? Have you ever been in a situation where people clearly thought you were smarter than you are?

How I Met Your Father

Remember your first date with your current spouse? I do. Well, you probably do too. But this is my blog, so you’re hearing about mine. But you can tell me about yours in the comments, if you want. I’d love to hear about it. But first, you get to hear about mine.

My husband and I met in college. We were both what they call “nontraditional age students” (read: we both dicked around and took fucking forever to get through college). We were taking a Dickens class together. My husband still mocks me for not having read “A Tale of Two Cities,” because I didn’t, but I will say that “Bleak House” is one of my favorite books to this day. He asked me out three times, I refused all three times (sometimes one hits a blog post topic dry spell—saving that story for just such a time). A few months later I was dating the biggest asshole ever to walk the Earth (let’s swap stories sometime—even if you do turn out to have dated a bigger one, it’ll make for good laughs over margaritas). A very old and dear friend listened to my tales of his treatment of me (which I didn’t think was that bad, but she did, and she was right) and said, “Ugh. Don’t you know any nice guys?” I thought for a minute. For some reason, my now-husband came to mind.

“One. I know one nice guy.”

“THEN ASK HIM OUT.”

So I did.

I called him and suggested we go out. Mr. Cool said, “Let me call you Friday afternoon at work, and we can make a plan for Saturday. Would that work?” Sure, I said.

Friday afternoon came and went. It was really more like Friday evening. At 4:54 p.m. my desk phone rang. It was Mr. Cool, calling to make plans.

I forget the really detailed details, but we agreed that I would come to his house, and we would figure out where to go for dinner. There was something about his not wanting me to do a ton of research on restaurants we might go to in order to maintain a certain air of spontaneity. It’s probably worth noting that my job was Research Assistant for the ad sales department of a national newspaper, so research was kind of what I did. Also, this was the early 90s when restaurants were like theater and plays thirty years previously, and you went to the big names so you could say in casual conversation, “Oh sure, I’ve been there.” But I cooperated, and met him at his house as planned.

We decided to go to restaurant in Washington, D.C. called Jaleo, owned by Jose Andres. It has now expanded to something like six locations but this was the original location 20 years ago. I remember we had shrimp with garlic and tomatoes, an apple and Manchego salad (which I make to this day, and will give you the recipe for, if you want it—it involves cutting a lot of things into matchstick size pieces and dressing it with olive oil and sherry vinegar, but it’s very good), plus a number of other things, and a bottle of wine. We ate, we drank, we dug each other. He excused himself to go to the restroom, and leaned over and kissed me for the first time as he stood up. After dinner we went for a walk on the National Mall in the dark, with all the monuments theatrically lit. It was all nauseatingly romantic. As I left his house that night (no, we did not. I’m not that kind of girl. We waited a least a month, as I recall), I knew this was the man I would marry.

 

This is the scene of the crime

We started dating. Everything was great, no hiccups. We got married, fa la la.

However, starting the week after our first date, and for the next 20 years (and counting) people have gotten a very interesting impression of where we went on our first date any time either of us has told this story. Jaleo bills itself as a tapas bar (as indeed it is). You order lots of small plates and share them, and if you like something a lot, you order more of it. Since many people have never heard of Jaleo, we just say, "We went to a tapas bar."

Humor me here. Go find someone near you and say to them casually, in your normal voice without any enunciation, “Let’s go to a tapas bar.”

What was their reaction? Furrowed brow? Suspicious side eye? Appalled recoil? Jumped at the offer? Reported you to HR?

That’s because you said, “Let’s go to a TAH-PAHS bar,” but what they heard was, “Let’s go to a TOP-LESS bar.” Feel free to tell them they have a dirty mind, if you want to make them feel sheepish about the whole thing, but know that it’s what absolutely anyone you say that to will hear (unless they're from Spain, or possibly married to someone who is).

He told me at some point after we’d been dating for awhile that a few days after our first date, he’d been talking to some friends, who had known we were going out, and who’d asked how said date went. When he told them he’d taken me to a tapas bar, they said, “Whoa—does she have any single friends? What girl lets you take them to a topless bar?”

Ha fucking ha. Eyeroll.

For the last twenty years people have thought that our first date was at a topless bar. I have since learned to tell this story by saying, “We went to a tapas bar. Not a TOP-LESS bar. A TAH-PAS bar—a restaurant where they serve Spanish small plates that you share.” I mean after all, like I said, I am NOT that kind of girl. But I still get a funny look for a few seconds before I can get to the explanation part of my sentence.

P.S. Mr. Cool told me long after the fact that he actually got caught up in work and totally forgot he was supposed to call that Friday afternoon. He was racing home from work, praying that I’d still be at my desk when he got home just before 5 so I could take the call. So much for Mr. Cool.

Working at the Mall

My third job out of college was for a major long distance carrier. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept of “long distance,” back in the Dark Ages, if you wanted to call a person who lived far away from you, you had to use a “long distance carrier” to place the call. This was a company you chose based on how recently they had sent you a check to bribe you to switch to their service. The “big three” were Sprint, MCI and AT&T. The truth is that initially they all just bought capacity from AT&T, which owned the fiber optic network long distance calls were carried on, before eventually laying their own cable, but never mind that. In any event, I worked for one of these three (not really important which one).

 

 

Let's face it--they were pretty much interchangeable

I worked there for almost exactly one year before getting laid off, much to my delirious joy. The woman I worked for was a control freak and a helicopter boss. In that one year I had met six people that I’d gotten to know well enough to converse with, and they were the people in my department, the girl who sat across from me, and the girl who sat next to me. There are two reasons for this. First is that my helicopter boss handled all the communication with our internal customers. I remember sitting in one meeting to hear about a project we were going to be working on. One. And my boss did all the talking. All other projects I worked on came through her, and my output was returned to the customer through the same channel. The second reason is the people themselves. People at this company were just unfriendly. I would cross paths with them in the kitchen, and they would studiously avoid eye contact, and respond with only the most cursory of nods to any words of greeting extended to them. It was weird.

Our offices were in a high rise building that was connected to a mall. My cube looked out on the top deck of the parking garage. To get to the parking garage, I had to walk through the food court of the mall. It was actually a fairly convenient location—the lunch options were diverse, since we had access to the food court, and more than once I got up from my desk and ran down to pick up a birthday card or present on a short break.

Since I was there for almost exactly 365 days, I was able to observe two phenomenon that have stayed with me to this day.  The first is Christmas at the mall.

Many are the outraged tirades I’ve seen on Facebook about “starting Christmas too early.” Nordstrom famously—and, in my opinion, smugly—puts up signs after Halloween every year declaring that you won’t find any Christmas decorations in their stores until the day after Thanksgiving. La di fucking da. Isn’t the absence of those decorations enough to make it clear that they’re not rushing Christmas? But no, they have to put up signs patting themselves on the back for making sure Thanksgiving doesn’t get stomped on by Christmas being rolled out too early. Like Thanksgiving has feelings and gives a shit.

Since I was at this company in the early 90s, and stores hadn’t quite gotten to the point that they were putting out Christmas decorations the day after Halloween, Christmas sort of crept in to the mall next to my office. The first thing we noticed was that the muzak had some Christmas songs in the mix when we walked through the food court. Then we’d see the big decorations that the mall owned and put out every year. Santa’s chair was set up, and a sign told us when we’d be able to come see Santa in a few weeks. The stores started to decorate. By Thanksgiving, the mall was in full on Yuletide mode.

But the most prominent memory for me is the parking deck. Remember it was the view from my cube. I started this job in August or September (I forget the exact date), and for the first couple of months of my employment, I could look out on the deck and there might be three or four cars up there. Some days it was completely empty and remained that way.

But starting in late November, an interesting thing happened. More and more cars started parking up there. This mall isn’t far from the Pentagon and the offices that surround it, so lots of people would come over to the mall on their lunch hour to do their holiday shopping. By mid-December, looking down on the deck around lunchtime, it was almost half full. Then the amount of time during which the upper deck was somewhat full began to lengthen—there would be a good number of cars there from 10 or 10:30 until about 3 p.m., with almost all the spaces being taken during lunch. The week before Christmas, from about 9:30 a.m. until the time I left the office, the top deck was almost completely solid with cars. (We had reserved parking in another part of the garage, so I didn’t have to fight people for spaces, fortunately.) What I find interesting about this is that if the top deck was solid with cars, it meant that the four levels beneath it were too. That’s a lot of people, when you think about it.

Then the holidays passed, and winter changed to spring, and another interesting thing happened.

Washington, D.C. is a popular spring break destination. Schools from all over the country send groups of kids to D.C. to take in the history, tour the museums, and learn about our country’s early years. They also, apparently, make sure they get a chance to check out important landmarks like Banana Republic and The Gap, presumably so they can see how the D.C. locations of those stores differ from the ones they have in Raleigh or Cleveland or Omaha. (Spoiler: they don’t.)

Look it's Short Hills Mall! Or is it King of Prussia? Or possibly the Mall of America. Because THEY ALL LOOK THE FUCKING SAME.

Busloads of kids would be dropped off at the mall, where they would swarm through it, eating Auntie Annie’s pretzels and drinking Slushees and checking out chain stores that were exactly the same as the ones they had at home. I’ve never understood this. People travel thousands of miles so they can go try on the same tan chinos they could buy at a store ten minutes from their own homes. I could see if they went to Georgetown, or Old Town Alexandria. While those areas do have a few places that are nationally prominent, they have a lot of small boutique type stores with interesting and diverse merchandise. But these kids were salivating to get to Ann Taylor and The Limited so they could look at the same earrings and bangle bracelets that were for sale at every Ann Taylor on planet earth.

So I spent probably six weeks watching these kids exclaim with excitement when they discovered that this mall had all the same stores their mall had. Wasn’t that cool? Ohmuhgod, they totally have Eddie Bauer here too! Squee! Then the spring break season ended, and the crowds reduced back down to more normal levels, or at least were comprised of more adults than teenagers.

About three months after that, the director of my department called me into her office and informed me that they would have to let me go, that the amount of work the department was being asked to do didn’t justify my position, and they were eliminating it. Her manner clearly indicated that she was delivering what she thought would be bad news, and cause me great distress. The truth was I had to restrain myself to keep from kissing her full on the mouth. This was the best news I’d gotten in months. No more would I have to try to pry a pleasantry out of some surly office drone while I was microwaving a Lean Cuisine. Never again would I be given work to do in such a way that it felt more like homework than a professional contribution to an organization. And I can’t say I felt much in the way of regret when the rise of cell phones pretty much drove this particular long distance carrier out of existence. About the only thing I’ve ever missed was getting to see the parking lot at Christmas, and the throngs of kids in the spring. They were the most interesting parts of the whole job.

Changing the Channel

I am not proud to reveal that my children watch a lot of TV during the summer. Oh, I make them turn it off at some point, and we have a mostly TV free day, but early in the morning, and in the evening, it’s a Cartoon Network-Disney XD marathon in my living room. It does, however, give me the chance to compare the TV watching of my childhood with the experience my kids have.

I monitor what my kids watch fairly stringently. I look things up on commonsensemedia.org and have vetoed a couple of shows on the grounds that they’re inappropriate. I feel like a troll policing them so rigorously but there’s so much more television now. We have satellite, and for example you could, if you were so inclined, watch SpongeBob from dawn until dusk. There’s an East coast and a West coast feed of Nickelodeon, which means that SpongeBob starts at 6 a.m. ET, and goes off at 9 a.m. ET. At 9 ET, the West coast feed starts up and runs for three hours. When the West coast morning feed ends, the East coast afternoon feed starts up. Seriously—All. Fucking. Day. I actually put my foot down and flat out banned that irritating little anthropomorphic rectangle of cellulose.

 

I despise this asshole

I don’t recall my parents ever telling me I couldn’t watch something, or even telling me I had to turn the TV off. I don’t know if my parents really paid any attention to what I watched. But then, a lot of what I watched was what they watched, because there was one of me and two of them, and we only had one TV set. We got a portable in the mid-70s, and I remember watching a few shows in my room, or sitting on a stool in the kitchen. That was when a portable TV was actually portable. Flat screen TVs may give you a better picture (because thank god—I would hate to think my kids were watching “Jessie” in anything less than perfect lifelike resolution and unadulterated crystalline definition) but you can’t take them to your bedroom and sit on the floor playing Legos while you watch the 1976 Winter Olympics.

Yep.

My kids never miss a show, either, because they can set up anything to record at any time of the day or night. It used to be that if you wanted to watch “Donny & Marie” or “Gimme a Break!” you made sure you were home when the show was on. It sounds sad to say we planned our lives around the TV schedule, but to some extent we did. Somehow it doesn’t seem sad to me, because it meant that those shows were special—we weren’t just staring at whatever happened to be in front of our eyes, which is often what my kids appear to be doing. They don’t really care that much about watching “Austin & Ally” or “The Amazing World of Gumball.” They’re just watching it because it happens to be on. They may have picked it, but it was picked from a list of perhaps five other shows. It’s almost like they pick the thing they don’t want to watch least, if that makes any sense (“I don’t want to watch ‘Kickin’ It,’ I don’t want to watch ‘Lab Rats,’ I don’t want to watch ‘Adventuretime’…guess I’ll watch ‘The Regular Show’ since there’s nothing else on.” If there’s nothing you really want to watch just turn off the fucking TV).

They also never miss any part of a show. Thanks to the pause button, they can stop a show at any point, and start it back up where they left off. Never will they know the stress of trying to hurry up and pee because there’s someone yelling from the room with the TV, “The show’s back! Hurry up!” I’m convinced that the people who scheduled the commercials figured out how long it takes the average person to go to the bathroom, and made it so the commercial break was one 30 second spot short of that window.

With the DVR and fast forward, watching commercials is also a thing of the past. With the possible exception of the Super Bowl, people don’t really seem watch them anymore. When we were kids, commercials even played a role in influencing our vernacular. Who didn’t imitate Clara Peller, saying, “Where’s the beef?” at least once between 1984 and about 1990? Other than shit like Stompeez and Stufeez (and may I say that I don’t know who invented those things, but I hate that person or people with the blinding heat of a thousand fiery suns), a few lame toys, and (oddly) ads for insurance companies, there don't really seem to be that many commercials on the shows my kids watch. Mostly they air promos for upcoming shows on the same network. Or, if it’s Disney XD, a video of the cast members of every single Disney XD show singing “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” which never fails to embed an earworm in my brain that takes days for me to get rid of. So, you know, thanks for that Disney XD.

They’ll never dig the TV guide out of the Sunday paper to see what’s going to be on this week. The TV guide may, in fact, have been the whole reason you got the newspaper on Sunday. That way you knew what the ABC Afterschool Special would be on Wednesday, and when the football game was on. TV guide had the most comically simplistic crossword puzzles in the history of crossword puzzles with clues like “a four letter word for ‘an accessory to hold up pants.’” My kids have never seen a paper TV guide. They know only the onscreen satellite guide that they can access with our remote.

Or you could look in the paper. Notice all the channel listings fit on a single broadsheet page.

They will also never know the pain of not being able to receive a channel. Where we lived there was a channel 20 (which is, of course, on UHF, which is another concept they’ll never understand—a TV set with two channel dials), the transmitter for which was on the other side of a tall high rise building that just happened to be on the corner of our block. The building blocked our reception of channel 20, which of course was the channel that showed cartoons like “Kimba the White Lion” and “Speed Racer” after school. I didn’t realize until I was an adult and bought a couple of “Speed Racer” DVDs for my kids just how astonishingly lame that show was. The closest my kids will come to this is that our satellite package doesn’t include The Game Show Channel or something (not that they care about The Game Show Channel, but if I told them it existed, and we didn’t get it, they would, in the way of children, be outraged at being denied access to it).

My kids won’t have the option to watch a favorite show on a different channel owned by the same network, but then, they probably won’t have the need, either. Sometimes our local station would be showing something else in place of one of our favorite shows. My mom and I were devoted to “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island” every Saturday night (no, we didn’t get out much). Occasionally our local ABC station would be showing something else—I don’t know, a Jerry Lewis telethon or something. In a pinch, we could watch ABC on the Baltimore channel (which, surprisingly we got, even though we couldn’t get channel 20, which was four miles away as the crow flies off of River Road—go figure). So we could watch, but it was a bit unsatisfying. Sure, we got to see this week’s episode with Guest Stars Barbi Benton and Charo, along with Gopher and Isaac Your Bartender, but it always looked as though there was an unlikely blizzard on the Mexican Riviera because of all the static. Channels don’t preempt regular programing as much as they did back in the day.

Of course, TV is now 24/7 and there are 984 channels. There’s no such thing as “not on the air” which means that the national anthem playing at 2 a.m., or turning on the TV on Sunday morning and seeing a test pattern don’t ever happen. If my kids wanted to get up at 4 a.m. and watch SpongeBob, they could. Which again to me seems to take some of the “specialness” away from TV. My generation was the one for which TV became a given, but for my kids’ generation, it’s the one for which it will become completely taken for granted, just another dementedly jabbering block of plastic that takes up space in our homes.

I guess where I’m going with this is that I think it’s kind of sad that TV has no magic for my kids. They can watch whatever, whenever. As a perfect example, take “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in my house. When I was a kid, once a year Dolley Madison (or possibly Mounds and Almond Joy) would sponsor its airing on CBS, and my dad and I would watch it religiously. We checked the TV guide to find out when it would be showing and when it came on, by god we watched. Now we own it on DVD, and if they were allowed (THEY ARE NOT) my kids could watch it any time during the year, and 450 times between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and completely ruin it for themselves by overexposure. This is why I have it hidden where they can’t get at it and only pull it out on Christmas Eve, when we watch it as a family. Once per season, the way God and Charles Schultz intended.

The Number You Have Reached...

I remember about eight million years ago (give or take), my dad read an article in some magazine about the New York City phone system, which contained the fact that at 9 a.m. every weekday, the system would “run out” of dial tone. Dial tone, it seems, was not a boundless resource, but something of which there was a finite amount. All those people beginning their work day and picking up the phone to make that first call would suck it all up, and for an unspecified amount of time each day, it wasn’t possible to “get a dial tone” in New York City.

Something reminded me of that article the other day, and it occurred to me that this was not a phenomenon my children would ever know. In fact, I’m not sure they even know what a dial tone is. Their awareness of phones and phone calls doesn’t include a world without smart phones, much less without cell phones. We have a landline phone, and it rings from time to time, but we generally let it go to voice mail, because it’s almost always a telemarketer, or some asshole from India trying to recruit us to partner with him in hacking our own computers so he can mine our passwords and otherwise defraud us.

(Why, you may ask, do we then bother with a landline? The answer is we had it for emergencies when the kids were a bit smaller—before they could all read to manipulate a smart phone, they could have picked up the landline and dialed 9-1-1 in the event there was an emergency, and the grownup who was responsible for them was the victim. We keep it now because none of our children have cell phones—yet—and they do occasionally stay home alone, so they have a way to call for help, should they need it.)

Also a foreign concept: long distance. Back at Christmas, my brother in law called me (on my cell phone, of course). He and his girlfriend were coming for a visit in a couple of weeks, and he wanted to talk logistics and plans. Sometimes I think my husband married me (with my lifelong reputation for being an incessant chatterbox) to fill the blathering void left in his life by the absence of my brother in law. If I can talk the hind leg off a cat, my brother in law and I together would turn it into a biped (unfortunately, one with two front paws, but never mind about that). So, we chatted of this and that, swapped some stories, made some plans. After about a half an hour, my 80s-raised brain presented me with this thought:

“Jesus, this is going to cost him a fortune.”

Duh. He called my cell from his. It wasn’t costing him a dime. That idea would never have crossed the mind of any of my kids in a similar circumstance, because they know nothing of the concept of local calls versus long distance calls. Calls are calls to them.

And remember calling someone and getting a “busy signal”? This will never happen to kids of this generation. Every call goes right to a voice mail, or you get a cheerful, musical voice letting you know that you’ve somehow made a mistake and should promptly fuck off. I bet she’s the cousin of that bitch who’s constantly telling me I can enter my phone number if I’ve forgotten my Club Card, and urging me to scan my first item at the self-checkout (I despise self-checkout, a concept I know was designed by a man—but more on that another time).

Although we do have a landline, our phones are all cordless. We have them in three or four rooms, but we could (if we actually used them) roam from room to room, chatting all the while. When I was growing up there was a red wall phone in the kitchen. As with all wall phones in all kitchens, it had a 6’ cord on it (so you could…walk into the dining room to talk, because…a change of scenery is nice? I don’t know). Naturally that cord was pulled out all to hell and gone, because we did go into the dining room for a change of scenery, or to the far end of the kitchen for a drink of water. Never will I say the words every teenager dreads, “Get back in the kitchen or you’re going to pull that phone right off the wall!” Ugggghhh, OKAY MOM.

Related—I’ll never have to yell at them for trying to jump rope with the phone cord, which could also pull the phone right off the wall, for god’s sake.

On the plus side, they’re unlikely to suffer the pain of the twisted phone cord. The phone cord that has been knotted and kinked up to the point that the only remedy for it is to stand on a desk or table and hold the cord high above your head with the receiver dangling down, letting the weight of the receiver pull the snarls out of it. Of course, that method was only partially successful, because the cord was so stretched out in the first place that it would crimp back up in a weird way that only remotely resembled its original tidy corkscrew pattern.

I once heard an NPR story on how phone cords got so strangely tangled. The expert (from…AT&T, back when AT&T made actual telephones? From the North American Telephone Cord Association? I have no idea) said that the way phone cords got all twisted was that, “People twist ‘em.” He went on to explain that the user would take the receiver out of the cradle and bring it to their ear, then during the call, they’d switch ears, and return the receiver to the cradle from there. That was one full revolution of the cord. Multiply that by a couple of hundred phone calls, and you’re well on your way to a highly twisted phone cord. Probably information I’m passing along too late to be of any use to you with your cordless handsets and your smart phones, but for what it’s worth, that’s how it happens.

They’re never going to pine for cute phones, either. When I was a kid, I desperately wanted a Kermit the Frog phone from the AT&T Phone Center store. Kermit was sitting in a chair with his feet up and his legs crossed, and one of his feet and an outstretched hand made the cradle for the receiver.  I didn’t get it. I got a princess phone instead, which was fine, but not exactly what I wanted (yes, First World problems, but I’m still a tad bitter about it, when you consider that about ten years later my mother decided on a whim that she wanted a Mickey Mouse phone and went out and bought it for herself. So a character phone was reasonable if she wanted it but not if I did? Humph). Later I took matters into my own hands, and bought both a phone shaped like a rain cloud, with raindrops for buttons, and a rainbow for a handle (which was cute, but impossible to wedge between your shoulder and your ear when you were on a call because it really was just a half circle, not “receiver shaped”), and one of those clear plastic Trimline phones with multicolored components and wires (which, to be totally honest, I wish I still had).

 

 

Maybe I wish I still had both

Phones today are so characterless and dull. They’re all cordless of course, but they’re also just black plastic with boring LED displays. About the only “feature” they have that differentiates them from one another is whether the display is orange, green, or blue. It’s almost impossible to distinguish between your wireless phone handset and your television remote control. In fact, in the past I’ve tried to answer the TV remote. (Although to be fair, I’ve also tried to use my TV remote as a calculator, so I clearly have my issues with electronics in general, and with TV remotes in particular.)

While there are a lot of positives my kids will have by living in the smart phone era, there’s one really wonderful telephone related experience they will miss out on completely—slamming the phone down on someone who’s been a complete asshole during a call. I don’t care what you say, pushing the “end” button on a smart phone or cordless handset just doesn’t give you the same surge of satisfaction as taking that receiver and crashing it as hard as you can into the cradle. It also doesn’t translate the same way to the jackhole on the other end, who just hears the call go silent on a smart phone. There’s no reverberating bang! as the call ends, and the dial tone starts droning tunelessly in their ear. It was a well deserved punishment for someone who committed the crime of being a total dick. Smart phones have rendered this impossible. Such a sad loss.

photo source

photo source

You Must Read This

Maybe it’s just our school district—maybe we’re slackers—but I have noticed something that tortured me endlessly in my school days seems to have miraculously faded from popularity. I speak of the dreaded Summer Reading List and accompanying Book Reports.

Maybe it was just the fancy ass private school my parents insisted on sending me to (some drivel about a good education, I don’t know—I actually hadn’t turned down the volume on my Walkman the way I’d been instructed to when they started the conversation), but for years when classes would end in June, they would pass out a list of “Recommended Reading.” Maybe I misunderstood the definition of “recommended” but I was always under the impression that a recommendation wasn’t necessarily a direct order to execute. With a recommendation, you had the option not to participate. That was not the case here. On the first day of school you were to bring back with you some appalling number of reports on books you’d read over the summer.

I hate you, I hate you, I hate you

 

I love to read, do now and did then. It was probably my favorite thing to do as a kid (since sports clearly wasn’t high on the list). But to read books and then have to write book reports just plain sucked. In the first place, they seldom picked books that I wanted to read. They always picked all those coming of age books like “Up a Road Slowly” (and really, why did it seem that every heroine in the books on these lists wanted to be a writer? I get it—write what you know, but where does imagination come into play? Couldn’t these people imagine a little girl who wanted to be anything other than a writer, even though that was clearly what they wanted to be when they were kids?) and deep books like “Bridge to Terabithia” and “Where The Red Fern Grows.” Frankly, my problem with all these sorts of books is, they’re depressing. They never picked things like “Starring Sally J. Friedman As Herself” or “Hangin’ Out with Cici” (which is apparently out of print now, but was written by Francine Pascal, so those of you who were “Sweet Valley” high fans might want to see if you can find it at your library).

I had enough trouble with depression as a kid. It was not necessary for me to read about kids with dying moms, dying friends, dying dogs, or other unfortunate circumstances. I had enough trouble dealing with my own problems, I didn’t need to read about problems other kids had that I couldn’t do anything about. And if it was about animals suffering (lookin’ at you “Incredible Journey”) just forget it. Fuck that noise. I was a huge animal lover, and couldn’t stand the idea of an animal in any sort of pain. I didn’t even like “Socks” because of that.

But I had no choice. Every summer I would go through and pick the least depressing of the gloomy lot. Of course now I go look at my school’s website and not only have they changed the requirement (only one book is mandatory, and no reports on the others they have to read), but they’ve added all the good shit—Judy Blume, E.L. Konigsburg (loved “The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler”—I just read it to my kids, and they loved it too), and J. K. Rowling. Not that J.K. Rowling was in print when I was a kid, but just to illustrate that they’ve really broadened their offerings.

Naturally I never did this exercise voluntarily, or ever particularly early on in the summer. Mid to late August always found my mother hounding me to figure out which books to read, and me spending multiple hours reading books I hated, and then having to write up some sort of stupid summary of them. Part of the reason I hated doing this is because I stink at it—there’s a reason I’m not writing reviews for the New York Review of Books. Although, ironically, I have an English degree, but an English degree is surprisingly easy to fake. If you can’t think of anything else to write, you can pick a pet theory, and apply it to every text.  Treatment of women? Even if you’re reading “Lord of the Flies” (which was one of the dogs I had to read in high school at one point—dear lord how I loathe that book, and I’m sorry to say it’s still required reading if you’re going into Grade 10 at my old high school) you can make it work. Postcolonialism? Sure. Freudian theory? No problem.

But these were “little kid” book reports, not a treatise on the application of a literary theory to a text. Most of the time they wanted the title and author, main characters, and a description of the conflict. Then they wanted you to say something you liked about the book. This was always a huge challenge for me, because, as I’ve said, I almost never did like the fucking book. I would have been glad to detail what I disliked about the books, but my school didn’t want to know (or perhaps my mother wouldn’t let me be honest). They were all “la la la what did you like about this book?” I would have said, “I thought it was depressing as shit and it brought me down for days to have to read about these dreary people in these cheerless, miserable circumstances with bleak prospects.” (Or, you know, the ten year old version of this.) Oh no, in spite of having made me read these lugubrious tomes, they wanted me to say what I liked.

Please don’t think I wanted to read nothing but Nancy Drew or V.C. Andrews or other similar literary junk food. I was willing to read decent books, I just didn’t want them to be such downers. I read and loved the Little House books, “The Secret Garden” (“A Little Princess” not so much), and the whole “Ramona” series. But they rammed “The Bluest Eye” and “The Once and Future King” down my throat (in high school, naturally—not when I was nine). And to be fair, “The Once and Future King” isn’t depressing, but holy hell is it long as shit and quite frankly not my genre.

Absolutely the only good thing that ever came out of this whole experience through which I suffered for more years than I care to count is that I learned to spell the word “character.” At one point I misspelled it on one of my reports, and my father made me write it over some absurd number of times to learn to spell it correctly. To this day, when I write that word, I think “char-act-er” because that was what my brain was saying the whole time I was writing it out to learn to spell it back in the day. But I’d say that’s a fairly small payoff for what I can assure you was hours of thankless work, between reading and writing up reports.

And now it seems the whole practice has either disappeared, or been reduced down to a more reasonable effort. To have been asked to read a single book and just be able to discuss it, without having to fabricate a positive response to it would have been heaven. Maybe that’s why I was actually successful in getting an English degree. I remember telling a professor once that I refused to read “Wuthering Heights” and asking if there would be a problem with that when it came time to write papers. I was reading it, I explained, when my mother died suddenly of an asthma attack two years earlier, and I couldn’t read it again without remembering the whole horrible experience. Her response was that reactions to books are very personal, and she wouldn’t force anyone to read something that would cause them to react in a way that would make them uncomfortable. I wish she’d been in charge of my summer reading program all those years ago. If nothing else, I might have been spared “Lord of the Flies.”

I Do I Do

When my husband and I announced we were getting married, everyone was very pleased. We’d been dating for a couple of years, and I got along well with his family. I was much better than his last girlfriend, it was agreed by all (better than a cheating psycho who once faked a pregnancy and then a miscarriage to get out of attending her grandfather’s 80^th birthday party—let’s be honest, I didn’t have to be that much better to be an improvement, but I like to think I was a lot better). Then his grandparents wanted to know which church we’d be getting married in. We struck a bit of a snag there.

My husband’s grandparents were Catholic. That didn’t stop them from getting married two months before my father in law was born, and then lying about the year of their marriage for the rest of their natural lives, because she’d gotten pregnant by accident in a set of circumstances that was never really clearly explained (I mean, some of it we can figure out from a basic knowledge of human biology, but there was a lot that was never divulged). But they claimed Catholicism as their religion, regardless of how loosely they may have adhered to its teachings at various times in their lives. My husband was raised Catholic, which, now that I think of it, I should revise to read “raised” Catholic, because I think the last time he was in church was Easter of 1972. I was not raised Catholic at all, and wasn’t about to convert to Catholicism and go through all that counselling and pre-marriage song and dance just to satisfy his grandparents (bless their hearts). They, however, declared that a wedding not in the church was invalid, and they would not recognize it. “If it’s not in the church, it’s not real,” I believe was their statement at the time.

I didn’t want to break it to them that I didn’t give a shit if they considered it “real” or not. It’s not like I was marrying David Rockefeller’s grandson, and he and Peggy disapproved of our ecclesiastical choice. There wasn’t a huge family fortune at stake here or anything like that. However, my husband was close to his grandparents and didn’t want to upset them. We spent a few weeks discussing options and finally decided that we didn’t want a religious ceremony at all. My husband’s godmother (who is also a cousin—a first cousin once removed, for those playing along at home) is married to a Federal Law judge. We wondered if a non-religious ceremony would satisfy them, or if they were going to scoff at that and insist on the Church.

Because they apparently had an unapologetically blatant double standard, they declared that, “If it was family, it was fine.” We asked the cousin’s husband if he would be willing to do this for us, and he agreed. He told us he needed to do some research, and would get back to us. About two weeks later, he called us and explained what he’d found out.

We were getting married in Virginia, in a county with the slightly dirty-sounding name of Fauquier (pronounced “Faw-KEER,” and if said quickly enough to someone unfamiliar with the name, sounds like something that might or might not be fightin' words). The judge called the Clerk of Courts in Richmond, and found out what Virginia’s policy was (at that time, anyway—I can’t speak to any changes in the last 18 years. This was our experience; your mileage may vary) for the performance of marriage ceremonies.

 

It's not all red in real life.

There is a body of individuals who are authorized to perform ceremonies carte blanche. This includes the clergy, and members of the judiciary within the state. There is also a group of a fixed number of laypersons who have been granted the right to marry people. Application is made to the state for these positions. Beyond that, it is possible to obtain permission to marry a specific couple on a specific day. This was what he was gunning for. Unfortunately, according to the Clerk of Courts, you had to be a resident of the county in which you were performing the ceremony. Since this man was not a resident of Fauquier county, we were screwed.

Except! Devious fellows, these legal types. If, he said, we got married before the “wedding,” he would put on his robes, stand in front of our guests, read our vows and “marry” us. But we had to be married before the wedding, he said.

We enlisted my future brother in law and his wife in our deceit. The day before our “wedding,” we went to the courthouse in the county in which we lived, bought a license (they didn’t even ask for ID—just typed our names as we dictated them. I like to think they’ve tightened up the restrictions on that since then), and went down the street to a judge’s office where we got married. My brother in law and his wife were witnesses. Given that it was a “civil” ceremony, I expected to have to promise not to bend, mutilate, or spindle or something, but no, they used love, honor, and cherish. Afterwards we went out for lunch, then went to our wedding rehearsal, and rehearsal dinner (which was, of course, really our wedding dinner).

The next day we got up and exchanged rings in front of 150 guests at what is now a spa and hotel (but was then a private house owned by the catering company we chose) in Fauquier county. Our rings have the two dates engraved in them. We celebrate our anniversary on whichever of the two dates is more convenient (some years, of course, neither is particularly, but when it’s Thursday/Friday, or Sunday/Monday, we pick the weekendier of the two days). Until a few years ago (when I started telling this story to anyone who cared—and probably a ton of people who didn’t) only six people knew we were married the day of our wedding—the cousin and her judge husband, my brother and law and his now-ex wife, and my husband and me.

In some ways, I recommend this approach. On the day of our actual wedding, I wasn’t the least bit nervous. I mean, I was already married to him. It was too fucking late, anyway. I was a little nervous on the Friday, but since there were only five of us in the judge’s office, I wasn’t a little nervous about getting married + a lot nervous that I was going to make an ass of myself in front of 150 of my closest friends. I might, on our wedding day, have been a little nervous about tripping over my dress and falling ass over teacup down the flight of stone steps we were standing at the top of. But the nerves of getting married didn’t push the making an ass of myself nerves over the edge (as they might have in other circumstances), and you’ll be relieved to know I managed to get down the steps and back up the aisle without mishap. And we’ve lived (mostly) happily ever after.

(Not) Playing the Field

We’re going to be out of town for a couple of days next weekend, and my kids will miss a day of school. They’re bummed out because it’s “Field Day” they’ll be missing. “Aw, man, I LOVE Field Day!” my daughter announced at dinner last night when it became clear what would be happening at school the day they would be out. I’m now trying to figure out whose kids these are. They can’t be mine, because they would surely have inherited my loathing of Field Day. Right? (Note: in spite of this, they are mine.)

As an adult, there are things I dislike about being involved with school, most notably the Science Fair and the Carnival. When I was a kid, my school didn’t have Science Fairs (although I’m sure I would have hated them if we had), and I vaguely remember one sort of Carnival-esque thing, but it wasn’t the run around screaming-toss beanbags in a clown’s mouth-get a bag full of cheap plastic shit toys that will clog the vacuum in three weeks kind of affair that my kids’ school has. All I remember about it is that I somehow ended up doing magic tricks for small groups of parents that drifted by from time to time. I was stationed at a table in a hallway and had evidently volunteered to do this. That’s it—wine (and 33 years) has wiped out the rest of that memory. But we had Field Day, and boy did I hate it. In fact, on a list of things I didn’t like about school, Field Day must be about five of them. It doesn’t bother me as an adult, because I don’t have to participate in my kids’ Field Day, or try find a plausible excuse to miss it (and “plausible” was a relative term—I made up some pretty unbelievable shit trying to get out of it in my day).

As you may have gathered if you’re familiar with my rant about camping, I’m not outdoorsy. And although it’s not necessarily a given, in my case not being outdoorsy and not being athletic are parts of one another in the Venn diagram of Things That Totally Suck In My Opinion. In the first place, most sports are played outside. In the second place, as a normal human being, when someone throws something at me, my instinct is to duck, not stick out my hand and try to catch whatever the fuck they threw at me. And to address the obvious question (“Yeah, but wouldn’t you rather have done Field Day shit and gotten to miss class?”) the answer is, actually, hell no. The only thing worse than the academic part of school was the athletic part of school. If they had said, “You can do Field Day, or go sit in the library and read all day,” the wake that followed me as I raced down the hall to the library would have pulled everything off the walls and sent it swirling against the lockers in a tornado of homeroom announcements and “Just Say No to Drugs” posters.

I don’t even remember that much about Field Day (see wine and passage of time, above), but what I do remember about it was excruciating. It was always at the end of the school year, of course. I’m sure this had to do with the fact that they were basically running out of shit to teach us (plus the teachers were as eager for summer vacation as we were, maybe more) so they declared Field Day and it was a chance for the teachers to not have to do a lesson plan and try to teach something to a bunch of twelve year olds who were already checked out and anticipating spending their mornings watching reruns of “Gilligan’s Island” and “I Dream of Jeannie” before they went to the pool for the rest of the day.

I grew up on the East coast, and naturally the day of Field Day was always the first really hot day of almost-summer. The activities were held on playing fields that were twelve miles from the nearest tree, so there was no shade. This was long before concerns about things like sunscreen (we called it “sun tan lotion” of course, which only serves to underscore the fact that it wasn’t about protection, but about cosmetics) and hydration (no one had a “water bottle” in those days, and there was no bottled water, and the school administration apparently didn’t give a shit if we all passed out from heat stroke). As a child, I was often mistaken for Casper the Friendly Ghost, so lacking in pigmentation was I. As a result, I’m very sensitive to excessive exposure to heat. So right there I’m not all that excited about this whole thing.

And then they wanted us to run. I don’t remember anything we did at Field Day other than sprint up and down the field. The 100 yard dash, the 500 yard dash, the 1000 yard dash, the 4,927 yard dash or whatever the fuck. I suppose they had other activities, but I can’t recall what they were. I think we actually signed up for stuff in advance, so it’s very possible I just picked the things that required the least coordination. Of course, it’s impossible to have enough activities going at once to keep 250 kids occupied the whole time, so we spent a lot of time standing around waiting for shit to happen.

Out in a field for four or five hours, with the sun blazing down and with nothing to drink, waiting to get to run a few hundred yards so I could go stand around some more…I can’t quite put my finger on what about this I found so abhorrent.

The logical strategy was to find ways to get out of it. I did my damndest. If I had put as much effort into my schoolwork over the course of the year as I did in coming up with reasons I couldn’t participate in Field Day in the week before it happened, I’d have been a Rhodes Scholar. My first encounter with Field Day was in fourth grade. When the guidelines were explained to me, I immediately knew that this was something in which I would be gracefully declining to participate. Just about that time, I was starting orthodontic treatment. I had some little bits of wire between a few of my molars to make room for some bands they’d be putting on shortly. The pressure these were exerting on my teeth was causing them to ache, therefore I was so sorry, but it seemed to me it would be unwise for me to participate in this “Field Day” thingie.

That one was a failure. I realized that in future years, I was going to have to come up with something better. A doctor’s appointment or a broken bone would have been a godsend, but I was never that lucky. Probably because in order to break a bone, you had to be remotely athletic and perform potentially risky acts that could result in bone breakage. About the most dangerous injury I was ever likely to sustain was a severe paper cut, or perhaps a pinched finger from getting it caught in the hinge of my Barbie carrying case.

I tried a lot of different things, but the one that probably worked the best over the years was simply going to the bathroom, and never going back to the field. That probably wouldn’t fly these days—the schools are much more vigilant about things like where kids are, and visitors to the school buildings and such. But thirty years ago it was no problem. The trick was, I had to pretend enthusiasm up to the point where I allegedly needed to use the restroom. That was kind of challenging for me, since it wasn’t exactly a secret that I hated gym class and anything that resembled it even slightly.

Our school colors were blue and white, and when you enrolled, you were assigned a color, which was your “team” for the rest of your school career. On Field Day, success in events was rewarded with “points” for your team. The team with the most points at the end of the day was the winner. There was a lot of screaming about “GO BLUE!” and “GO WHITE!” Really, I always thought, who gives a shit? We’re not running for Congress here. It’s not like “winning” gets you anything tangible or important. In fact, about the only thing I can think of that you “got” was that if your team won, you got to say “Ha ha! We won at Field Day!” to anyone on the losing team for the next ten days until school was out for the summer, and everyone forgot about the whole thing until the next year on Field Day. But in order to make it seem like I cared, so I could be struck with such an unfortunate need to go to the restroom about 45 minutes into the whole stupid thing, I had to participate in the inane and pointless screaming. (I was a Blue, for the record.)

My memory of all this nonsense ends by about tenth grade. I don’t know if they didn’t force the older kids to participate, or if I managed to convince my mother to just let me stay home “sick” on Field Day day. Given how much my mother also hated physical exertion, I’ve always been a bit surprised by the memory I have of her urging me to give it a go. I suspect she didn’t feel like she could let a ten year old stay home by herself all day while she and my dad were at work. I know she sympathized with my distaste for all things athletic, especially since her genes were probably where I got it.

I’m grateful that as an adult, the few times I’ve been exposed to something that had a hint of a “corporate Field Day,” it’s always been completely optional. Unlike in elementary school, there’s no shame in saying, “Yeah, not my thing,” or, “You know, I don’t do team sports,” or, “I’d rather perform my own hysterectomy with a rusty corkscrew” (depending on your level of enthusiasm, or lack thereof). Also, when you do team building activities in a corporate setting, there’s almost always alcohol provided. Having to yell, “GO BLUE!” with a glass of wine in my hand is way more tolerable than it was when I was fourteen and empty handed. Also I can walk away whenever I want and drive home and no one can stop me. It’s not always obvious, but there are some really kick ass things about being an adult. Not having to participate in Field Day may be at least two of them.

The Musical Question

A bit more on the subject of music…

The other day I was listening to the 80s station on Pandora when the song “867-5309/Jenny” came on. I remembered hearing years ago that every time that song was played on a radio station back in the day, the people who had that phone number got dozens of calls from people calling to see if 1) it was a real phone number (which it was in some area codes, but not in all), and 2) there was a “Jenny” who answered it (not sure the outcome of this one).

With the advent of internet radio, I’m guessing the people who had that number have long since abandoned it because now that song must come into rotation thousands of times a day. Personally I think it would be hilarious to get a cell phone and request that number, then leave it permanently on voice mail with a message that said, “Hi. This is Jenny. Sorry, I changed my number. No recommendations on who you should turn to. Maybe try your imagination? Good luck!”

I crack myself up.

But I started to really think about the music we listened to. And I had no major philosophical revelations whatsoever. Probably because, let’s face it, a lot of it was complete drivel of one sort or another. “Everybody cut footloose”? What the hell does that even mean? “Every breath you take. Every move you make. Every bond you break. Every step you take. I’ll be watching you.”? Um, hello? Stalker? “Relax, don’t do it, when you want to go to it, relax don’t do it, when you want to come”? Is there a person alive who thinks this song is about anything other than sex?  (Hint: It is not about anything other than sex.) And do I even need to bring up “We Built This City”? A song that has been voted the Worst Song Ever Written (maybe more than once)? Of course it came smack out of the 80s.

For fun I looked up a list of the Billboard #1 hits from the 80s. Some of the early ones are by artists that, in my mind, are more 70s than 80s. KC and the Sunshine Band, Diana Ross, Olivia Newton John, Chicago. In some cases they also had hits later in the 80s of course, but to my mind they were “70s music.” Maybe because I had a babysitter who adored Chicago, and she was a child of the 70s, just as I was a child of the 80s. Therefore, anything my babysitter liked—Chicago, the Eagles, the Bee Gees—got tucked in the 70s file in my mind, along with the enormously wide ties belonging to my dad, the patchwork evening dress my mom had, and the fire hydrants painted like little men from the colonial era that my city did for the bicentennial celebration in 1976. It is not an original thought that decades “bleed,” and the first two or so years of any decade are really culturally more in step with the decade immediately preceding them.

It also seemed like there were an awful lot of hits that came from movie soundtracks. An Officer and a Gentleman, Purple Rain, Flashdance, Footloose, Ghostbusters, a couple of James Bond movies, St Elmo’s Fire, Dirty Dancing, Cocktail. And we should remember that any song featured in a John Hughes movie was an automatic hit. It’s possible the 90s had just as many movie-song hits, but the 80s just appears to have been overwhelmed with them. Or maybe I’m just more aware of them.

But in the oeuvre of 80s music, one band stands out to me as being the Most 80s of All. Not because they were really my favorite (I don’t think I even owned one of their albums until my husband bought a greatest hits CD in 1997), but because I think they best encapsulate what 80s music was all about. One of their videos was voted Best Music Video of All Time (or something). They were everything we loved about the 80s— neon colors, skinny leather ties, androgynous men that were prettier than most girls. I’m talking, of course, about Duran Duran. These guys were musical gold in the 80s. And somehow they managed to be musical gold, without ever writing a single coherent song.

I have listened to Duran Duran songs thousands of times over the years, and I have yet to hear one that makes a lick of sense. The lyrics sound like they wrote words on pieces of paper, threw them up in the air in a big empty room, and whatever landed face up got used in whatever song they were writing.

Let’s have a lookee at the lyrics from the #1 hit “The Reflex,” shall we? Here’s the first verse, plus the chorus:

"You've gone too far this time"
But I'm dancing on the valentine
I tell you somebody's fooling around
With my chances on the dangerline
I'll cross that bridge when I find it
Another day to make my stand
High time is no time for deciding
If I should find a helping hand

So why don't you use it?
Try not to bruise it
Buy time don't lose it
The reflex is an only child he's waiting in the park
The reflex is in charge of finding treasure in the dark
And watching over lucky clover isn't that bizarre
Every little thing the reflex does
Leaves you answered with a question mark

So, immediately three words come to mind. What. The. Fuck. What the fuck does any of this mean? I have an English literature degree—I spent eight years (yes, I was slow, what’s your point) combing through the works of people like Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Chaucer, and Edith Wharton looking for contextual references, satiric characters, and random symbolism and I can’t make heads or tails of this. Perhaps I’m not drunk enough (or something). I’m sure with enough stimulant, I would read this and think, “Of COURSE. It all makes sense now!” But even then I’m not so sure. Dancing on the valentine? Try not to bruise it? I say again, what the fuck? And yet, we bought the shit out of their music, and I listen to it to this day.

Where am I going with this? Nowhere.  Weren’t you paying attention earlier? I said that I hadn’t come up with a single major philosophical revelation because we listened to what was essentially techno junk food with guitar accompaniment and a drum solo. But I love 80s music and having The Pet Shop Boys and the Outfield come up on Pandora back to back (“West End Girls” and “Your Love,” respectively) can make my whole day. My kids aren’t as charmed by it, but they don’t have the context for it, either. The horrible school dances, the party that a certain song reminds me of, the movie song that reminds me of That One Time at That Theater When That Boy Noticed  Me. My kids will have context for Pharrell Williams' “Happy” and Robin Thicke singing “Blurred Lines” (God help them, because I suspect that the memories those conjure up will be of their mother doing an embarrassing butt-seat dance in the car). But that’s just how it goes, I guess.

At the end of the day it’s still rock ‘n’ roll to me.