Simply having

I decided on the way in to work this morning that I’m ready for Christmas. But it certainly wasn’t that crap Paul McCartney “Wonderful Christmas Time” song that helped me turn the corner.

MAN ALIVE that song is like nails on a chalkboard. I flicked past it as quickly as I could. But as I enjoyed the first of the Christmas lights along my commute, I started getting excited about pulling out my own decorations. Tomorrow is December 1, after all. I can get okay with the Christmas hoohah starting on December 1.

Plus, I love my little house at night when it has candles in the windows and lights on the tree and smells of pine. I’m one of those people (um, at least I assume there are others) who tends not to turn on tons of lights at night; even in the winter I usually move about by the glow of the streetlights and moon as much as possible, only turning on the light by the bed when I read. But the window candles? And the tree lights? Those I adore.

So tomorrow I will pull out the Christmas decorations and set up my tree and lights; I will hang a bushy green wreath on the door and maybe stick some pine boughs in my window boxes. I will look forward to the gentle glow througout my house all December long, and start playing the Nutcracker over and over and over again.

At least until it drives old Paul’s ding-dong song out of my brain. I mean, I’m sure the baby Jesus loves the Beatles, but I doubt even He can stand that song.

She had a pleasant elevation

Getting back into the swing of things today, and feeling a bit rusty, I have just a brief thought on “And She Was.” Namely, that despite the very obvious fact that this is about d-r-u-g-s and despite my much-chronicled prudishness regarding sex- and drug-related music, I have always loved this song.

Well, “always” might be an overstatement. It’s possible I did not encounter it — or at least focus on it — until my junior year of college, when I stumbled into a sudden and all-consuming Talking Heads obsession. I don’t remember if it was this song that triggered the obsession, I just know that all of a sudden I could not stop playing Sand in the Vaseline.

The very subtitle of this compilation, “Popular Favorites,” is enough to make any true fan cringe. But for me, it offered two full discs of joy, a playlist that combined the familiar with new and wondrous sounds.

The briefness and specificity of this passion is evidenced by the fact that still, when I hear the band, I picture myself walking into my junior-year dorm room, turning right and covering the few paces between the door and the bureau that held the stereo, popping one of those CDs in, and pushing play. Ah, bliss.

AT40 on I-90

Hot on the heels of a lovely Thanksgiving holiday, I am feeling stressy and crabby and tired and right at the edge of sick this Monday morning — a very pretty picture indeed. So: Forgive the lame-o blogging.

I made the long drive home yesterday morning, and spent a couple hours of my ride listening to that stalwart of Sunday morning programming, “American Top 40.” Or, as Ryan Seacrest apparently insists on calling it, “AT40.” Blech.

It’s been years since I heard more than the snippiest of snippets of this show, and the loathsome Seacrest was almost enough to make me switch channels as soon as I realized it was he — and that it was now “AT40.” Now, I don’t watch “American Idol,” and really only have a passing awareness of the vile wee man, but is he not the world’s worst person interviewer? How is he a deejay/emcee/celebrity/millionaire? I heard him talking to Cher — with whom he has some passing familiarity, one presumes, given that his girlfriend was just in a movie with her — and he was barely listening to her answers or engaging her in actual conversation. UGH. Twas horrid and painful.

I only heard a few songs in the 20s of the AT40 before I lost the signal, but was surprised how many of them I knew. I got a good (in the sense of “healthy,” not “high quality”) dose of Adam Lambert, Lady Antebellum, and Katy Perry (and don’t need to hear any of those songs again any time soon). I was hoping for Cee Lo, whose “F&#$ You” I taught my parents over Thanksgiving (much to my and my siblings’ delight), but got none. Overall, I was unimpressed, and my hopes for enlightenment on the front of up-to-the-moment pop hits were unsatisfied.

However, my non-existent appetite for smug, preening, airheaded, hair-gelled turkeys was totally filled. Seacrest out. No really, Seacrest: OUT.

Come inside, it’s fun inside

This morning’s scan yielded nothing but Christmas pap, which I refuse to address until turkey day has passed (even though I did hear Bruce grunting his way through “Merry Christmas, Baby” … ooh la la). So instead I shall share a quick little bit of happiness on this pre-holiday day.

To wit: For the last two months or so, I have found myself watching “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” with my son, and enjoying it far more than I’d have expected. This has been helped in large part by the catchy opening and closing numbers, with which I couldn’t refrain from singing (and occasionally dancing) along. I’ve never been a fan of Mickey et al, but they’ve grown on me over these last few weeks. And my son, needless to say, thinks they’re the best thing since … well, since Thomas the Tank Engine (and good riddance to that buffer-busting fool, as far as I’m concerned).

Anyhow. Yesterday, catching myself humming the theme song during work, I googled the lyrics to confirm that one line is really as inane as it seems to be: “Come inside, it’s fun inside.” The bad news: Yes, that’s really the lyric. The better news: Turns out the theme song and the closing number, “Hot Dog,” were both penned by They Might Be Giants.

Suddenly it all made sense: the catchiness of the songs, my inescapable attraction to them … and suddenly I felt better about it. I won’t argue that these are TMBG’s best offerings by any stretch of the imagination — I assume they wrote the songs for big bucks, as they have more than a few TV theme songs, and hope they were indeed handsomely paid by Disney. But the music adds just enough oomph to make this kids’ show palatable. And for that, among many other things this week, I am grateful.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Sweat comin’ out your pores

With TGOTS gone for Turkey Day, I am left holding down the fort. But I’m not going to be much of a good fort-holder-downer — after tomorrow, I too am heading for the hills.

Meanwhile! Marky Mark, the Funky Bunch, and my high-school field hockey team await.

We began each practice in a large circle at midfield, doing warm-up stretches led by our co-captains. Ours was not a particularly rigorous region of Calisthenia; we were not all-star athletes by any stretch of the imagination, and our exercises were punctuated by idle gossip and whatever music was blaring from the radio in the middle of our circle.

I still don’t know what these radios are properly called, because the early (and obviously inappropriate) term ghettoblaster is the one that was used in my house and is lodged in my brain. The web tells me boombox, so boombox I shall call it. Actually, that term reveals all, in its perfectly dated 80s/90s-ness.

Anyhow, the boombox would be booming, and I remember exactly two songs from those moments: “Good Vibrations” and “Everybody Dance Now.” [Excuse me: "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)".]

At the time, the music didn’t do much for me, but most of my teammates seemed to like it. Marky Mark didn’t do much for me then either, although if I’d focused on the anti-drug lyrics in his song, perhaps my Church Lady heart would have opened to him. In the ensuing years, I’ve come to have warm feelings about ol’ Mark, who is clearly a multi-talented fellow.

I’m not sure I’ve even seen him in that many things — a quick review on IMDB suggests that “Boogie Nights” and “I Heart Huckabees” might be the sum of it — but I’m always happy to see him in previews or in articles or on the teevee. Local boy made good! Heck, I’m even happy to hear “Good Vibrations” once in a while. As long as I don’t have to stand in a circle and do lunges.

 

Turkey-Lurkey

Well, reader[s], I am getting ready to head out for some Thanksgiving travel — including a visit with my dear MamaKitt! — so I probably won’t be on Ye Olde Blogge for the next week or so.

But I couldn’t resist one last entry for the OMG I AM SO OLD column. This week brought two instances in which I experienced current globs of pop culture in secondary and satirical and/or reverent form. I had heard of both globs — songs, I mean — but never actually heard either; this week, before I had ever experienced the originals, I was gifted with two remakes. This reminded me, yet again, how I’m growing aged and distanced from the zeitgeist. I read about songs in magazines or on the web, rather than actually hearing them; I even, as happened this week, sometimes know about remakes before I know originals.

Sigh. Partly this bothers me, but partly it doesn’t so much. Do I really need to know about “Whip My Hair”? No. “F*&# You,” on the other hand …

Original recipe Willow Smith:

Fabu Jimmy Fallon remake (seriously, Boss lovers, keep watching):

Original recipe Cee Lo (I am wimping out and pasting the clean version here, but I highly recommend searching out the cussing one):

Oh, man, that song’ll stick in your head. I love it.

Twitchy Gwyneth Glee remake:

Happy Thanksgiving, dear reader[s]!!! I am thankful for you.

Stronger and harder than a bad girl’s dream

Wow, I was about to wax rhapsodic about Huey Lewis and “The Power of Love” and Michael J. Fox and Back to the Future, and then I needed a lyric for my headline, and then I discovered this line which I swear I’ve never, ever heard in all my decades of “listening” to this song, and now I’m floored.

Floored, I tell you!

Anyhow. When it is not flooring me with raunchy lyrics, this song transports me — back in time, shall we say? — to that movie, which I (of course) saw in the theater and which I (of course) loved because I was going to (of course) marry Michael J. Fox, among other reasons. It was also the first VHS tape I owned.

The fella and I recently caught the movie on the cable, which is (of course) not hard to do, especially in this, its silver-anniversary year. It was about 1/6th of the way in, and we happily sat and watched the rest. OK, it’s been 25 years, and I still love this movie.

It is … my density.

So when I hear “The Power of Love,” I picture MJF skateboarding in his orange vest while hanging on to a car, and I feel a certain indescribable lightness of spirit, and I am 10 and 20 and even 35, and all is well with the world.

Even the double-entendre-iest of lyrics cannot spoil that.

It’s a wonder I can think at all

I don’t know about you, Paul and Art, but when I think back on all the crap I learned in high school:

* I am smugly satisfied that I have never, as it happens, needed calculus. Just as I suspected.

* I find it odd that, for someone who went on to spend years and years reading and thinking about and discussing literature, I can remember very little of what I read in any year of high school English. Aside from sophomore year, which was all about the terrifying little lady teacher (only one of my four HS English teachers was a lady) and research papers and books like Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451.

* I feel like a dummy for, unlike MK, remembering only a few words of Russian, of which I had two years of study. I do remember my French, though. And one of my OCD tics is translating things I hear and sometimes things I think from English into French in my head. In my OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE HEAD.

* I remember even less of Latin, of which I had just one year, mostly because A) I wimped out on physics in my senior year and B) MK had so much fun in her Latin classes that I wanted in on the good times.

* I find it hard to imagine that health classes could possibly still be as poorly executed as mine was, with a gym teacher in charge using dump truck metaphors to illustrate human reproduction.

* I wonder if everyone has a teacher who A) leaves in the middle of the year with no explanation but plenty of rumors as to her whereabouts; B) leaves in the middle of the year to get sober; C) leaves in the middle of the year to get divorced; or D) one of each.

* I wish I’d retained any of my social studies and history classes, because I really haven’t. Aside from the one “Shaker Studies” class, which was awesome.

* I’m kind of amazed that, in spite of our tales of horrid teachers, MK and I actually had some pretty great ones at our rinky-dink school.

When I think back to high school — the actual SCHOOL part of high school, that is, and not the far-more-memorable social dynamics — I find that I remember the subjects like science and math that I didn’t like more than the ones (history, English) that I did — the ones I continued to study for years after high school. I’m worried that this means the things that came harder to me made more of an impression — and then I worry that I have a lifelong tendency to fixate on the bad rather than the good.

Sigh. I hope that’s not the case. I hope it just means that the things that have been challenges, that I’ve overcome to a least some measurable degree, have stuck with me. Yeah, let’s choose to look at it that way. Like all the world’s a sunny day. Oh yeah.

You’ll never settle any of your scores

A mere month and a half after TGOTS reported hearing “Little Lion Man” aplenty, I finally heard it for the first time. And love it. And want to run out and buy the Mumford and Sons CD (yes, I’m old-fashioned that way).

As I listened to it this morning, though, I didn’t know who was singing or what the song was. My radio readout helpfully told me it was called “Little Lyin’ Man” (which puts rather a different spin on things). So I tried to puzzle it out, wondering if these were Scottish singers, or possibly Irish, or — heaven forbid — the Barenaked Ladies putting on a fake accent. I know!

Wrong on all counts. But for some reason, my brain tripped on the Irish option, and transported me to a hillside across the road from my tall, brick sophomore-year dorm. I sat there in the grass with my Dad, talking about my options for the following year. I had assumed, pretty much since I was a child, that I would spend my junior year abroad, and was now debating where to go.

My father, bless him, came every fall for parents weekend. My mother was a field-hockey coach back home, and that same weekend was always Homecoming, so she stayed to fulfill her duty. Which meant my Dad would hop into his little VW and drive the 3.5 hours to my college so we could spend a couple of days watching rugby games and crew races and eating out and seeing the occasional movie. Remarkable, for all sorts of reasons that are too complicated to get into here, and something I treasure.

So there we sat, on the hillside, and I told him I thought I’d like to go abroad, and I was leaning toward Ireland. I don’t remember having any driving reason for going there, other than always having been intrigued by it. But my father scoffed. “You don’t want to go to Ireland,” he said. “All they do is drink and tell stories.”

Or words to that effect. A hilarious and rude characterization, but it was enough to make me refocus my plans.

As it turned out, I was accepted into two programs, one at Oxford and one at the university in St. Petersburg, Russia. After a great deal of deliberation, I chose … to stay put.

I have sisters who regret my decision more than I do. For me, junior year on campus was a magical time. You know how it feels when you’re in a college town after the students have left for the summer? Or you stay home during a holiday weekend when everyone else has skedaddled? That’s how it felt. Like I had special access to something other people were missing. Like those of us who stuck it out experienced something the people who left never would, even though it was against an all-too-familiar backdrop.

Would studying abroad have changed my life? No doubt about it. But staying put changed my life too: I gained confidence, great friends, and a happiness I had not experienced at school theretofore. Two roads diverged in a wood, and yeah, I took the one that wound through campus — and that made all the difference.

 

If I could turn back time

… then I wouldn’t have to know about THIS:

… and have to be ashamed about kinda wanting to see it.

I mean, COME ON! Cher and Xtina whatever, but (though you’d barely know it from the trailer) Stanley Tucci, Kristen Bell, and Alan Cumming? Talk about a few of my favorite things!