The other day, while combing the internet for corgi-fied movie posters and lists of foreign words that have no equivalent in English (did you know that the Germans have a word for "excess weight gained from emotional overeating" that translates literally as "grief bacon"? If you did not know that, were you truly alive until one sentence ago?), I came across a list called 48 Things That Will Make You Feel Old. This list inspired me a) to suspect I might be older than the person who compiled this list, and b) to remember the following three things that recently made me feel aged and "hey kids, did you realize there was a time before the internet when, if you wanted some good, old-fashioned corgied-up movie posters, you had to get scissors and paper and make them yourself"-y.
1) My niece, who was born when I was already basically an adult and is now in JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, is maybe going to be playing the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop" next year with the school band. A couple of things about that bother me. The thing I was proudest of in grade seven (besides my battered "journal" full of "poetry", obviously) was my Ramones t-shirt, which I purchased from a Yonge St. head shop (along with a t-shirt featuring a skull wearing an eye-patch that I have since tragically lost track of [the shirt, I mean, not the eye-patch]). I still have that Ramones t-shirt, which makes it twenty two years old. My Ramones t-shirt is nine years older than my niece. Also, when I was in grade seven, my music teacher (who looked almost exactly like James Taylor) made us sing songs like "One Tin Soldier" and "Big Yellow Taxi." They were roughly twenty years old when we sang them. When my niece performs "Blitzkrieg Bop" it will be thirty-seven years old. Of course, my music teacher was much older in relation to the release dates of his songs than I was in relation to "Blitzkrieg Bop", but still. If we'd sung thirty-seven-year-old songs in junior high school, we'd have been singing songs from 1952.
2) When I was in my first year of university, my boyfriend's fifteen-year-old brother purchased Ill Communication and was amazed to discover it wasn't the Beastie Boys' first album and that I had been all of ten years of age when I heard that first Beastie Boys album. That experience of feeling much older than a younger person occurred eighteen years ago.
3) On a recent episode of 30 Rock, Liz Lemon was revealed to have purchased a tiny Princess Leia costume for a daughter she does not yet have. This revelation triggered a sudden, vivid flashback to Halloween, 1982. I was in love, IN LOVE, with a boy named Colin. Colin was emphatically not in love with me. Imagine how thrilled I was, then, when I turned up at school on Halloween wearing my super-awesome Princess Leia costume and discovered that Colin was wearing a super-awesome Luke Skywalker costume (I preferred Han, really, but Colin wasn't dressed as Han; he was dressed as Luke). I proceeded to pursue Colin around the schoolyard (not a winning strategy, by the way), yelping things like, "But you have to love me! I'm Leia and you're Luke! We HAVE to love each other!" That totally underwhelming, slow-moving chase sequence was made possible by the fact that this was 1982, and NOBODY KNEW THAT LUKE AND LEIA WERE BROTHER AND SISTER.
1) My niece, who was born when I was already basically an adult and is now in JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, is maybe going to be playing the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop" next year with the school band. A couple of things about that bother me. The thing I was proudest of in grade seven (besides my battered "journal" full of "poetry", obviously) was my Ramones t-shirt, which I purchased from a Yonge St. head shop (along with a t-shirt featuring a skull wearing an eye-patch that I have since tragically lost track of [the shirt, I mean, not the eye-patch]). I still have that Ramones t-shirt, which makes it twenty two years old. My Ramones t-shirt is nine years older than my niece. Also, when I was in grade seven, my music teacher (who looked almost exactly like James Taylor) made us sing songs like "One Tin Soldier" and "Big Yellow Taxi." They were roughly twenty years old when we sang them. When my niece performs "Blitzkrieg Bop" it will be thirty-seven years old. Of course, my music teacher was much older in relation to the release dates of his songs than I was in relation to "Blitzkrieg Bop", but still. If we'd sung thirty-seven-year-old songs in junior high school, we'd have been singing songs from 1952.
2) When I was in my first year of university, my boyfriend's fifteen-year-old brother purchased Ill Communication and was amazed to discover it wasn't the Beastie Boys' first album and that I had been all of ten years of age when I heard that first Beastie Boys album. That experience of feeling much older than a younger person occurred eighteen years ago.
3) On a recent episode of 30 Rock, Liz Lemon was revealed to have purchased a tiny Princess Leia costume for a daughter she does not yet have. This revelation triggered a sudden, vivid flashback to Halloween, 1982. I was in love, IN LOVE, with a boy named Colin. Colin was emphatically not in love with me. Imagine how thrilled I was, then, when I turned up at school on Halloween wearing my super-awesome Princess Leia costume and discovered that Colin was wearing a super-awesome Luke Skywalker costume (I preferred Han, really, but Colin wasn't dressed as Han; he was dressed as Luke). I proceeded to pursue Colin around the schoolyard (not a winning strategy, by the way), yelping things like, "But you have to love me! I'm Leia and you're Luke! We HAVE to love each other!" That totally underwhelming, slow-moving chase sequence was made possible by the fact that this was 1982, and NOBODY KNEW THAT LUKE AND LEIA WERE BROTHER AND SISTER.
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