One night in 1989 while I was watching my favorite show (America’s Funniest Home Videos), my Dad explained to me that before Bob Saget was on TV, he had an unsuccessful musical career and in an effort to escape his past he had changed his name from “Bob Seger” to “Bob Saget”.
7 or 8 years later, I’m 15 and flipping through a box of records at my friend’s house when I come across a Bob Seger album. Wouldn’t ya know it, I had a super fun trivia fact about Bob Seger! So I proudly shared it with the room.
My friend’s dad laughed until he cried. At me, not with me.
Sometimes it’s pretty easy to get caught up in the minutia and forget about the amazing night sky. Last weekend I took a little camping trip out to Colorado Bend State Park—off the grid—and got up at 2:30 in the AM after the moon set to do some stargazing. And it was in-fucking-credible. I’m not new to this, and have set late night alarms set to go catch a meteor shower, a space station passing, or a lunar eclipse. But last weekend’s pitch black and perfectly clear night might just take the cake for best star gazing I’ve ever done.
I only took mental photos, but they are fantastic. Now I want more. I might be making a trip out to West Texas in the next couple of weeks to take catch this spectacle before it’s gone.
Maybe I’m so interested in things like this because for my entire life my parents have made fun of the time in 1986 when, alledgedly, I “wouldn’t wake up” to see Halley’s comet while my family was at a friend’s beach house in South Africa, where the viewing conditions were perfect.
5-year-old-me “slept through Halley’s comet”, and now almost 35-year-old me is into going to great lengths to appreciate the stars—like by crawling out of a warm sleeping bag on a 29º night just to stare up at the sky.
Hopefully I’ll make it to July 28th, 2061 when Halley’s comet returns. But until then, the night sky is not lost on me.
There was a pretty cool reddit story the other day about an internet stranger casually solving a huge song mystery for another redditor. After a year of the mystery lingering, one day a stranger sent a link to the song, and it blew the original searcher’s mind.
Oh my god. Oh my fucking god. I’m actually freaking out.
Who are you? How did you know? WHAT IS GOING ON?
Thank you so much. But also, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON
And the kind stranger just responded with:
Shh bby is ok
And, just like that, a meme is born. The internet is amazing, sometimes.
But I can totally relate to the poster’s original excitement. Sometimes a song just gets under your skin, and you’ll do anything to find it. Before the modern internet, finally locating a song felt just as satisfying, and I remember distinctly trying to hunt down the following songs in the following ways, and feeling just as excited once each of them was in my possession.
###1989
“Girl I’m Gonna Miss You”, by Milli Vanilli. I’d hear this on the radio, and the melody line in the chorus (1m 24s) rocked my little 8 year old heart so much I just had to find the geniuses who created it.
I called up the local radio station and hummed the melody on the phone in order to figure out what it was. I was gifted the tape by a family friend shortly afterwards.
(And listen, I realized the error in my ways regarding Milli Vanilli not much later. We all did. We all did.)
###1997
“Incense and Peppermints” by The Strawberry Alarm Clock. I heard this song in Austin Powers, and it blew my teenaged mind. I wanted more. More Strawberry Alarm Clock.
I searched far and wide for a recording of this song during Christmas break of ‘97, and had to go up to the Sam Goody in The Mall Of America in order to finally find the truth: that there was no available back catalog of Strawberry Alarm Clock, that they were basically a one hit wonder, and I’d have to settle for the Austin Power’s soundtrack. Which I did.
###1998
I heard this song every so often on the radio for months and months and months, and it would haunt me. I wanted it. But every time, the DJ would say nothing about it. I delayed plans and waited patiently in my Mom’s 1995 Dodge Neon for a song set to end, hoping to get a clue about the song that had been captivating me.
I tried to savor every second the song was playing, knowing it might be weeks before hearing it again. At night after getting back on the 1998 internet in my parent’s basement, I’d Altavista the shit out of the lyrics that I scribbled down earlier in my pocket-sized memo pad.
I don’t even remember exactly how I ended up finding the song, but I do remember that when I finally did locate the MP3, it was named incorrectly. I went around for years afterwards thinking the song was called something else, but I was also thrilled to have it.
###2015
Yesterday, I held up my phone up for a few seconds and it identified a Barbara Lynn song from 1963 that was playing on the radio.
I have a hard time saying no. I still do it, but often times depending on the request, the lead-up to giving an answer is filled with inner turmoil.
First, I must seek out my true feelings on the matter: Do I really want to? What is my hesitation?
Then I do a brief to lengthy internal debate about the pros and cons of saying yes and saying no, and whether I should listen to my internal feelings, or set them aside this time.
“Will I be my best self if I say yes? Am I feeling compelled to say yes just so I don’t disappoint the asker? Have I said no enough times to this person so that if by saying no again they may feel compelled to never extend an invite in the future? Do I want that? Am I overthinking this entirely, and by just saying yes, I might do something that may be slightly uncomfortable in the short-term, but highly beneficial in the long-term? Would saying yes provide a more interesting story?”
This is my brain.
After reaching a conclusion internally, then it comes the matter of telling the person. How can I decline without sounding rude, and without sounding like I’m making too many excuses?
Well, found one.
There are other good ones here along with actual good advice on how to graciously turn someone down.
I think I made this in 2001. It was around the time prank calls using Arnold soundboards were really popular (I’ve got some of those, too), and I can’t remember if I made this at my parents place, or at the house I lived at for that one year in college.
Because, yes, in college, I mostly lived with my parents. Or as I liked to say at the time, “with an elderly couple”.
I’d tell people “I take the trash out, and do other things around the house for them, and they let me stay in their basement practically rent free. They’re really nice people. Sometimes they’ll even cook me dinner.”
It was a pretty good deal, and some people I told about it were amazed, and wished that they too could live with their parents an elderly couple.
And when that nice elderly couple found out what I was telling people, I feared the worst: that they’d be heartbroken, or angry. But they weren’t. They thought it was hilarious.
"I'm gonna suffer through four years of an electrical engineering major and then never use it!", I'm probably not thinking.
Because hey, you gotta do what you gotta do when you’re a nerdy 21-year-old Electrical Engineering major who works at a computer store and lives with his parents and still wants a hope in hell of meeting a lady who’d be willing to take her clothes off. So I lived with an elderly couple. I worked on campus. What major? Can we change the subject? Let me tell you about this elderly couple I live with.
Obviously this strategy worked wonders, and I had zero free time around the difficult and retrospectively useless classes I was taking to do silly creative projects such as this Who/Arnold mashup.
I’ve been slowly going through some boxes of files I’ve been holding onto for more than a decade. The things my former-self chose to keep are mostly pointless: assignments, notes, tests… from as far back as the seventh-grade. I’m sure I didn’t keep everything, either, but the mound of paperwork I did keep is still overwhelming.
And that’s only in print. My digital collection of files extends back even further (all the way back to 1987, I believe) and in some ways, the digital problem is much worse. Need that conversation we had about CoCo Puffs in 1999? I probably have it, somewhere.
Before you start calling me a pathetic pack-rat, allow me to say that I am aware of the problem, and have identified it even further—“sentimental pack rat” is the term, I believe. The hardest part of resolving this issue is behind me–admitting that I have a problem. Now comes the hard work of eliminating the trail of my past that I’ve kept in two or three bankers boxes for most of my life.
While most of the things I’ve kept are completely useless and shouldn’t have been kept in the first place, there are a few gems.
Here’s one of them, from 8th grade:
English 8, 10-10-94
What I Want To Be When I Grow Up
When I grow up I do not want to be sitting behind a desk, wearing a suit and tie, talking to a guy from another country whose name I can’t pronounce having to watch every word I say so that I don’t offend him, trying to sell him a product or buy from him a patent.
I would rather choose a more exciting job like being a test pilot for McDonnel Douglas or Grumman, for instance. I would like this job because I would never have to worry about what to wear. I’d put on a flight suit, with no worries about matching colors, about brand names, or the latest fashion. No choices and no thinking while I am getting ready. Cool.
When I am in the plane, I’m in charge. I would not be driving a bus in the air (like the pilots of Northwest Airlines) and I would be able to fly the plane how I want to and see if it works to the specifications expected of its designer. I would also be testing myself, my knowledge and skill of flying, every detail about the aircraft and even my instinct. If things go wrong I’d have to make a quick decisions, not only to complete the tests but to perhaps save the plane.
I would hardly get bored because new planes, new instruments, and new weapons come out for me to test all the time. This is what I call a cool job, flying a plane, having fun, and getting paid.
There is only one setback to this job if the designers make a mistake, I might not be around to complain about it.
Hilarious. I also included a drawing.
I’m not sure how this happened, but at this point of my life—one year before discovering the Beatles, and two years before discovering programming—I was really into planes. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, my bedroom walls were covered with pictures of jets. I regularly absorbed books about the design details of anything with wings, and drew pictures of planes all the time. I remember all of that very clearly. What I don’t remember, however, is my apparent worry of what I might wear in the future, and fear of one day not being able to pronounce someone’s name.
It’s finding gems like this that assuage my negative feelings of being a sentimental pack-rat. For once, my former-self was correct in the prediction that my future-self would someday take great pleasure in reading this.
