When I was at The Gap today I noticed a bottle of body spray with the scent “Grass”. I spritzed a little into the air and, lo and behold, it was the same scent The Gap had a few years–err–well over a decade ago, when I was in high school. I kept regretting the fact that I didn’t stockpile it when it was originally discontinued.
My conversation with the employee went like this:
Me: So, you brought back the scent “Grass”!
Guy: (Puzzled eyebrow furrow) Oh, we had it before?
Me: Yes, I wore this when I was in high school, in the Nineties. (Don’t they teach these kids anything?)
Guy: Oh, cool. (Awkward pause) I was a baby in the Nineties.
Um, yeah. Hard to believe that much time has passed. Also hard to believe I’ve been shopping at The Gap for about twenty years. In any case, smelling that scent took me right back to the age of 16, when my biggest concern was whether or not the parents I was babysitting for any particular night would arrive home before it was too late to meet up with my friends for coffee. Oh, the Nineties. How carefree and grassy you were….
The problem with today’s youth is this.
When I was 19, I was getting coffee and/or hot chocolate at Starbucks. Kids these days are abandoning their Jettas in front of trains. Call me crazy, but today’s youth needs some discipline.
www.wndu.com/localnews/headlines/45921187.html
You can’t make this stuff up. I wish I was an eyewitness.
I am the type of person who frequently experiences waves of nostalgia. In many circumstances, this is a good thing. This evening, for instance, as I was leaving the campus where I am attending summer school, I was overcome by deja vu. The way the sun was sinking into the horizon, filtered by a canopy of trees, coupled with the time of year (summer) and the temperature in the air (moderate and breezy) took me right back to college, the summer before my senior year, when myself and a good friend house- sat for a professor in Indiana. We were both participating in research projects, enjoying our first taste of the freedom of life as an academic. We went for walks in the evening, checked our email in the library, cooked dinner (pesto was a favorite) and drank wine on the back porch. We listened to Emmylou Harris and watched the evening light fade into the trees. It was nothing short of pleasant, and I am grateful for the memories associated with that period in my life.
Speaking of nostalgia, for all of my adult life I have had a love-love relationship with Fleetwood Mac. For those of you living in a cave for the past 30 years, Fleetwood Mac is a popular bluesy-pop band whose songs elicit a string of memories ranging from the pain of a broken heart to the excitement of a new love interest. The older I get the more meaning I extract from their lyrics, alerting myself to a form of (emotional? psychological? spiritual?) progress. I experience great comfort in knowing that the songs I enjoyed listening to in high school have the ability to grow with me into my thirties, gaining depth and intensity (not unlike a fine wine).
Tomorrow night I am seeing Fleetwood Mac in concert in Oakland, and looking forward to another venture down Memory Lane…
One of my favorite things to do is make myself laugh. Sometimes this is easier said than done, since the mainstream media’s headlines make me want to crawl under a rock and stay there for the next twenty years, and outlets such as PBS and NPR (whose reportage is fact-filled and accurate) are so honest that I find myself running aimlessly in a bad dream, to the soundtrack of Jack Nicholson barking, “You can’t handle the truth!”Over and over and over.
Alas, the truth is hard to swallow. It’s also hard to decipher fact from fiction, and to know when to laugh or cry, or wear a face mask in public and refuse to be in the same room with anyone who’s been to Mexico in the past three years. The thought of a pandemic is irksome, but when is it appropriate to jump on the media bandwagon and neglect responsibility? I’m fairly certain I can give myself the flu just by thinking about it, so how does a hypochondriac like me survive the possibility of a pandemic without imploding?
Reading a book on the Bubonic Plague probably isn’t the best place to start. Bathing in antibacterial gel is not cost-effective, especially if I contract the bacon virus and need money for insurance co-pay. Perhaps I’ll just quarantine myself and catch up on Oprah.
When I saw this headline, I immediately thought “This probably happened somewhere in Indiana.” I was wrong, but it was my second guess: Texas. And Wacky Waco, at that. Is it something in the water? Too close to the equator? Inhaling the same air as George W?
Apparently in Texas, “Pull my finger” is code for “You’re about to get stabbed, biotch.”
Really?!? If this is the case, then they should be suing half the males in my family for using that phrase on a semi-regular basis, most notably at major holidays, right before dinner.
A funny story from Salt Lake City.
And so begins my quest for the world’s most hilarious “news” stories. This guy is one near-miss away from a Darwin Award.
It’s been a long time, and for that I apologize. Wish I could say I’ve been gone traveling the Orient, or something exotic like that. But I’ve been keeping it real in the Bay area. Relatively uneventful, but nice. The rain has finally hit, and dare I say, I quite enjoy it? When the weather is bright and sunny, the last place I want to be is inside. So now that the situation presents itself to hunker down indoors, I’m catching up on three main areas of neglect: reading, writing, and housekeeping. Not to say I haven’t been reading, nor writing, nor sweeping away the dust bunnies in the past few months. But I haven’t done any of the aforementioned with any fluidity for a long time.
Right now I’m rotating between writing a short story, organizing my jackets in the front closet, and reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Outliers” (which I recommend).
All this to the soundtrack of Warren Zevon, Linda Ronstadt, and a compilation of 80s hits. Believe it or not, I’m walking on air…
