Tag: #20's

  • Earworm Wednesday: It’s Blondie!

    I woke up this morning and “Heart of Glass” was in my head. And I think I wrote about Blondie and “Heart of Glass” before, but you know what, I think I’m going to do it again.

    I think for most people my age, when you say disco, the Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever are the first things that pop into your head. For me, it’s been “Heart of Glass” since I first head it. Which is funny because me and just about everyone else would never say that Blondie is a disco band – punk and new wave, clearly.

    Then, when I was in my 20’s, the song took on a whole different meaning. Instead of being a silly disco song, I started to appreciate the juxtaposition of the tragedy of loss of the love in the song, with the upbeat infectious driving dance beat. To me, it encapsulates the feeling of monumental life altering infatuation that could evolve into love, but deep down you know its doomed, but these feelings are so intoxicating that you can’t say no to them. You embrace the coming train wreck, though you know better.

    Give me a year, I’ll probably write about this song again.

  • Sharing Photos with the Kid

    There has been a project that I have been meaning to get started on, which is getting photographs framed, and up on the walls. I have been squirreling away picture frames for some time, because when we go to IKEA, I pick up one or two. (Yes, I have a very unhealthy obsession with IKEA.) With it being Spring Break this week for the kid, I thought this might be fun for us to do together. We went out to our storage space, and grabbed the boxes for pictures and frames, and settled in on this project last night.

    When I started pulling out the pictures from the box, all still in that folder envelope that your pictures would come in after they were developed, the kid wanted to know why they were like that. (She has only lived in a digital world, and will never know that you used to have to wait for your pictures, and even then, you weren’t sure that they would turn out.) The pictures that I had were from Fall of 1995 to Summer of 2006, as after 2006, I used a digital camera, and never when back to film.

    And as I shared these pictures of my early and late 20’s life with my daughter, she had a perplexed look on her face. I remember feeling confused when my parents would show me pictures of their life at Southern Illinois University, or back in their high school days in Kankakee. Little six-year-old me was confused because it was hard for me to fathom my parents had a life before me and my brothers. My parents were fun, but serious, responsible people who ate their vegetables, paid their bills, and went to bed on time. Who were these people with beers in their hands, smoking, captured mid-laugh in photographs? Who were these people?

    The kid looked at the photos of me, with long hair, circle glasses, beer in hand, smoking, and wondered what I wondered when I was her age; who is this guy? Who are these people with Dad? What are they doing? Why is that guy hugging a tree?