Measuring

“Except for the error of measuring and limiting all that is good and beautiful, man would enjoy more than threescore years and ten and still maintain his vigor, freshness, and promise.”
– Mary Baker Eddy

I don’t pay attention to birthdays or discuss my age much, because I’m generally inclined to take Mrs. Eddy’s advice and maintain my “vigor, freshness, and promise” without regard to dates on a calendar.

Last night, I ran across one of those Facebook memes where you click “Like” on somebody’s post, and they give you a number, and you have to answer a series of questions about where you were at that age, then answer the same questions as they apply to you at your current age. I don’t usually click on age-based memes, but this one appealed to me as an opportunity to reflect on growth and experience.

I have always understood age in strictly experiential terms. I’m only interested in people’s age to the extent that it helps me extrapolate whether they were around for a particular historical event. If you’re a Baby Boomer, I want to know your thoughts on Vietnam, Watergate, and Dylan’s decision to go electric. If you’re older than the Boomers, I want you to tell me what it was like to watch Jackie Robinson on the basepaths. I need to know these things.

Left to my own devices, I’d establish a new system for expressing age. Instead of basing it on the amount of time that has elapsed since someone’s birth — which has a tendency to “measure and limit” — I’d base it on cultural experience, which prompts conversations about shared experiences.

How old am I?

I have a near-Pavlovian response to the Cheers theme song.
I conjure up images of British ice skaters when I hear Ravel’s “Bolero.”
I watched the Sandberg Game.
I think Sesame Street was better before Elmo moved in.
I feel warm and fuzzy inside when I hear the sound of an Apple IIe computer firing up.

Try measuring your age in terms of pop culture rather than years. How does your pop-culture age influence who you are today?

Emily

Munchkin Tuesday: Crayon factory

Best thing about YouTube: vintage Sesame Street clips. This one has always been one of my favorites.

Emily

Munchkin Tuesday: Tiffany

So today I’m running an errand for work, minding my own business, when I walk into a store and hear a spectacularly wretched cover of “I Think We’re Alone Now” come over the speakers.

I don’t know who was responsible for this monstrosity, but as a child of the ’80s, I cringed.

I know it was originally recorded by Tommy James and the Shondells, but if you ain’t Tiffany, I don’t wanna hear you sing “I Think We’re Alone Now,” because I spent most of seventh grade belting that into a hairbrush and trying to decide whether to be awestruck, inspired, or just wildly jealous that she had a record contract when she wasn’t even out of high school. (I think I mostly opted for awestruck. I harbored no delusions about how my own pipes compared to hers, and even at age 12, I recognized how frickin’ brilliant that mall tour really was. Talk about marketing to your target audience — a teen pop act playing shopping malls in 1987? Holy crap. That’s genius.)

There wasn’t much I liked about junior high, but dammit, Tiffany makes the short list. If you’re anywhere close to my age, I bet you can’t even listen to her voice without remembering the scent of Salon Selectives hairspray, the taste of raspberry New York Seltzer, and the sound of an Apple IIe powering up. (You just heard it, didn’t you?)

Here she is a couple of years ago. Stay with her through “Could’ve Been.”

Girlfriend’s still got it … and how great is it to hear her sing it like she knows what she’s talking about this time? ‘Course, y’all know I’m a sucker for that sort of thing anyway.

Emily

A tribute

We got word last night that a former colleague had passed away unexpectedly.

There are two kinds of people in my life: Those who have worked the copy desk on Election Night with me, and those who haven’t.

Roger was in the former category. If you aren’t, you’ll never understand why that’s important.

I met Roger near the end of my first year in the classroom. For nine months, I’d been struggling to do some good in a completely corrupt school district, to no avail, and I was exhausted. Burned out and living miles from anyone I knew, I felt alone and adrift.

Then I walked into the newsroom one May evening, and Roger — in typical Roger fashion — went out of his way to make me feel welcome. He showed me around, asked me questions, joked with me, and just generally included me. It was the first time in ages that I’d felt as if I fit in somewhere. I don’t think Roger ever knew how much I needed that.

Journalists are a different breed, and the ones who stay up past midnight, putting the paper to bed are — to paraphrase Orwell — “more different than others.” We are the grammar geeks, the designers, the adrenaline junkies. We work the hours no one else wants, and we love it. We get on each other’s nerves. We yell at each other. But between headlines and frustrations, we learn each other’s quirks, concern ourselves with each other’s lives, and entertain each other with outrageous humor that keeps us sane in a fast-paced, high-pressure environment.

It’s that last bit I’ll remember most when I think of Roger.

Some of the laughs we shared aren’t fit for public consumption. (That Monica Lewinsky emoticon we invented, for instance.) Others wouldn’t be funny to anybody outside the newsroom. But then there’s this. And this.

And most of all, this.

For better or worse, I will never, ever be able to hear “Mr. Roboto” without thinking of Roger, and I will never be able to think of Roger without hearing “Mr. Roboto” somewhere in the back of my mind.

Somewhere, Roger is enjoying that last fact way more than he’s got any right to.

Jerk.

I already miss him.

Emily

Munchkin Tuesday: TV Themes

Love this. How much TV did you watch in the ’80s? Write down your answers, then click on the YouTube icon and look at the description to see how many you got right.

Emily

Folk Thursday: Joan Baez sings Simon & Garfunkel

This was the first thing I ever heard Joan Baez sing. I’ve been a fan ever since.

Emily

What connects us

Last winter, I was putting together a lesson plan in my office when a familiar melody suddenly floated in from the living room, where Ron was watching football on TV.

For the next 60 seconds, Ron and I saw the same series of Victorian drawings flash through our thoughts, in the same order, and while the music was playing in the middle of a 2012 afternoon, for us — and probably for every other American between the ages of 35 and 65 — it was 8 p.m. on a Thursday sometime in 1982.

Cheers.

State Farm was using the Cheers theme song in what may be the most arresting television commercial I have ever seen.

Ron sent me the link to a GQ article about Cheers tonight, and while I was reading it, he got on YouTube and pulled up that commercial.

Here is the power of pop culture: It connects us. It creates commonalities that tie members of a generation together, and in some cases, those commonalities tie one generation to the next.

You and I may think we have nothing in common, but if you were old enough to watch television between 1982 and 1993, you see the same series of images and remember (probably fondly) the same characters I do when you hear that first distinctive chord from the Cheers theme song. And if you remember Cheers, you and I probably have some other things in common, too. When we see a St. Louis Cardinals logo, the first thing we think of is probably a young shortstop doing an exuberant backflip onto the field at Busch Stadium, and when we sing the seventh-inning stretch at a baseball game, we probably hear Harry Caray’s voice. For us, Christopher Reeve will always be Superman, Soleil Moon-Frye will always be a precocious 7-year-old, and we will always remember where we were when the Challenger blew up.

For whatever reason, you and I were chosen to walk through this period in history together. Our paths may diverge wildly, but no matter where we go or what we do, we will be forever connected by our Pavlovian responses to little things like the Cheers theme song or the sound of a Speak ‘n’ Spell being turned on. (You heard it as soon as I said it, didn’t you?)

I find that fascinating … and oddly comforting.

Emily

Munchkin Tuesday: Little Professor

Raise your hand if you owned one of these as a child.

*Emily raises hand*

Raise your hand if you wish you still did.

*Emily raises hand again*

Raise your hand if you are pretty sure algebra scores would be a helluva lot higher if kids still had these instead of being handed calculators at age seven.

*Emily raises hand, waves it, jumps up and down in seat, stomps foot, grinds teeth, gives up, gets on eBay to find Little Professor for niece and nephews*

If there were an app to turn my iPhone into a Little Professor, you know I would be downloading it. Somebody needs to get on that, stat.

Emily

Simple pleasures

It’s been cool for a couple of weeks, so I think it’s safe at this point to say that summer is more or less over. I’m no fan of winter, but with the changing of the seasons, three small pleasures return:

1. It’s been cool enough for us to resume our tradition of taking Song and Riggy to the dog park on Sunday afternoons. After being cooped up in the house all summer, they’re really enjoying the change to get out and romp with the other dogs.

2. It’s cool enough for cappuccino in the evenings. I bought a new burr grinder several months ago but never put it to use because the weather was so hot, I just didn’t feel like messing with it. I cleared off a counter and set it up tonight. I didn’t have any good espresso on hand, but I rummaged around in the cabinets and found a bag of decaf house blend I’d picked up in Makanda last time I was home. It was stale, but I put it through the grinder anyway. Stale or not, Makanda Java tastes like home, and for me, cappuccino is always a multisensory experience anyway — one that exists in both the past and present tenses simultaneously. Depending on my mood, the time of year, and my surroundings, a cappuccino can conjure a skipped class, an icy morning in Carbondale, a laugh with a friend, a 20-year-old conversation about politics, a Gus Bode cartoon, a novel I never got around to writing, a text from a friend at a moment of crisis, a date in St. Louis’ Central West End, or any of a thousand other scraps of memory scrawled on paper napkins or scribbled on receipts and bank deposit slips and dropped down the rabbit-holes at the bottoms of purses that no longer exist, where they slipped through singularities and vanished, waiting to surface again at odd moments when the first shock of hot, bitter coffee penetrates the gentleness of foam and carries me into the past at the very moment I’m savoring the present.

Even bad coffee is usually a good experience.

3. Hoodie season is upon us. I didn’t really appreciate hoodies until I wore one to ward off the chill of San Francisco this spring and realized the cool suited me fine if it came with Beat poetry, an ocean breeze, and breakfast in a little coffeehouse two or three blocks from the Pacific. San Francisco is a long way from Oklahoma, but somehow it feels closer when I’m snuggled into a warm hoodie under a cool rain.

Hope you’re enjoying your evening, wherever you are.

Munchkin Tuesday: A trip to the arcade

I went looking for ’80s video games through which to relive my childhood this evening. I hit the mother lode here.

You’ll have to access these from a computer, as they’re not smartphone-friendly, but what a collection — Frogger, Q*bert, Space Invaders, Zelda, and even Duck Hunt.

I assume no responsibility for your utter lack of productivity tomorrow….

Emily