vr_trakowski | Entries tagged with huh

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I recently spent quite some time watching music videos from the '80s and early '90s. It's an interesting pastime if for no other reason than it's the adolescence I didn't have. At that time I was listening to Cleo Laine and George Winston and Michael Franks, and (to my later embarrassment) Barbra Streisand.

I don't know if my parents would have kept me from such music, but I wanted nothing to do with most of it, for reasons I don't care to describe. I don't remember when we finally got cable, but we certainly didn't have MTV. Yet some of the tunes seeped in anyway; between ambient sound and my rocker best friend in college, enough was laid down to create a little nostalgia.

So watching these things is an adventure in amusement, befuddlement, and occasionally wistfulness--I wouldn't have had any idea what to do with the ideals put forth in the things, but a small part of me wishes I'd had the opportunity to try.

Conclusion: According to the Eurythmics, sweet dreams are made of cows.

There's the usual things--I can remember not only the first PCs and when milk costs fifteen cents a carton in the school cafeteria, but reel-to-reel tape and transistor radios and Styrofoam containers for Big Macs.

But my parents remember the first TVs appearing in their neighborhoods, and not going out without a hat and gloves, and glass shampoo bottles.

And most of my grandparents were born when Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft were still living--indeed, when the latter was in office. They were adults before spaceflight, before nuclear power or weapons, before the widespread use of antibiotics. I've had long conversations with people who were born before the start of World War I.

Up until three years ago, I could still talk to one of them.

Time's funny, it is.