Sometimes the internet is a beautiful thing. I live in a small town in New England but by following my interests, I’ve “met” people from all over. Recently I posted a #tbt of a concert ticket on Instagram and two people I follow there, that I’ve never met in real life, had been at the same show. 26 years ago!
I don’t have a big footprint on the internet but when you find people who enrich your life, even in the smallest way, by reblogging an image of a classic film that made me smile, or posting a link to an article I found interesting, it helps me feel like I’m not confined to this small town.
I have found people who are on my wavelength. When you come across something cool that you want to share and you hop on Twitter or Tumblr and discover one of the people you follow already beat you to posting that new Savages video, I actually love that. I hit the retweet or reblog button like it’s a high-five button. Yeah, I was just going to say that!
I’ve also learned a lot from these friends in the computer (or the smartphone, as the case may be). They come from different walks of life and different countries, and by showing me what they’re interested in, my own views expand. I encounter new things all the time because of these connections.
I found this song, and this band, because of one of these people. I really like it. Kind of shoegazey and right up my alley. Plus, you know me, you can’t go wrong with a bicycle.
So thanks, friends, for putting yourselves out there.
Oh, you are glad you were not with me in the car today for Tape Deck Tuesday. As is probably obvious, most of my tapes are from the 80s and early 90s. These are my high school, college, and early adult years. Highly angst-ridden times.
Today I pulled out a Maxell XLII 90-minute tape, created on 1/18/89 (after several days of deciding, rearranging, and adding up minutes, no doubt), which puts it at the very beginning of my final semester of college. The title is “Anguish, Fear, Lamenting”* so you already know you’re in trouble. I spent a great deal of time drifting from one of those emotions to the next. I had one semester left and I was hoping to get somewhere by the end of it. The guy I’d had my sights set on was the main source of frustration but life in general left a lot to be desired and none of it was matching up with my vision of where I was supposed to be, at 21 and nearly done with school.
Choosing this tape this morning, I knew it was full of songs about anguish, fear, and lamenting, but actually listening to the songs, in order, put me right back in that dorm room. As each song came on, I could immediately remember what it was about that song that earned it a place, and its particular place, in the mix. I was always very particular about the flow from one song to the next. From my much more objective position, 25 years later, there are a couple songs I would probably encourage my younger self to replace but that’s mostly because Sting doesn’t age well and In Your Eyes took on mythical proportions later that year when Say Anything hit movie theaters. I was first! I want credit for having it on my tape months before the movie came out and Lloyd Dobler set all of our hopes too high. But back then, the spot each song had was purposeful and as I listened in the car, I remembered exactly why for each one.
Side A – Anguish, Fear
Troy – Sinéad O’Connor
Scorpio Rising – 10,000 Maniacs
The One I Love – R.E.M
9–9 – R.E.M.
Altitude – Pylon
Be Still My Beating Heart – Sting
Red Rain – Peter Gabriel
Temptation – New Order
O My God – The Police
Crazy – Pylon
When you start a tape with Sinéad O’Connor’s Troy, that’s some seriously pissed off shit right there. It should be mentioned that this was a tape I meant to torture myself with and never give to someone else. I’m sure I never listened to it unless I was alone. Scorpio Rising picks up that angry mantle and gets in little digs at that guy. The version of The One I Love is a live version from an old bootleg, before it was released on a studio album, because it’s still really raw. If you heard this version first, there would have been no chance you would have mistaken this for a love song.
So we have our anguish off to a good start, then we start bringing in the fear with 9–9. Conversation fear. Check. Altitude. “I’ve been watching so long I’m afraid to move.” Yup, that would have been accurate. And on it goes, wrapping up the first side with the album version of Crazy, with the overdub of Vanessa singing “I’m not crazy” at the end. Had I not been driving, I’d likely have hurt myself trying to dance like 25 years hadn’t passed. What was I afraid of? That I would say the wrong thing. That I wasn’t cool enough. That things wouldn’t work out the way I wanted them to, or that they would. Honestly, I was pretty ill-equipped to deal with either one.
Side B – Lamenting
Does Everyone Stare – The Police
Androgynous – The Replacements
Scotty’s Lament – The Connells
That Voice Again – Peter Gabriel
Cotton Alley – 10,000 Maniacs
Maps and Legends (live at McCabe’s guitar shop) – R.E.M.
In Your Eyes – Peter Gabriel
Try – The Connells
I Will Dare – The Replacements
Age of Consent – New Order
Kiss Me on the Bus – The Replacements
Side B keeps the good times rolling with songs that seem practically tailor-made for me and this untouchable guy. Does Everyone Stare, Androgynous, Scotty’s Lament. Ha! Subtle as a brick. It’s really remarkable the power that music has to bring moments from the past into clear view. I’m certain I haven’t heard that Police song in decades but there I was, singing along, picturing events on my college campus like it was just last semester.
Some of these songs are so deeply entwined with my life in college that they don’t just bring back the memories, they bring the emotions back up too. Especially when they are stitched together in this way. Of course, that was the intention at the time. What’s that? You’re not a reeling mess yet? Ok, let’s see if this one will push you over the edge. I needed a cathartic release and sometimes the only way out was the hard way. “Nothing can hurt you, unless you want it to.” Part of me definitely wanted it to. 25 years later I’m not dialing those emotions up to 11 like I would have in college but singing along, alone in the car, I still felt a little red in the face here, faint butterflies in my stomach there.
I’d backed it off toward the end there, going for songs that had a hint of hope to them. I hadn’t totally given up, I was just, cautious. Wary. Life sucked, and it was maddening to always get thiiiiis close to my dreams. Maybe, just maybe that last semester would hold some surprises. A girl has to try, right?
*”Anguish, fear, lamenting” is a line from a 10,000 Maniacs song that’s really about nuclear war but at the time it seemed too good to pass up.
It’s May 1st, International Workers’ Day. I thought I’d take the opportunity to post a Billy Bragg song. Not his version of the Internationale, though I thought about it, but this song always brings a smile to my face even while it entices you to be active with the activists.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen Billy Bragg but each time I’ve seen him perform this song he changes some of the lyrics to put it in context with events that are relevant to the current time. I looked at a bunch of live clips on YouTube but I’ll leave it to you to look some up if you’re interested. They’re like little historical snapshots. For myself, I’ll always remember the time he sang, “In a perfect world we’d all sing in tune but as we’re all Smiths fans give us some room!” That was the same show where he covered Deee-Lite’s “Groove is in the Heart” with help from the opening band, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, on the pretext of proving that Billy Bragg fans could dance.
I love the rousing end of this song. I don’t know how you can not feel fired up. When I start feeling pretty discouraged about the state of the world, and lately that’s really easy to do, I need to remember to play this song. One of the live clips I watched was from the City Winery in Chicago about a year ago and I really love how he talked about fighting cynicism, more than anything else. I’m pretty jaded but he’s right.
“So join the struggle while you may, the revolution is just a t-shirt away!”
My Billy Bragg t-shirt from the Internationale tour.
The back! Were you at one of these shows?
A little t-shirt #tbt with your musical interlude.
Today for Tape Deck Tuesday we have one of the many tapes lacking any kind of identification. It stood out to me because it has purple on the (blank) cover and it’s only a 60-minute tape. Normally I would have chosen a 90-minute or I’m finding some 100- or even 120-minute ones, but 60? That’s not nearly long enough for most of my taping purposes.
I put the tape in and it started up about half a minute into “Interesting Drug” by Morrissey. Ok, I thought, this must be a copy of Bona Drag. But then next came “Groove is in the Heart” by Deee-Lite. I laughed out loud, both because that song always makes me laugh and because it was not what I was expecting. What was this tape?
The third song was 52 Girls by the B-52s. Now I was beginning to remember. When I graduated from college I didn’t have a job lined up or any grad school plans, nor any clue what I wanted to do. I went back home to Maine and, eventually, got a job at the new record store in town. It seemed like a pretty good gig while I figured out my next steps. Listen to music all day long, order new releases, talk to other music lovers, there are worse ways to spend your day. I got to know some of the regular customers pretty well, some of them college students with radio shows.
Which is how, by the fourth track, I knew what this tape was. Shazam didn’t recognize the song, and I wasn’t 100% sure myself, but I had a strong feeling it was the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies*. I had gone over to the college radio station with a friend who had an early morning show and he helped me make a tape for a party since I wanted a bunch of songs I didn’t have.
My brother and sister were sharing a big old farm house with a couple of other friends about 20 miles away out in the sticks. I’d go over there once or twice a month just to hang out. They were going to have a party and I thought it could use a little new music. I picked some songs I knew they would know, some I liked that they wouldn’t know and a guilty pleasure or two.
Not remembering what was coming next meant I laughed most of the way to work this morning. It’s exactly what I was hoping for with this little project. Reminiscing in the car and enjoying some old songs I might not have listened to in a long time. This seems pretty 1990 to me. Here’s the complete track listing, which I will finally write down on the cover.
Side A
Interesting Drug – Morrissey
Groove is in the Heart – Deee-Lite
52 Girls – B-52s
Do You Remember – Chickasaw Mudd Puppies
Been Caught Stealing – Jane’s Addiction
U Can’t Touch This – MC Hammer
Can I Kick It? – A Tribe Called Quest
The Only One I Know – The Charlatans (UK)
We Saw Jerry’s Daughter – Camper Van Beethoven
Side B
Temptation – New Order
Love Vigilantes – Poi Dog Pondering (cover of New Order song)
What the World is Waiting For – The Stone Roses
Ugly – Fishbone
Life During Wartime – Talking Heads (Stop Making Sense version)
Look Alive – Pylon
Ask – The Smiths
It was pretty rare for me to make a tape just for a party. Mostly I made tapes that had some deeper meaning, a hidden message, or a theme perhaps. I might make a tape for biking or for a road trip, but even those usually had more going on than met the casual listener. This tape is not trying to say anything more than Can I Kick It? Yes, you can.
*YouTube to the rescue. Also, I think there is one more track on side B but Shazam didn’t know it and I forgot once I got inside what it had been.
Over the weekend I finally bought a car to replace the one I’ve been driving for the past four years. I needed something that was cheap but reliable, didn’t already have too many miles on it, and gets good gas mileage. I bought a ’99 Toyota, very basic (manual everything still) but I hope it will be good.
Given that it’s a real no-frills car, the stereo doesn’t have a CD player, and it’s of course too old for an auxiliary jack for an mp3 player, but it does have a tape deck. My husband had an old Saab for a while that had a tape deck but it didn’t work. Mine works! So as long as it’s working I thought I would haul out my old tapes and listen to things I haven’t listened to in a really long time. It’s perfect for my long commute. I’ll pick a tape from my stash then write them up here as tape deck Tuesday, like throwback Thursday, or the once a month Where I Lived Wednesday that I love doing. It should be entertaining, especially as I seem to have a large number of tapes without any identifying marks whatsoever. I had this theory that my siblings would be less likely to steal my tapes if they didn’t know what was on them as they would just not take the time or risk to find out. That was a fine plan when I knew the difference between what I’d taped on the 90min TDK with the red label versus the Maxell with the blue label. Now it’s all lost to time and I’ll find out as I drive to work.
This first tape deck Tuesday (guess I should hashtag that) features an old tape my oldest sister made. It’s titled “New House/Xmas ’83” and she made it at Christmas, our last spent in our house in New York as my mother had finally found a house for us to live in up in Maine. My oldest sister had just graduated from college earlier in May and she had been living in the house and commuting in to Manhattan. She had made some other tapes that are legendary in our family (if I can find them, they’ll probably appear on some other Tuesday), but I think this is the last one from that time period. We spent that Christmas break packing up the house and this tape was pretty heavily in rotation.
It’s a curious mix, like her tapes could be, some big radio hits, other lesser known songs that my sister just liked, and very 1982/1983. This song is the fourth track on side B. When I picked up my 8-year-old son from school today he was so excited to ride in the “new” car. As I started up the engine and the music started playing he asked if it was one of my tapes and I replied yes, it was one my sister had made. He gasped and said, “She made it?! How could she make a tape?! That is sooo cool! Can we make one?!” He has seen my Walkman before and knew you could listen to music on tapes but I guess I just never bothered to explain the whole culture surrounding it. Honestly, I didn’t think he would be that interested or have the attention to span to listen to me rattle on about how much work was involved, etc.
I did, just today in fact, see some blank Maxell’s for sale when I went to a store to buy some other things for the car. I don’t have a cassette player for my stereo anymore (just my Walkman and now the car) but there’s one sitting in my mother’s basement. I don’t remember if that one works but I told him we could check it out next time we’re visiting and maybe we could bring it home and make a tape together.
Whew, what a day. Week, actually. Did you ever have one of those weeks where nothing particularly bad happened, no work crises, nothing horrible on the home front, just a series of frustrations and disappointments that pile on top of each other until you feel like you just can’t take anymore? Yeah. That’s when you need to blast this song as you go peeling out of the parking lot.
When we were teenagers, all the Elvis Costello records belonged to my older sister. I have a 7″ now, I’m not sure where or when I got it, but she owned all the LPs. I taped some of them way back when but I have a hole in my collection where all the Elvis should be.
Tomorrow is Record Store Day and I’ll be hitting my local record store, just down the street. Or as my son once called it, The Most Forgotten Place on Earth. He was only seven at the time and it is down a little pedestrian-only alleyway, but I’m sure it will be busy. Most Saturdays there is some regular traffic through there but it’s not crowded. Tomorrow will be bumping elbows, waiting your turn busy. I may not end up buying any of the special RSD releases but I might pick up an old Elvis Costello album. It’s going to be tough to top my great find from RSD last year.
It’s also Easter weekend and my kids have been off from school all week so I contemplated going up to Maine to visit my mother. We could spend Easter with her and I could go to an event at a branch of the record store where I had my first post-college job. I had too much going on at work though, and didn’t really want to spend that many hours driving up and back for what would end up being a day and a half there. It’s also just as well we stayed put because I’m close to securing a new (to me) car and I need to do some things to get that all lined up.
Normally, I try not to let politics bother me. I mean, it does bother me, a lot. Too much for my health, so although I care deeply, I try not to listen to the daily deluge of bad reports. I read the news, I just try to stay away from the audio and video because it quickly becomes overwhelming.
I live in a very blue state in a very blue part of the country. I put up with crappy winters because I enjoy living somewhere with values that are similar to mine. I generally feel like my elected representatives are going to vote the way I would on issues and they introduce legislation that I agree with so all of the pleas to email or call your legislator are things I don’t usually feel I need to do. I don’t live in a battleground state. Now and then I have fired off a letter when I feel especially strongly about something but mostly I get out and vote at every primary, every local election, every seat. I make sure I vote even when it’s nothing but a local bond issue. I show up at the off-season special elections. Voting always seemed to me like the truest way to take democracy into your own hands.
But I couldn’t help but be really disappointed by the latest Supreme Court ruling further dismantling the already weak restrictions on campaign contributions. Nothing gets my blood boiling faster than trumped up campaign commercials paid for by some patriotic sounding organization that is a front for who knows what or whom, advancing the candidate they think will let them get away with what they want to do. If I had my way, there would be zero dollars allowed in elections. Not even your own money. Public financing only, equal dollar figures (of a modest amount) for all candidates, and if you want to increase your visibility, get your ground game in gear. Polish that stump speech and criss-cross your state and show up and talk to actual people. Real human beings. And your tv commercials and radio ads would only be allowed to say where you stand on the issues, not trashing the opponent. The same policy for both sides.
This very disturbing trend toward handing over the reins to the uber-wealthy infuriates me. I know I’m not the only one. I saw Jon Stewart’s segment on the Daily Show from the other night and just watched in horror as a couple of the Justices basically said they don’t see how money equals influence. At best, it’s willful blindness though I’m sorry to say that I think that’s being way too generous.
I am not someone who is going to be taken in by advertising because I’m not an undecided voter. I don’t really understand how people can be. I am not a low-information voter because I feel it is my responsibility as a citizen to find out about the issues and where the candidates stand. Maybe it’s the fact that I grew up in the age of School House Rock and spent my Saturday mornings learning about bills becoming law and the three branches of government, set to catchy tunes. If you’re about my age I bet you can recite the Preamble to the Constitution, but maybe only if you can sing it.
However, I think there aren’t enough people for whom that’s true and sometimes they are swayed by misleading advertising. If we can’t count on the Supreme Court to see the evil inherent in allowing the voice of a few to rule the air waves, then I guess we are going to have to get a whole lot louder ourselves. Crank the tunes, folks, it’s on.
I need to replace my car. It failed inspection, which was not a surprise, but when I took it to the garage to see about getting it fixed, they advised me not to bother. It’s a 15-year-old car with 180,000 miles on it and the problem that caused it to fail is far from the only thing wrong with it.
I bought this car from my sister four years ago when it had 65,000 miles of hard city living on it. It had a lot of scrapes on the bumper from years of parallel parking on Brooklyn streets, the rear windshield washer has never worked since I’ve owned it, the glove compartment requires a special touch to get it to shut, but we needed a car and the timing and price were right so I didn’t complain.
I have put 600 miles a week on this car just getting to and from work. It’s nearly all highway miles but that’s bound to take a toll. Other problems have developed, as much from age as neglect on my part. I’ve bought new tires, new spark plugs and connecting wires, maybe brake pads once? It smells mildewy, the side view mirror is held together by duct tape, it burns oil, and the odometer light burned out a long time ago. It’s got manual windows and door locks. My kids think it’s so cool that they can roll down their windows without the car being on.
Looking for its replacement, however, is making me see it in another light. I don’t have money to spend on a new car and I can’t really take on a car loan right now either. I’ve been looking on Craigslist and wondering about the chances of finding anything reliable, let alone something that can take my commute. Nearly all the listings say things like, “Runs and drives good. No reverse.” or “Excellent car, great on gas, needs new motor.” Um, no. It is not an excellent, or even good, car if it needs a new motor or you can’t put it in reverse. The ones that don’t appear to have major mechanical flaws have 250,000 miles or more and that just seems like trouble to me.
Today I happened upon a listing for a car that is the same model I currently have, one year older, but with only 100,000 miles. I have never really liked this car but the pictures show it looking in better condition than the one I’m driving. Is it foolish to consider it? I feel like it’s the devil you know. Maybe I could get 80,000 miles out of that one before it succumbs to a similar fate? I should probably stick to looking for old Toyotas and Hondas but ones that are cheap enough for me to afford are so high in mileage that it doesn’t sound smarter. Sadly, public transportation for my route doesn’t exist or I’d jump on that in a heartbeat.
My family has a long history of car problems. When I bought my first car I only looked at new cars, hoping to avoid all the issues that might arise from buying a used car. Twenty years and two kids later, I just want something that isn’t going to fall apart while I make my way to the office. I want to be sure I can get home at the end of the day. Is that too much to expect from a 15-year-old used car? Is history doomed to repeat itself or have I paid enough dues in the old car wars to come through unscathed? Stay tuned.
This is part of a series about places where you’ve lived, started by Ann Imig of Ann’s Rants. I highly recommend checking out her site for more people’s stories.
For two years in the early 90s I lived in what was commonly called a group house in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C. My three housemates were like me, young women with jobs that didn’t pay all that well but that looked great on your résumé. D.C. was full of young people and it was an exciting time to be there, the end of the Reagan/Bush era and the start of the Clinton years.
Our house was a row house with four bedrooms and only one full bathroom upstairs, then a kitchen, dining room, living room, and a tiny little half bath on the first floor. A back deck no one ever used, just like the front porch, and a basement where the laundry machines were. The neighborhood was pretty mixed, some group houses, some old timers, some new young families, some of the houses had been fixed up, others were sagging a bit around the edges. Mt. Pleasant backs up to the National Zoo and Rock Creek Park on the western edge, Columbia Heights to the east, Adams Morgan is to its south, and sort of nothing to the north. Back then, the Green line of the Metro stopped at 14th and U St. and that wasn’t a neighborhood where you really wanted to spend much time (my how things have changed), so we generally walked across the park and caught the Red line from Cleveland Park.
Mt. Pleasant didn’t really have many stores that sold stuff you actually needed. There was a 7-11, where I would go for my Ben & Jerry’s fix during that period of time when I had my pint-a-day habit. It was summer and we didn’t really have air conditioning. It was too hot to cook anything and invariably I’d suggest to one of my housemates that we hit up the 7-11 for something cold. I admit, I was addicted to Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream. You know how when you dig in, there are these chunks of cookie dough, and then when you get down near the bottom, you think, well, I’ll just get that little chunk there. But when you move that one out of the way, a new little chunk would be revealed and eventually there wasn’t really enough to bother putting it back in the freezer so you might as well just polish it off. That was my dinner for a good three weeks straight. It worked out all right though since I rode my bike to work down at the Smithsonian and in that heat I easily burned off all the calories.
Mt. Pleasant wasn’t a great neighborhood but it felt moderately safe, especially when you consider D.C. had the reputation at the time of being the murder capital of the country. It had been the scene of the Cinco de Mayo riots in 1991 (and the anniversary mini-riots in 1992) and we jokingly called it Mt. Unpleasant. It was certainly better than Columbia Heights but if you were sensible you could get off the bus on 16th street and walk home without trouble.
That all changed though on the night of St. Patrick’s Day in 1993. Three of us were home, I was up, the other two were already asleep, and our fourth housemate, who had a car, had double parked to unload stuff and then went back out to try and find a parking spot. Shortly after she left I heard a loud bang and a car screeching off. I looked out the window but couldn’t really see anything. I told myself that screeching car must have backfired. But she didn’t come back, and it shouldn’t take that long to park the car. Then I saw flashing police and ambulance lights. I was too scared to move. One of my other housemates woke up to use the bathroom so I ran up and told her what was going on and convinced her to walk down the street with me to see what was happening.
A small crowd had gathered down the street where police had blocked off an area with crime scene tape. The ambulance had already left and after determining no one had seen anything, the cops tried to get people to leave. The crime scene tape was encircling her car and the sidewalk leading up to a neighbor’s house. Feeling like I was about to faint, I stepped forward and told one of the officers that it was my housemate’s car.
She had been shot in the head by an insane person with a shotgun, driving around our neighborhood looking for people walking alone. As we later learned, there had been previous victims but as they were men of color and those incidents had happened closer to the eastern edge of the neighborhood, they didn’t see any connection. They wanted to know if she did drugs or had an abusive boyfriend. No and no.
She lost an eye but otherwise pulled through amazingly well. Her father came down from NY and we moved my bed down to the dining room of the house where he lived for the next six weeks. I borrowed a foam fold out sofa from a friend and had that in my room. It seemed like the least I could do. Her mother had died only a year or so beforehand and her brother also lived in the area so their dad wanted (and needed) to be there.
A week after our housemate was shot, a white woman was killed by the same shooter about a block away while she was out walking her dog. Only then did they piece it all together and a curfew was imposed on our neighborhood. You had to be inside your house by dark. Things were bleak. I spent a lot of time holed up in my room listening to music. I was outraged about the cops just dismissing the first shootings as symptomatic of the area. I was worried about my housemate, and I hated being cooped up in the house. Headphones on. “Breathe deep, fill up with relief…”
I forget now how long this all lasted. It felt endless while we were living through it. Sometime in the spring she sent her dad back home and told us she wanted to move across town to be nearer to her friends and her brother. The rest of us didn’t really want to be there anymore either, even though the shooter had been caught. While I have fond memories of my years in D.C. and of all the things I did and people I knew, I can’t say I miss that house.
*This video is from a live show in 2006 but this song comes from their 1992 album and I saw them a lot back then and this song kicks ass live.
It might seem crazy what I’m ’bout to say
Sunshine she’s here, you can take a break
Happy Daylight Saving Time! This is my absolutely most favorite day of the year! More than Thanksgiving. More than Christmas. From the day we have to set the clocks back in the fall until today, I am a grumpy, despondent person. Now, I can breathe again. I am a room without a roof and I can see the freaking sun still there in the sky!!
I know a lot of people hate switching their clocks. I get it. But you’ve been led astray. The problem isn’t DST, it’s standard time. What you hate is that slightly jet laggy feeling some people have for a day or two. Do you hate that it’s still light out when you get home from work? Probably not. You see, if we never switched the clocks back in the fall in the first place, we would have had all of this daylight, all of this time! We wouldn’t have had to suffer in darkness all of these months. Yeah, it’s dark in the morning but in the depths of winter, it doesn’t matter. There’s no consolation that the sun comes up at 5 a.m. instead of 6 a.m. because you’re asleep either way (or, if you’re not, what are you doing waking up that early?). But the fact that sunset would be at 5:30 instead of 4:30? Huge. That’s huge!
Yes, I’m not a morning person and I work in a windowless office, I hate winter with every fiber of my being and all of the darkness. Today marks winter’s death knell. The bell tolls for you, winter, get your sorry, frozen ass out of here! We are ready for warmer, longer days.
And don’t even start about your hour of sleep. Please. If you really can’t handle a simple hour, then please go to bed an hour earlier the night before. Or try this. Don’t move the clocks forward when you go to bed, wait and do it when you wake up. You woke up at 7 a.m. this morning? No! You actually slept in until 8 a.m.! See how that works?! It’s all good.
Why do we keep these stupid farmer’s hours anyway? We are no longer an agrarian nation. Why on earth does the bus for the high school kids roll past my house at 6:30 a.m.? That’s barbaric. We do not need to wake up in the wee hours of the morning to get the milking done before the poor cows are ready to burst. I have been informed by my children that their friends eat dinner at the geriatric hour of 5:30 p.m. and they all think our dinner time of 6:30 (ok, sometimes it’s more like 7, or 7:30) is very late. It’s called continental. Or urban. You would never catch anyone in New York City eating dinner at 5:30.
So please, don’t hate Daylight Saving Time because it’s beautiful, love it for the extra daylight it just gave you. Love the beginning of the end of winter.
Noisy Cats 