Day: February 1, 2006

I was working tonight on getting ready for tomorrow night – Survivor Panama Premiere! We’re having friends over for dinner, so I made the spaghetti sauce ahead of time & was cleaning the kitchen & tidying up, when the next song on the CD came on, and such a rush of memory & emotions….. I was listening to Annie Lennox’s Medusa album, the one with all the cover songs, and she re-did the Blue Nile’s “Downtown Lights” – and I could see myself, 22, living in Minneapolis, listening to that Blue Nile CASSETTE TAPE (insert stodgy laugh!) over & over, the ache & pain of my foolish young age, the apartment I was living in – it was like having a crazy slide show just jut into your brain & take over the screening room.
(My brain gnomes were freaked the fuck out. One of them hit the tear supply by accident, causing some leakage – it was a mess.)

After I recovered from the surprise, I thought, everyone’s got those songs. Not the ones that make you go bonkers butt-dancing in your chair, but those songs at those pivotal times in your life, when you didn’t know diddly-squat but you were charging ahead into Life, anyway, and when you hear them again, it’s like part of the ceiling falls on your head, you’re slightly stunned to see that part of your life again. We forget how far we’ve come in our journey, and I still marvel at the fact that there are still so many songs to be written, that there are infinite arrangements of notes & words in the world.

I wonder if I’ll hear Fall Out Boy’s “Dance Dance” when I’m 50, and I’ll have the same crazy slide show…. :)

So the other night, after finishing dinner at our nearby Thai restaurant, James & I were joking around & he was being a cheeky monkey and I responded by feigning as though I was going to up-end the entire table over onto him.

Then I said, “Just once, wouldn’t it be fun to do that? Just once?”

James thought it would be an excellent diet ploy, as it would prevent us from ever returning to our favorite restaurants.

I couldn’t let the idea go, I kept pretending I was going to do it. It just seemed like such a FUN thing to do, and so dramatic, and something that only happens in movies, and never something ordinary people like us would just…. DO. Which makes it all the more tempting!

On the drive home, I brought up how we’d come a long way in the 6+ years, and while there isn’t a magic recipe, or that conflict ever goes away, some things are just more “known” now, and we don’t get worked up the way we did, say, when we were living in the apartment, buying the house, etc.

“We’ve mellowed, JWo,” I said.

“Except for the part where you’re turning over tables in restaurants.”

“True, true.”