The Seversons

Here we are in our last full day in Panama City Beach.  We came for a short vacation on the cheap with a beach, and it certainly fit the bill.  Though I have to say my best way to describe it is like a poor man’s Hilton Head.  In Hilton Head, there are extensive well-maintained resorts with lovely pools and private beaches.  PCB has plenty of little resorts with perfectly lovely beaches, but they all look kind of like those old hotels in Vegas, you know, the ones they’ve since torn down.  Hilton Head has nice wide streets with bike trails and nice restaurants.  Here the streets are too small and too crowded, and we’ve found some good restaurants but they’re often tucked inbetween poorly named novelty stores.

We’re staying in a brand new place that is perfect for us.  The beach has white sands and lovely water.  And fortunately our screen door is very heavy so we don’t hear all the motorcycles roaring and horns honking below.

When we first arrived, every single person we saw had a bright cherry-red sunburn.  All of them.  When Eric and I were alone I wondered if any of them had ever heard of sunscreen.  I, of the pasty complexion, am partial to oil-free SPF 45.  I haven’t had a sunburn since before I went to law school.  I tend to be overly cautious about my time in the sun now, especially since I was in the sun so much as a kid that I didn’t even realize I was pale until I was in my 20’s and quit spending all summer in the sun.

Saturday morning, Eric and I headed out to the beach, put out our towels and chairs, peeled off our clothes, and got in the water.  A while later when we got out I realized we hadn’t put on sunscreen yet.  I waited a while so I could dry off a bit before slabbing on the sunblock.  Apparently I didn’t wait long enough.

I don’t look like 90% of the people here, bright red from head to toe.  But I have to admit, I think I look worse.  My red comes in splotches.  A splotch on my neck, a splotch on my shoulders, a whole bunch of splotches down my front, tracing the line of my bathing suit.  And, most annoyingly, a big huge splotch where I must have missed a spot with the sunscreen, on my left elbow.  Eric did a little better, his red doesn’t come in splotches, but he does have some bright red arms and shoulders.

We are smart people.  But apparently we aren’t quite smart enough to think that maybe we should put on our sunscreen in our room before we head down to the beach and get all wet.  To our credit, we did do that yesterday.  Today I’m still feeling a little tender and it’s pretty hot out, so we’re sticking to the shady area by the pool instead.

Plus there’s one other thing.  Yesterday I broke out in a mild but still annoying bunch of hives.  Again!  (Time #1 was our honeymoon at Hilton Head.)  Theories: 1) I’m allergic to vacations.  2) I’m allergic to the ocean.  Eric says it’s not that uncommon to have a reaction that shows up 24 hours later, which would explain the delay both times.  It’s not nearly as bad as last time, when I went to the doctor and got some steroids.  But I am quite the picture.  (Which is why there won’t be any pictures.)

Still, we’ve had a nice trip.  Though a few hours in the sun goes a long way and we spend a good portion of each day with one or more of us sleeping it off inside.  This afternoon I am going for a pedicure and then Eric will have what I’m sure will be a large portion of ribs.  So don’t feel too bad for us.  But I also wouldn’t mind a non-beach, hives-free vacation next time.

So, back in the day, me and some roommates had up on our quote board (the quote board is one of those things you can have in college because you’re allowed to delight in your own wit and people humor you because, well, you’re in college) this little gem courtesy of yours truly: “I’d rather get married than take a bath.”  (The context of this was rather complicated.  We were in the habit of making bets where the wager was $5 and you had to do something ludicrous to do it.  One main example was to get married in two months.  None of us was even dating anyone, so of course that was a long shot.  This particular day, we’d just watched What Lies Beneath, which is scary and involves a bath.  After the movie, I was offered $5 to go take a bath, and that is the origin of the quote.)

Now I am worried that somewhere, water heard me and is now exacting its revenge.  You may recall that within the last few months, I have lost all water to our apartment on multiple occasions.  It even went out on me when I was mid-shampoo.  Now water has a new trick up its sleeve.  It’s here.  It’s available.  It’s just no good.

We are in the middle of what now claims to be a 24-48 hour boil-water advisory.  We found out this morning about 12 hours after it went into effect.  After we’d both showered.  We are not supposed to bathe in it, drink it, or use it to brush our teeth.  So, that means I can’t cook my planned dinner, since I can’t wash the vegetables.  We’re getting ready to leave in a couple of days, so we can’t do dishes or laundry so the house will be tidy.

Worse, Eric just went on a run.  He is sweaty.  And when he is sweaty, he’s pretty fragrant.  And he just said he wasn’t going to take a shower.  I told him he is taking one anyway.

So.  Hopefully someday we’ll get our laundry done.  In the mean time, we’ll be chewing mint gum, buying bottled water, going out for dinner (in another county), etc.  I am not sure what I need to do to make it up to water, but I’m definitely ready to do it.

We are not a pet couple, nor are we quite at the stage where we’re looking to reproduce.  Therefore we add to our little family unit in mainly one way: electronics.  These purchases are rather few and far-between, they are also much discussed and mutually agreed upon.  Eric may pretend when he’s around the boys that being married means no more toys, but it’s just pretending, I promise.  (Although in a bit of pre-marriage jitters, he did buy a flat screen television when he was convinced that I would never let him buy anything again.)

Our newest addition is a Wii Fit which Eric managed to hunt down.  He may act like he did this for my benefit, but I suspect it’s only because I made a deal with him that he couldn’t get Guitar Hero III until he found me a Wii Fit.  I somewhat naively assumed it would take him a while.  It didn’t.  But so far you’d think things had been the other way around as the Wii Fit is Eric’s new best friend.

I am a good wife.  You know this because I am not posting pictures of Eric doing yoga poses.  But I am a good blogger, so I must tell you that he does yoga poses.  Every day.  He is pretty bad at the balance stuff, and let’s just say hula hooping is not his forte, but he does well at the yoga poses and strength training.  We are both pretty competitive and the Wii Fit brings this out even more.  I am in the number 1 spot for most of the yoga, but Eric has me beat on one of them and I am determined to oust him.  Eric also likes to regularly compare our graphs and insists, if mine is steeper, that the graph is off because of some adjustment for something.

My favorite thing about the Wii Fit is the company.  Last Christmas, we took the Wii to my parents’ house and so most of my family members ended up making their own Mii’s, little people that represent you in a game.  We don’t use them anymore, but they still exist.  And it’s obvious which one goes with who, in fact the one of my Mom looks an awful lot like her.  When you do Wii Fit exercises, sometimes you’re not alone.  You do step on a stage with a bunch of other Mii’s.  The Soccer Heading exercise involves a bunch of Mii’s kicking balls at you.  They run by you in the running exercise, and they throw hula hoops at you in the hula hooping.  But the Step is by far the best.  Every time one of us does Step, they are joined by my entire family, all of whom have ecstatic looks on their little Mii faces.  My dad, in particular, really seems to rock out when he does Step.  The two Mii’s on either side of you will look at you in between steps and give you this smile like, “Isn’t this the coolest thing ever?”  It isn’t, but it’s amusing.

However, I do have one caveat.  If there has ever been a machine that seems to have designs to take over the world, it’s the Wii Fit.  It wants to know an awful lot of things about you.  If you are doing well it congratulates you, but if you’re not it gets on your case.  If you fall over during a yoga pose, your trainer says, “You fell over, didn’t you?”  It tells you how you favor your right leg over your left.  It lectures you about how you need to do this every day.  If you lose weight too fast, expect a talking to.  It even spies on you when you’re not around.  On Eric’s second day, when he got on the board, instead of letting him get into his workout, it asked him about me and how I was looking.  (Ever since then Eric wants me to get on the Wii Fit all the time to see when it asks about him.  It hasn’t yet.  I think he is secretly heartbroken.)

The Wii Fit is so opinionated about everything that I can’t help but think it is trying to secretly brainwash me and millions of others into a toned, well-balanced, yoga-posing army to take over the world.  In a way, it kind of reminds me of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  There is something kind of stalker-ish about how curious it always seems to be about every aspect of your life.  I’m just waiting for it to say, “I’m sorry, but you cannot quit this exercise,” after I hit the Quit button.

Eric doesn’t seem to see quite as malevolent a presence.  But he was rather surprised the other day when his trainer wasn’t available and had to be replaced by the second trainer.  We still haven’t figured out why a computer-generated image would need to take a little break.

We probably won’t be posting much for the next week.  On Friday we are taking a short trip to the gulf coast, but pictures should follow.

I’m sitting here drinking my green sludge.  It is that most lovely time of the day, the time right after my workout where I get to have my post-workout shake.  (The green sludge is actually very tasty.  It’s made of a banana, some plain yogurt, and Superfood.  Superfood is a juice by Odwalla, but it has spirulina and wheat grass and such giving it a green color.  Thus the green sludge.)  I still hate doing the workout, but it’s become a part of my routine.  And despite the fact that I am still not bikini-ready and our beach trip is less than two weeks away, I am still feeling very positive.

Yesterday I decided to mix it up a bit by doing a Pilates video instead.  I’ve done this video before, when I was first making my workout attempts a few months ago.  Pilates is one of those things that is much more difficult than it looks.  The last time I did it, I really struggled, and I was so sore the next day I had trouble moving.  This time it was cake.  Not only was it cake, but I did a second short workout afterwards just to make sure I got my daily dose of lunges and crunches.  I don’t know why I missed my lunges, I hate my lunges, there is no way in which I enjoy them.  At least with crunches I can feel buff because I’m getting good at them, but I always hate lunges.  But I did them anyway.  Given my previous exercise experience, this is about as hardcore as I get.

Also making me feel good about myself are my current reads.  For those of you who don’t read the other page, I’m now in the middle of The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence and Brideshead, Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.  I am reading two impressive books by impressive authors, making my reading list more impressive.  But the big news is that I am thoroughly enjoying them.  Lately I’ve been feeling underwhelmed by my reading choices.  What happened to the days where I read big, difficult classics for fun?  So I added some more serious stuff to my list and so far it’s going well.  I still haven’t gotten to Melville or Proust, but let’s take some baby steps.  I actually think having Waugh on there as a serious author is kind of cheating.  There are far too many jokes.  But it’s my first Waugh so it has to count for something.  And D.H. Lawrence is kind of cheating, too, because I’ve enjoyed him so very much in the past.  I’m going to have to step it up a notch at some point.  Right now, though, these are good for the ego.  If I am feeling particularly daring, I may take one of my mammoth unread paperbacks to the beach with me.  (Great Expectations, Swann’s Way, or Don Quixote… actually maybe I won’t.  My intended beach reads are Sacred Games and Tipping the Velvet. I am very much looking forward to the latter which I expect to be quite scandalous, it’s my last Sarah Waters book, now that I’ve gone through them all in reverse chronological order.)

This morning I made a reservation for Eric and my first anniversary.  We are going back to the Ritz for just a night.  This time we’d actually like to spend the night there instead of the Emergency Room.  Wish us luck.  (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, click here.)

You may recall that we’ve been trying to take a hike for about a month or so.  Eric wants to take me up Blood Mountain and I think I’m in good enough shape.  I haven’t actually been on the Appalachian Trail yet, though we made a previous attempt where the trail taking us there disappeared so we had to turn back.  The only day we can plan for this hike is Sunday, since Eric works weekdays and I work Saturday mornings.  It’s a couple hours to drive up and a moderately long hike.  So we get ready to go for every single Sunday so far.  Except that every Sunday there have been thunderstorms.  I don’t particularly want to get soaked to the skin while I hike.  Plus, I remember in Utah reading stories in the paper about young newlywed couples going on hikes together and then getting struck by lightning and killed.  (It’s completely possible I only read one such article, but it’s compounded in my mind.)  Cross your fingers for us and let’s hope for better this coming Sunday.

And the last thing that is making me feel particularly good today?  My work-in-progress is up to nearly 34,000 words.  While it looks puny as currently formatted, when I do it in the publishing format with different font, spacing, and margins, I’m actually at 143 pages.  Should I ever finish this beast, I will be looking for readers.  (If I am very lucky, perhaps by the end of the year?)  However, first I should probably figure out who the killer is.

Right now we’re having a stereotypical summer shower.  It’s the middle of the afternoon.  It was pleasant out five seconds ago.  And then suddenly rain comes hammering down with no warning, only to clear up a few minutes later.  We’ve been having lots of big thunderstorms, too.  I love them, except when I am at the library and one hits just as I get out of my car.  That happened a couple weeks ago.  I tried to wait it out, but it wasn’t one of the little ones, so I ended up pretty drenched.  We didn’t have any of these last summer.  I remember because Eric and I were engaged and it rained exactly one day our whole engagement.  The next time it rained was, of course, our wedding day.  At least it means the drought has let up a bit.

I neglected to share a particularly terrifying experience last week.  I was hesitant to share it because I thought some of you (particularly members of my own family) would get all freaked out and paranoid about it.  I can’t blame you.  But misery loves company, and so does paranoia, I guess.  I was up early a couple Saturdays ago for work.  I got in the shower and was going about my showerly business when I felt something on my back.  Not unusual, my back was under the water, my hair is long, these things happen.  But I reached back and felt that there was something there.  It was a very quick chain of events from there.  I could tell it was a bug, so I flicked it.  It just had to land anywhere, since everywhere was wet, and it would be out of commission.  It fell on the floor of the tub, except I lost my balance and my foot went right on top of it.  I didn’t exactly smush it because feeling it under my foot sent me reeling in the other direction.  Finally when I steadied myself I saw a little black thing–possibly with wings–being whisked down the drain.  But I wasn’t really paying much attention.  Because it bit me.  Or stung me.  Or something.  On my back and my foot.  And it HURT.  I jumped out of the shower for a minute, inspected for any other bugs that may be lurking, and then took a look at my back in the mirror.  There was a nasty little welt there on my back.  I finished my showering business, got a towel on, and jumped into bed where a half-awake Eric did his best to make me feel better.

Because it’s me and I’m paranoid I was worried maybe my welts would swell up and then I’d fall over from anaphylactic shock or something.  But I didn’t.  While Eric inspected my welt, I told him about when I was a freshman in college and a bee landed on my face as I was crossing the street heading for class.  I’d never been stung by a bee before, and being the crazy paranoiac I am, I always harbored a fear that I was allergic to bees.  I didn’t realize it was a bee on my face, sitting right on my cheekbone just below my eye, so I swatted it away, and it stung me.  So there I was, only about 100 feet away from the building I was heading for and my Humanities 101 class and I didn’t know if I would make it.  The sting hurt a lot and I felt my face swelling, so I went into the bathroom to check on it.  I got a pretty nasty looking welt on my cheek, but I put cold water on it and it went down.  After a few minutes, satisfied I wasn’t dead or in a coma, I went to class.

My bee sting experience was a good relief, since I learned a bee won’t kill me.  But the shower experience was the opposite.  I still have no clue what kind of bug it was and now I’m hyper vigilant when I inspect the shower.  I still don’t know how that thing got on my back in the first place.  I’m leaning towards a winged creature… but I can’t be sure.

It’s saying something that my shower-stinging experience (which in my mind is accompanied by the music in the Psycho shower scene) is the only real event of note the last week or two.  We aren’t up to much.  I had this past Saturday off, meaning a whole week without any work.  We had friends over on Friday.  I figured out that we could watch tennis on the computer instead of having to drive somewhere (thanks, ESPN360.com!) and we decided to sit on the couch in our jammies to watch the women’s and men’s Wimbledon finals on Saturday and Sunday mornings.  By the time Eric got it set up to run on our television (the picture was decent, but the frame speed made it hard to keep up with those quick shots) it was nearly halfway through the Williams-sisters match.  I rooted for Serena, who lost, though I think she was playing better tennis for most of the match.  I commented to Eric that I like Serena because she’s pretty much the only athlete with boobs that I can think of.  I mean, it’s hard enough having to run all over the court like that, but I feel like Venus, who’s all arms and legs, probably has an easier time.  I like that Serena doesn’t have a traditional athlete’s build, but that she’s incredibly tough.

Sunday was a much longer haul.  Two rain delays and a five-setter meant we watched tennis basically all day.  It was traumatic, since I’m a hard-core Nadal fan and I really wanted him to beat Federer and he blew a 2-0 set lead and from there I was convinced he’d lose.  When I watch sports where I actually care about the outcome, I get very stressed.  Whenever there was an important point, which came every five seconds or so, I got worried and didn’t want to watch.  Still, it was a great game to watch.  Especially since recently too many matches are all short points.  It had tons of long rallies, lots of great shots, and had either of them been playing anyone else it would’ve been over in an hour.  But Nadal pulled it out, I was very pumped, though I still resented the fact that I’d been miserable for a few hours anticipating his defeat.  I watch a lot of tennis, though not enough to be any kind of expert, and I thought it one of the best matches I’ve seen.  Though I remember one from several years ago when I was a big Sampras fan where Sampras seemed so sick he wouldn’t be able to finish the game, but then managed to win.  (An internet search makes me suspect this was a US Open match from 1996 against Corretja, though Sampras had a reputation for faking illness on the court and puked in at least one other match on the court.)

I’m still working out about 5 days a week.  I do just one workout now, pretty much every time.  It’s the hardest and so I figure it’s the best.  It’s still, as always, me and Cindy out there getting our sweat on.  But I have to admit, it’s not as fun as it used to be.  When I started working out at home a few months ago, it was something new and different, I would get a bunch of different videos from netflix to try.  But once I started this final workout and did it for a good three or four weeks now, it’s not so fun.  I have it all memorized, which means that when I’m doing the second set of forward-and-back-lunges, I know that coming up next are dips and I hate both of those.  I know the jumps come in the first cardio set, even though I always hope it’s the second.  It was much better when I didn’t know what was coming.  The problem about this is that working out is hard.  It’s hot, I’m sweaty and out of breath, and it’s just not fun.  My only reward is seeing improvement.  My cheeks are thinner.  My waist is more defined.  But I still have plenty of undesirable pudge that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.  I’m now able to do all the various sit-ups and crunches (over 100), which makes me feel awesome.  But I still can’t do all the squats or push-ups and my improvement is slow-going.

Today, to mix things up a little, and since I know the routines so well, I decided to turn on the news while I worked out.  So I downloaded a podcast of a morning news show I like for today, put it on, and learned about research on whether octopuses (apparently the term octopi is frowned upon) are right or left armed.  It made my workout much more pleasant.  And this is good, since I should probably keep it up for a while to see if I can get a bit more buff.

We have an upcoming trip to Florida for a little vacation in a couple weeks.  But we aren’t expecting to have quite the travel season we usually do for the rest of the year.  We’ll head up to Salt Lake City with my family for Thanksgiving, but it’s looking like we’ll stay in Atlanta for Christmas.  Eric will be just starting his clinical rotations in med school, plane fares are obscenely high, and it just seems like the best option.  Eric has, as usual, very specific requests.  There must be a tree, it must have lights and decorations.  I would be perfectly happy to go tree-less, and have decided that the tree will be tiny, since that’s the size of our apartment.  He has, though, kindly offered to let me do whatever traditions I wish.  While I hope to carry on my family’s tradition of having a goose dinner, there is no way I’m cooking a goose in our crappy oven for only the two of us.  Geese are huge.  And a pain to carve.  I will save it for another year.  So, I’m thinking something like a turkey from the honey baked ham store.  Not too expensive, very little work.  That way I can go crazy on side dishes and pie.  I understand that it is July, but if you aren’t familiar with my ever-expanding tendency to plan, well, consider yourself lucky.

However, what I was actually going to say was that since we are going low-key for traveling this year, any and all of you are welcome to come visit us.  (We look forward to my in-laws in October!)  Or we can work out something else.  Eric may not be able to make it once December rolls around, but I will be just plain bored in February and March when I won’t be teaching.  Anyone who wants to come to Disney World with me is welcome to drop a line.

Today I was actually listening to music on my iPod.  This isn’t something I do often, even though that’s technically the purpose of the iPod.  Mostly I listen to audiobooks and podcasts on it.  (Mostly.  That was for you, baby.)  But I decided I needed to listen to more music, mostly so I could sing.  I quite like singing and I do it so little these days.  I was motivated after I listened to an interview with Kelli O’Hara.  I have had plenty of women I’ve envied over the years, where I would gladly have given an arm to get their voice.  But I think the search must stop because Kelli O’Hara is perfect.  (There is a sad lack of Kelli O’Hara material on youtube.  But you can hear the interview which has plenty of musical clips here.  If you haven’t heard of her, she’s got the main role in the current revival of South Pacific, was in last year’s The Pajama Game, and the previous year’s Light in the Piazza.)

Anyway, listening to Kelli O’Hara sing songs I love to sing made me want to sing them.  And that made me sad about the state of my iPod.  They say you get stuck in your musical tastes around 25 or so, and my iPod would seem to support that idea.  I’ve heard all my music so many times that I just put it on Shuffle most of the time.  My greatest joy is being surprised by a song I haven’t heard in a while and Shuffle is the only way to get that to happen.  But the problem with shuffling is that I just feel like my iPod is depressed.  Depressed enough that it could use some therapy or a Xanax or something.  Where is all my peppy music?  I actually pulled off all my musicals from the playlists because it was too long.  I now see that this was a mistake.  Because instead I’m left with a whole bunch of perfectly respectable but depressing music that I never want to listen to.  Depressing music was great back when I used to get regularly dumped.  But now that I’m past that I want peppy.  (This may explain why the last addition to my iPod was ABBA.  Yes, I’m admitting it.)

Today I had a bit of a drive out to an outlet to get myself a new pair of cross-training shoes.  The in-town selection has been pitiful.  So I pulled out the old iPod and put it on shuffle and prepared to sing my lungs out.  Except I kept having to hit next because everything was so gloomy.

One thing I did notice was that so much of my music reminds me very specifically of particular times and places.  Wilco makes me think of driving down University Avenue in Provo.  Ryan Adams reminds me of driving around downtown Austin.  Liz Phair puts me back the year I lived in Conroe, Texas.  Elvis Costello and David Bowie go with Orlando, on I-4 between Disney World and Sea World.  Atlanta doesn’t really have its own music, probably because I rarely acquire any.  I got the new Rufus Wainwright last year, but that just reminds me of playing it over and over again while I drove to Tennessee.  One of my favorite memories, though comes from listening to The Who.

I must preface this story by saying that a car is good for two things.  First, getting around.  Second, singing.  Your car is your own soundproof booth to belt as loud as you can.  Good stereo systems are always helpful.  No one’s in the next room when you’re in the car.  You don’t have to worry about who will overhear you.  This is probably why all my music memories relate to driving down particular roads.  Once during law school, I was driving through Provo and had The Who playing pretty loud.  Specifically, I was playing Baba O’Riley, a.k.a. the awesomest song ever.  (Among the sins committed by the television shows in the CSI oeuvre, the greatest–even greater than putting on lame television–is the way they’ve ruined The Who.)  There is only one possible way to listen to Baba O’Riley.  You must play it loud.  And you must rock out.  I was doing so, at least I was doing so whenever I was stopped at a light and it was safe to do so.  (There may still have been some subdued rocking out while I was driving.)  I happened to notice in front of me was a woman driving a sedan with a couple kids in the backseat.  She looked at me in the rearview mirror, then pointed back at me, made some comment to her kids, and then started mocking my rocking out.  I had no recourse.  I could not get out and let her know that I was completely justified in rocking out, that I was listening to Baba O’Riley, and that I had no other choice.  Instead, her kids laughed and they drove away.  Obviously this woman had never sat in the car with her kids rocking out.  (It was Provo, so I shouldn’t really be surpriesd.)  I chose not to be upset at her, since she only mocked what she clearly did not understand.

As kids, we all sang in the car regularly.  It was simply what you did.  And it went beyond the years we listened to kids tapes.  (When I was a kid we listened to these things called tapes, and we walked uphill in the snow both ways…)  It was the Beatles and everything on the Oldies station.  I still know the words to pretty much everything they play on the Oldies station.  Our musical tastes as kids were limited by our parents.  So we got musicals, oldies, and my Mom’s spanish disco cd.  (Ask any member of my family to sing some for you, and they probably can.  Even though none of us know spanish.  Luckily she only had one cd. No one has yet owned up to listening to it on Amazon.com.  Lucky for you, Amazon does have some track samples to listen to from other albums.  Like track one on this disc.  Sadly, it cuts out before the chorus.  It’s about a cat.  Don’t ask me anything else.  Is it weird that listening to it now, I have to admit it’s kind of awesome?)  But we definitely all got into it.  And this is as it should be.

When we have kids, the iPod will get changed up for a special kids-singing-in-the-car playlist.  It will include pretty much everything that is both peppy and kid-appropriate.  Which means there will be at least a couple of Liz Phair songs on there, which rocks.  With these requirements, it will probably be musical and oldies-heavy.  To me, it sounds like heaven.  However, I think the idea of having me and our kids singing at the tops of our lungs from something like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat frightens Eric.  Luckily he’s got time to come to grips with it.

It could be worse.  In high school I never really broke out of my oldies listening.  I never got into the popular bands.  (It was the mid-90’s, it’s not like there was much out there.)  The first CD I ever owned was Man of La Mancha, so you can imagine just how much of a nerd I was.  All I knew of modern music I learned from riding the bus to and from school.  I wasn’t impressed.  And once I started hitching a ride to school with Erika every day, we would occasionally listen to the radio.  But we were in choir and musicals and so there was a stretch of several months where we listened to the D’Oyly Carte Opera’s version of Pirates of Penzance.  Every.  Single.  Day.  Both ways.  If I am ever in some kind of vegetative state, I am still confident that I could sing the entire thing, from start to finish, even the orchestra bits.  Just turn it on and see what I do.  I swear it’ll happen.  Pirates is pretty fun to sing, as is most Gilbert and Sullivan, if you know it.  But it doesn’t really do well for group-car singing.  So Eric can thank his lucky stars it won’t be on the list.  Probably.

Eventually on my drive home today my iPod perked up.  I got my Baba O’Riley, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  It was followed by Hiro’s Song by Ben Folds.  This is quite a reliable peppy song, and it also fit with my train of thought, which you’ve just seen in the preceding paragraphs.  It’s a song about a guy who can’t really deal with getting older.  The chorus is, “I don’t wanna grow old.  Won’t you let me, won’t you let me explode?  In a karaoke supernova.”  I am okay with getting older.  But if I could explode in a karaoke supernova, I can’t imagine that would be such a terrible thing.