So my mother and I have, what you might like to call, a so so relationship. We've mostly gotten over that span of about six years when I did a lot of drugs that she didn't know about my rebellious teenage years. She hasn't accepted my lack of the Catholic religion...but she's dealing with it. (Or at least she's stopped openly talking about the baby spending eternity in purgatory and me burning in hell.) (I once had a nun explain purgatory to me like this....it's like having all the pancakes you could ever want, but with no syrup. The pancakes are still good...but not quite what you wanted.) (This is why I am so fucked up...my formative years were spent with a bunch of loonies comparing eternity to breakfast foods.) (Side note...Hey JD! Sister Myra told me that...remember her?) (Moving on.)
My mother and I have a once-a-week, 15 minute max, standing phone call. It's like taking off a bandaid...you don't want to make the call but you know you have to...and then you do it as fast as possible with the biggest grimace on your face...but you keep saying out loud that it's no big deal. So these phone calls generally consist of filler...like what she watched on TV that week, which one of my wonderful full members of the Catholic church elementary school classmates she saw in the Safeway, what the baby has been doing (with mumblings suggesting that maybe the kid wouldn't climb the bookshelves or keep stealing the remote if she had a bit more of the Lord in her), etc. This past week she was talking about something that she heard on the radio...something that she heard on MIX 107.3 to be exact. This is a station that I know well...non-offensive Top 40's with a little bit of cleaned up pop from the 70's, 80's, 90's, and today! It was all I was ever allowed to listen to when I was a kid. It's the quintessential Mom station. And it's the type of station that I've been avoiding for years...heaven forbid my dial land on that sort of station! Oh the embarrassment! Or so I thought...
So I'm driving in the car this morning...and I'm listening to the morning show that is a blend of some music, some talk, some news, some contests...and then I hear it. "You're listening to MIX 105.1!" I'm listening to a mix station. I'M LISTENING TO THE FLORIDA EQUIVALENT OF MY MOTHER'S RADIO STATION...FOR WEEKS! And I never noticed. There I was every morning...laughing along with freaking Scott and Erica! Playing along to the $25 Pyramid! Yelling about how Florida is full of idiots...obviously the category is "Alternative Names for Wombat Dung!" Singing along to Leona Lewis (KEEP BLEEDING! KEEP KEEP BLEEDING!) and fucking Daughtry. DAUGHTRY...as in AN AMERICAN IDOL WINNER! WHY DO I EVEN KNOW THAT!? And the entire time...my sweet, innocent, naive child sitting in the backseat...dancing and clapping when they play the pick-me-up song of the morning...laughing at mama yelling at the voices.
When did I become a pre-menopausal woman? I don't even consider myself to be a woman yet...I refer to myself as being a girl...not a woman. Women are old and wrinkly and serious and listen to mix stations.
Now I've been struggling with this whole age thing for a
while...but this seems like the beginning of the end.
And then this lead me to another line of thought...everyone has a musical expiration date...a time when you stop keeping up with current music and you just stop liking anything new. New music sounds like noise..."those damn kids don't know what good music!" is you say...and you mean it.
I think I've hit this time period. I used to listen to all sorts of music...now I just want to hear things from 1994. I've been trying to pinpoint when my musical preferences stopped evolving...luckily iTunes is good at helping out with this sort of thing. 2002. 2002 was the end for me. I pretty much stopped adding in anything new in 2002. I was only 21. I peaked musically at 21.
How soon before I peak at everything else?
So tell me...have you reached your musical peak?
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