i’ve been listening to the gin blossoms’ “lost horizons” on repeat lately. i think i’m experiencing some weird not-quite-mid-30s crisis this week or something. it’s one of those weird crises that make you see the deep insight and profound truth in song lyrics. and lucky for me, the truth has hit with the gin blossoms. yeah, remember them?

“hey jealousy” must have hit big the summer/fall of 1993, when i was just turning 21. i remember being 21 and standing in the middle of the crowdy, smoky GI trying to wade through the mass of drunken college students. whitley was in front, then me, then fulkernun (both of their real names were jenny, but that was the semster we had six SIX jenny’s on the newspaper staff, so we called most of them by their last name, except for fulkernun, we called her because she wouldn’t let me say bullshit in a column in the newspaper and she always got really perturbed by our sex jokes). anyway we were drunkenly making our way through the sea of drunks toward either the bathroom or the dart boards, and this song came on. whitley stopped, i stuck out my thumb, and fulkernun leaned over and we all sang “hey jealousy” as loudly as we could into my thumbmic. we were so stupid. it was so much fun.

and now it’s 11 years later and i’m listening to “lost horizons” and thinking ‘my god, why didn’t we just take this song seriously. why didn’t we really listen to what it was telling us?”

and that’s how you know you’re having a not-quite-mid-30s crisis, when you start finding deep meaning in the words of the gin blossoms, in case you were wondering.