Now that the weather has gotten slightly chillier than it was before, The Tibbles have totally conned me into giving them rides to school. This is not because they want to spend more time with their beloved Aunt Jodi. No, it’s because Aunt Jodi is a sucker and if they get a ride to school they get five or six more minutes of Minecraft time.

This morning after we all piled into Ruby and buckled up, The Current started playing Weezer’s The World Has Turned and Left Me Here. For some reason I decided that this very morning was the time for my young nephews to understand just how much Weezer meant to me once upon a time ago.

The world has turned and left me here. Just where I was before you appeared. And in your place an empty space, has filled the void behind my face

I started singing the song out loud before I even put Ruby in drive.

“I love this song so much,” I shouted over the music.
“We can tell,” Nolan, who was stuck in the middle, said.
“This whole album, Weezer’s Blue Album, was one of my very favorite records when I was in college,” I said, ignoring the smartypants.
“When you were in college?” Cade asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “We would listen to all the time in the newspaper office. I think everyone loved this record.”
“So, like you listened to this when you were in college?” Cade asked again.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Wow,” he kind of gasped. “This song must be really old. Probably from the 90s.”

That’s when I pulled over and made him get the hell out of the truck. But only because we were already at school. They don’t live very far from their school.

Things were better then. Once but never again. We’ve all left the den. Let me tell you about it.

After they were out of Ruby I continued to have warm, smooshy, nostalgic feelings about Weezer’s Blue Album. I mean, when’s the last time you thought about the Blue Album? Or, you know, Weezer?

The last time I seriously thought about Weezer was when the young, beautiful Grad (remember him?) told me he was in fifth or sixth grade when he first heard the Blue Album. I think it was probably that one sentence that turned me from like a regular thirtysomething into a cougar. I was advanced for my age. Now that’s I’m forty I’m just regular cougar age, right?

Enough about cougardom, back to Weezer.

Of all the records in my canon of Personal Artifacts none of them make me feel quite so dated as this one. Not Matthew Sweet’s “Altered Beast” not “Exile in Guyville” none of The ‘Mats, not even Pearl Jam’s “Vs” (which hasn’t yet secured its place in the canon).

What’s a matter, what’s a matter, what’s a matter you?

Here’s why, the Blue Album represents a very definite point in my life. It is that last yearish of college. It’s those people and that time and very specifically a night at The Spectator office when my friend Whitley and I were trading off singing lines from “Buddy Holly” and one of the other editors accused me of being mean when I sang “Oh oh and you’re Mary Tyler Moore.” Because, well, Whitley looked like a grungier modern Mary Tyler Moore and this editor, I can’t remember who it was, thought that was a slight. Whitley and I laughed for about six years picking on whomever that person was who was so uncool as to not know all the words to “Buddy Holly.” In that person’s whom I can’t remember’s defense he/she took the teasing pretty well and thought that I was super clever working in Mary Tyler Moore into the song.

There are other albums that nail me to certain points in time or certain people. For instance, I discovered this weekend that Teagan & Sara make me feel thirty again. Exactly thirty and how I felt when I was sleeping with that one guy I slept with when I was thirty. For the record, I don’t burn with shame about it anymore. Apparently I have forgiven myself for being a bitch.

But there are two thing about those other albums and Weezer’s Blue Album. A lot of them I have carried with me throughout my life. A lot of those album has become timeless, simultaneously reminding me of specific point in time and yet not being rooted to that time forever. They’ve become more than what the were.

Weezer’s Blue Album hasn’t transcended it’s place. It will always be that year in college, that night in The Spectator office. It will never be anything more than that, which is okay. Being that year is enough.

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When I set out to re-evaluate my personal artifacts in honor of my FORTIETH! birthday, I had grand dreams of having re-evaluated everything by the time the actual birthday rolled around. Eternal, illogical optimism is often the cause of all my tardiness. I constantly think everything will take entirely less time than it actually does.

The Dawson’s Creek re-watch was going really well for a long time. I’d clip along, a few episodes a week, usually during lunch. But then I got fed up with the shittiness of the DVD series I bought a few years ago, so I quit for awhile until that magical day I discovered the entire series on Netflix. I did pretty well, making it through most of junior year, senior year, and part of freshman year, until Mitch Leery died. I just wasn’t in the mood to sob my eyes out. So I stopped again.

My birthday came and went and I never did get around to finishing the series, until last week when I discovered I was losing my most favorite (and lucrative) client. There’s nothing like emotional and financial upheaval to leave a grown woman craving her favorite visual security blanket.

The Mitch Leery dies episode of Dawson’s always gets me unstuck, at least emotionally. I cry my eyes out until I can’t cry any more. It gets the ick out in a way nothing can, not even listening to Jeff Buckley’s “Lover You Should Have Come Over” in the dark.
[blockquote_styled sign=”Joey Potter”]Get over it. What is the big deal? So I like a teen soap? So what?[/blockquote_styled]

As I type this I’m watching the first part of the series finale, and Jen has just fainted. My heart is giddy and fluttery and I can’t stop grinning even though I know in about 7 minutes I’ll be projectile crying, the tears shooting out of my eyes

I love this show. I don’t know why and I can’t explain it. Is it ridiculous and melodramatic? Yes. Is it inane and unrealistic? Yes. And yet I love it still.

(Oh Grams just came out of Jen’s room sobbing, here come my tears)

I love this show so much and have watched it so much, that I have many quibbles with the Netflix version. First, they’re fucking up these final episodes, cutting shit out. . . like the first time Dawson & Joey see each other at the gas station, and Joey finding the wedding ring.

Second, the music is all wrong and I’m not talking about how they swapped out theme songs. Trading Paula Cole for Jann Arden. There’s one scene where college-aged Jen plays R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming” for Dawson to remind him of that one time they went skinny-dipping, only on this new and unimproved version it’s not R.E.M., it’s some song I’ve never heard of.

Also, when Jen jumps on the chair to “Baba O’Reilly” in this version it’s some other bullshit song that makes the scene feel awkward.

This, this quibble, more than anything shows how much I love this show. I’m like those crazy StarWars fans who got mad at George Lucas for changing shit in their beloved movie. Dawson’s Creek is my StarWars and if there were weirdo conventions where I could cosplay as Audrey Liddel or Grams, I would totally go every year.

Other thoughts on this show which will continue to serve as the TV-backbone of my personal pop cultural canon:
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• Dawson is a self-centered creep. His ridiculous arrogance and obliviousness to other people’s feelings gets more unbearable with each re-watching of the series.
• Michelle Williams is luminous. Her skin. . . it’s like otherworldly in its beauty.
• Speaking of Jen, I have her dying speech to her daughter memorized.
• Now that Katie Holmes is divorcing Tom Cruise (just typing his name gives me shivers of revulsion, he’s the reason I have never seen “Top Gun” or “Risky Business” or many, many movies) I write fan fiction about Michelle Williams and Busy Phillps (Audrey Liddel) swooping in and reprogramming her and the three of them being BFFs.
• PACEY! PACEY! PACEY!
• The professors at Worthington college have very inappropriate relationships with their students. At least Joey’s profs do.
• Grams is the most dynamic character on the show, she changes the most from bible-banging judgmental old hag, to college-attending, black-man dating withit woman of the world.
• I write fan fiction about a Dawson’s reunion where Michelle Williams comes back to play her own daughter.
• In the early years Joey pulls the “dead mom” card way too often and early, luckily she lays off that as she grows up.
• Also, Betsy is totally under-rated. She’s a great sister and character.

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Grams just said, “I’ll see you soon child, I’ll see you soon” which makes me cry so hard I can’t even type anymore.

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For the purposes of this story, let’s pretend it was “Luka.” Not that it really matters, mostly I just remembered it and I put down everything that I remember regardless of relevance.

What is relevant to this story? The fact that when I was a senior in high school I took a class called Humanities taught by Mrs. Kugel. It was, probably, the best class I took in my high school career. It was a class that tried to teach us about beauty and art and philosophy and most importantly, critical thinking. It was a class with not so many right or wrong answers but a lot of explaining how you arrived at your conclusion. Mrs. Kugel made us a think. A lot.

To get us out of the whole sit in your desk, raise your hand, and recite the right answer frame of mind the previous twelve years of our education had taught us, Mrs. Kugel would hold class in various empty spaces throughout Blaine Senior High School. We discussed the Iliad and the Odyssey on the stage of the theater. One time she brought in a Holocaust survivor who talked about escaping the death camps. Damn, what an amazing teacher. Just now, twenty-two years after taking her class I am realizing what a gift it was to take that class.

Which is what is bringing me to Suzanne Vega’s “Solitude Standing.”

I procured a tape of “Solitude Standing” the summer before my senior year. I say procured because I didn’t buy it. As you know, GenX has a long history of stealing music. We started out taping it off the radio and gradually moved on to bilking Columbia House and BMG out of dozens of cassettes at a time long before we even imagined downloading songs from the Internet.

One of the twelve tapes I got for a penny was Vega’s “Solitude Standing,” chosen solely because of my great and profound love of “Luka.” It was, I think, one of the first songs where the lyrics really, really got me. I’d always been a lyrics kind of girl, sitting on the floor with a notebook in my lap pressing pause on the stereo every few seconds so I could transcribe the words I’d just heard. But “Luka,” man, “Luka” was something else altogether. It was the first song I can remember falling in love with that was bigger than love or sex or weathermen. It was about, you know, SOMETHING and I liked that. And, as you can surmise, I dug the whole album, specifically the titular song.

So when Mrs. Kugel gave us the assignment to bring a piece of music to share with the class that meant something to us. I chose “Solitude Standing.” The decision was not without great debate or angst. The choice was fraught with danger, to bring in music that meant something to us even then felt like a very personal and revealing act, and then to have to share it in front of the class. I was pretty sure this would be the death of me.

We had class, that day, in one of the empty band practice rooms. The acoustics were good and the room was soundproofed so we could turn up the music. I don’t remember what anyone brought in, except for the kid who went before me. I can’t remember his name, but he was a band kid. A trumpeter, I believe. Senior year was the first time I wasn’t a band kid. I had given up band to be editor of the high school newspaper and the yearbook. I was the writer kid, I guess.

The band kid brought in a song called either “Intergalactic Soda Pop” or “Soda Pop Galaxy.” It involved soda pop and space and was a kind of synthersizer-y song with lots of boops and beeps and such. He said he loved it because it was fun and sounded like soda pop in space.

I went next and I was so nervous I thought I would puke. Now you have to remember that I was a 6’3″ senior booknerd who’d never been kissed, a girl whose family had recently moved to Wisconsin to open a restaurant, leaving me to live in the basement of a house that was no longer mine, but my cousin’s and her family’s.

I know I didn’t cry, but my voice shook and my eyes were watery as I tried to explain why the song meant so much to me, how it was a song about the power and beauty of solitude, of how standing out from the crowd is scary but rewarding, and how it’s okay to be scared and do what you know is right even if everyone else is doing something else. I don’t know how I got through my little speech without crying, but I do remember that when I sat back down next to my friend Rob he smiled at me and said I did good.

Damn. Can you think of a single reason why I wouldn’t keep “Solitude Standing” in the canon? I can’t.

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I have a pack of friends who write books for young-adult and middle-grade readers (all of whom you should read). This is not just because I’m incredibly blessed to know smart, talented people, but also because this is Minnesota and you can’t throw a lutefisk without hitting someone who writes books for people who aren’t yet considered grown-ups. Seriously, this state is filthy with young-adult, middle-grade, and children’s writers*.

Because of this I hear about a lot of fabulous young-adult writers both old and new. However, none of them have ever spoken about one of my very favorite young-adult writers, M.E. Kerr.

As a teen and young-adult, I gobbled up every M.E. Kerr book I could find. Some of my favorites include Him She Loves, Gentlehands, and I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me. But my all-time favorite is I Stay Near You: One Story in Three, which along with The Count of Monte Cristo was my favorite book until I read A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Oh, I get all teenaged and sigh-y when I think about I Stay Near You, a book that follows three generations of the doomed Cone-Powell family. I’ve probably read this book four or five times in my life. I recently reread it as part of the Re-evaluating Personal Artifacts project I’ve started as a ramp up to my FORTIETH! birthday.

The book starts off in the pre-war 40s of upstate New York where we meet Mildred Cone, a poor, harp-playing loner who is shunned by most the kids in her class not just because she’s poor and she plays the harp but because Mildred’s a pit prickly. The only thing Mildred hates more than when her peers shorten her name to Millie are the super rich Storms who live on top of a hill in a mansion called Cake.

But things change when Mildred falls in love with the youngest Storm, Powell over the summer. She returns to school beautiful and exotic. She wear an expensive gold ring around her neck with Basque writing that says “I Stay Near You.” Love changes Mildred and she reads scandalous poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay in English class and plays popular songs on her harp during the recital. The kids are mesmerized and Mildred takes Laura into her confidence. It’s Laura who tells us the tragic love story of Mildred and Powell that ends as WWII breaks out.

Next, the book jumps to the sixties where we find Vincent Haigney, Mildred’s teenaged son who longs to be a rock and roll star. Vincent’s in love with the girl whose family runs the local pawn shop. Mildred’s not a fan of the girl she dubs trashy. But Vincent doesn’t let his mother’s distaste stop his relationship and he promises Joanna the mysterious gold ring in his mother’s drawer as soon as he gets it on his eighteenth birthday. Things don’t end well.

Finally, we land in the eighties where Powell Storm Haigney, Mildred’s grandson, is writing a letter to his dad, rockstar Saint Vincent (huh, I wonder if St. Vincent ever read this book). P.S. is a little pissed off and chronicles the ways in which his father has let him down time and time again. This last third, is easily my favorite part of the book not only because it features a lot of pop culture, but also because Kerr slowly reveals what happened to Vincent and Mildred through P.S.’s eyes.

It’s really smart and clever and probably why I loved the book so much as a teenager and why I still appreciate it now. Though I do have to admit there was a bit of eyerolling when Vincent said about his mother, “She still looked good, too, even at thirty-four.” Yeah.

When you spend most of your teen years reading the predictable pap that is Sweet Valley High (not that I didn’t love that pap), I Stay Near You was so wholly different I couldn’t help but fall for it.

*As I was writing this I saw the link for The Loft’s 2012 Children’s and Young Adult Literature Conference float across Facebook and if you have any interest in writing for not-yet-grownups, you should check out the conference.

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Whenever anyone, usually a dude, has complimented me on my taste in music I would laugh and say, “I have awful taste in music.” Then they would say, “no, no, really. . .” and then list all the music they like that I also like. Sometimes, depending on my level of attraction to the complimentary dude, I would reel out some of my more egregious lapses in taste. For instance, “I truly love with all my heart three songs by the Spin Doctors.” Nothing levels a musicgeek like that admission. They will stare at you with open-mouthed horror. It’s hilarious, you should try it sometime.

As my Re-Evaluating Personal Artifacts project rolls on I’ve discovered that I have impeccable taste in literature and have for quite some time. I’ve re-read four of the ten to tweleve books I’d include in my personal canon and have yet to eject one.

You could also say I’ve discovered that I have not grown a lick since I was seventeen and am hopelessly stuck in the swamp that is my personal taste and incapable of any sort of personal pop cultural maturation. I used up all my good taste on books leaving me incredibly vulnerable to some really awful, decisions when it comes to music (see: Spin Doctors).

I still love those three Spin Doctors songs. I don’t know if I’d put them in my Personal Artifacts basket, well I’d probably include “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues” but only because I played that damn song so many times at The Cam as a young journalism student that the bartender would actually pay me to not play it.

Now, I fully realize that those Spin Doctor songs are not good. They are the worst kind of bland jammy electric guitar pap, and this is coming from someone who doesn’t like jammy electric guitar at all. Also, lyrically? They’re kind of cliche. Rhyming pockets with rockets and then launching into a sort so scat thing. Unforgivable. And yet my love goes on.

You know where my love dares not go anymore? Jewel and Alanis Morissette.

The soundtrack of my life the summer of 1995 was probably heavily made up of Jewel, Alanis Morissette, and Soul Aslyum’s “Let Your Dim Light Shine.” This astounds me. I have no idea how my twenty-three-year-old ears could handle endless repeats of Jewel and Alanis. Practically FORTY-year-old me cannot even make it through the entire “Pieces of You” album.

It is awful. I’m not even sure if I can put into words the awfulness of this music. I blame a lot of it on the song that gives the album it’s name, “Pieces of You.” It’s a bunch of faux-earnest pop-psychology bullshit that induces very much eye-rolling. In fact, a lot of the album strikes me as incredibly faux. The drama and emotion feel put on, trumped up for the sake of appearing deep and emotional. This is ironic, considering how much of the mid-90s was all about being genuine or seeking out something that was.

Speaking of irony, Oh Alanis.

I loved “Jagged Little Pill.” A lot. A lot. A lot. A lot. I should have listened to my friend Goetz who would protest whenever I slipped this one into the CD player we kept at The Spectator office. “I don’t know why you love this so much,” he would say.

The reason I loved it so much? “Jagged Little Pill” felt like it was saying something about what it meant to be a young woman in the 90s. It was easy and accessible in a way that was safe. It felt angry without actually being angry. Anger is scary and downright terrifying when you grow up with a dad who had an explosive, violent temper. When I fell in love with “Jagged Little Pill” I wasn’t ready to confront the anger of my own childhood and the injustice of being a woman in a patriarchal society.

Alanis was a nice gateway drug into that. Without Alanis, I don’t think I’d ever have been open to really hear Liz Phair. For that I’m quite grateful for her. However, I can no longer tolerate “Jagged Little Pill” for more than 90 seconds.

Ruling: Jewel and Alanis are out of the canon.

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