Bits and Pieces

I was sitting at Starbucks just yesterday with Claire, (holla!) one of my tutorees. (Made up word meaning: girls I tutor.)

Okay, I am growing older, and it is a sad truth that the music I listened to and loved in my formative years is also growing older, and therefore, Time is softening the edges of music that was considered so rough in its day that it was banned from my middle school. Case in point: two years ago, I heard Nirvana's "Polly" in a Starbucks, a song whose barely veiled lyrics discuss gang rape and BDSM. The buzz surrounding this song has of course disappeared, as the song is 14 years old now, and all that's left is the mounrful dirge tune and Kurt Cobain's sexy, barely intelligible mumble. (Ironically, exactly what caused the furor in the first place.)

While R.E.M. wasn't, and still isn't, a band that could be directly compared to Nirvana, they certainly started around the same time and were considered part of the new sound on the radio, although R.E.M. was barely a grunge band. Still, I fell in love with R.E.M. around the same time I fell in love with Nirvana, and because of that, when R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" came on the air in the Starbucks yesterday, I sang along for a few bars, even though it embarrasses Claire. (Ah, teenagers.) She looked at me.

"It's Everybody Hurts," I said, stating a fact.
"Who is it by?" she asked.
"R.E.M.," I said, thinking, duh.
She responded, "What's rem?"

Oh, Lordy. Am I THAT old?

Apparently not old enough, as just a few hours later, I posted about cuddling with my dog while he was sleeping, proving that I was late to my next tutoring appointment, and therefore was speeding along on the highway when a cop pulled me over and issued me a ticket.

Hello, insurance! Sorry about that! Please don't raise my rates too high, thank you!

LT, when I was telling him this story: "Does your insurance have a three-ticket limit?"
Me: "No idea. Guess we're about to find out." (Those playing along at home will remember that I got two tickets in one week, last year, and one of them was deferred for a year. Not quite a year ago.)

Uh. Whoops. (And I was doing so good, too!)