Not much to report today…

Today at the bookstore, time was slower than however slow molasses is, I don’t know.  There were no customers, too many volunteers, and I was bored and itching to go home. I was standing near the doorway and the weather felt more like a sunny day in Los Angeles than in Oakland, and I felt transported back to my senior year in college when I was working in a bookstore on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and I couldn’t wait to get out of work, out of college, and back to San Francisco. Today I felt that same longing to go and anxiety to move forward. It was like a deja vu moment, only I recognized it.  It felt like the exact same moment was being replayed 25 years later.

I haven’t thought about that job or time in my life for a long time, and to feel it so acutely today was weird.  But nice. 1990 was actually pretty gross.  The number one song of the year was “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips, fashion was atrocious, and it was the year I tried to have a perm (ahem, body wave) but it only lasted for 24 hours before it fell out.  I look back on 1990 as being a year I was lost and making pretty stupid decisions — life-wise AND hair-wise.  It wasn’t all bad — I graduated from college, had great friends, a nice but very-wrong-for-each-other boyfriend, an okay job with a nice boss, and one time Donna Summer AND Captain of Captain and Tennille came into the store AT THE SAME TIME and talked about gardening.  I mean, that was really phenomenal, like seeing Bigfoot AND a unicorn frolicking together.

So it wasn’t all bad, but I’ve always had this overall felling of “ick” when I think about it.  I wasn’t being true to myself — I went through a phase where I thought I was supposed to get my shit together and be “normal,” and that didn’t work so well.  No more pink hair, no more vintage clothes (I still lament the garbage bag full of dresses I dropped off at Buffalo Exchange in July 1990), no more me.  So no, I don’t look at the early ’90s with much fondness, but today I did.

I’ve noticed that one of the nicer things about getting older is that some of those old, icky memories have been smoothed over a bit and cancelled out by the good ones.  Even a few years ago I would have thought about 1990 and shuddered, disgusted by it all.  Now I can look back and think, “Yeah, but that year ruled because of Captain and Donna Summer, hello!”  I find that I’m much more forgiving than I used to be.  I was even emailing with a friend today, and I asked how an estranged person from my life was and thought, “I miss that guy. He was fun.”  THAT is never anything I would have even considered a few years ago, but now I feel kind of meh, like I don’t want to expend that energy.  So weird.  Maybe I’m maturing, or maybe it’s Alzheimer’s, or maybe I just don’t care anymore and can be happy as a middle-aged fuddy duddy, I don’t know.  Or maybe I’ll be back to my regular self tomorrow, seething about something that happened in 1995.

Anyway, I didn’t really have much to say today, but this was fun.  And here, now you, too, can be transported back to 1990 and be totally grossed out as well.