Yowza!

CCAI just posted that CCAA has gone to the matching room! We're up, folks! Gulp! I can't help but picture a group of people armed with coffee and donuts going through a door and reaching around to hang a sign: "Matching: Do Not Disturb." I wonder what really happens in there. Do they squint at our "Family Life" photos and then at little overexposed close-ups of baby girls, going back and forth until they get an "Ah-ha! Now THAT'S a family!" I guess we'll never know.

So, all of the sudden every song on the radio seems to have something to do with my head. Right after I read the news, I was driving to yoga and heard "Time Of Your Life" by Green Day. This song already makes me cry (okay, there's a moron alert ahead) because it played over the final "Seinfeld" montage, but now it had fresh resonance. On the way home, I heard "Girls Just Want To Have Fun," (so true!) and right after, Howard Jones's "What Is Love?"

Can anybody love anyone so much that they will never fear
Never worry never be sad
The answer is they cannot love this much nobody can
This is why I don't mind you doubting

I haven't heard this song in years, but child of the '80s that I am, it has a lot of associations. In the interest of full disclosure, I should also admit that I had a lot of life experience in the '80s: all of high school, all of college, first kiss, first apartment, first grown-up job, and various other things I don't care to mention and which you'd no doubt thank me for keeping to myself. But this explains why I'm sometimes a little moony over '80s songs, in a way that doesn't seem quite sane considering people now make a sport of laughing at '80s music videos.

Anyway, I did something else in the '80s that's a little embarrassing. I filled 49 cent composition journals with seething accounts of my love affairs and unrequited crushes (let's be honest: unrequited infatuations) so wonderfully solipsistic that when I read them now I have no clue what I was on about. I mean that literally: I included no names or other proper nouns that could be used for identification purposes. I suppose I assumed I would never forget a single detail of my fascinating, fun-filled and jam-packed life. But I did. Whoops.

The one constant that offers some clue to who I was in that decade (summation: pretentious and maudlin, but passionate and well-meaning) is the pop song epigraph that began almost every entry. Songs you wouldn't imagine anyone noticing HAD lyrics, let alone believing they offered an uncanny parallel to their own life. Did someone say melodrama is wasted on the young? I hope not.

At any rate, this song thing seems to have some sort of primal roots, as I find myself reaching for meaning in this venue whenever something momentous happens in my life. This is a confession. Be gentle. ;)