The Bearded One and I both had a couple of extra days off this weekend and, although I spent a chunk of it on a little road trip with my mom and sister to meet up with someone from our past, and another small chunk trying to figure out how to even more thoroughly predator-proof our chicken coop after we lost three ladies to some kind of critter last night (poor Rose and Joan, pictured above, are the last two left from our original flock now), and another chunk working around the house, we decided to go out for a little treat tonight. When we were first dating, we took advantage of the half-price appetizers at Applebee’s several times, so we decided to do that tonight. Except, fyi, it’s not exactly half-price appetizers after 9:00pm now, but there is a select menu of items that only cost $3, $4, or $5 after 9:00, and that menu happened to include most of the apps we used to get.
Anyway, it was a fun little throwback to our dating life, and I don’t know who was in charge of the music at Appelbee’s tonight, but it was an all ’90s playlist. Santa Monica (Everclear), Can’t Get Enough of You, Baby (Smash Mouth), Steal My Sunshine (Len), The Way (Fastball)–if you were a teenager in the 1990s, you would almost certainly recognize all of these songs (though I wouldn’t have been able to name most of the songs or the artists who recorded them–The Bearded One helped me out here). These songs took me back, and really got me to thinking about how much things have changed since the ’90s.
They also got me to thinking about other songs from that era, and one that has been popping up in my head in the last several months is The Sunscreen Song (Baz Luhrmann). I couldn’t remember a lot about this song, but I remember feeling like it was significant. So, when we got home from Applebee’s tonight, I looked it up and played it. It’s…I just…I don’t know if there’s even anything to say about it except IT’S SO TRUE. Almost every part of this song feels real now that we’re pretty solidly middle aged. It’s too bad we weren’t wise enough to follow all of this advice. I even remember that it felt significant and true back then, but I still haven’t always followed it.
I guess I don’t have a lot more to say about it, but I’ll post a video below. You might feel like you’re living in a way that honors most of the advice in this song. You might feel like you’re past it. You might have heard it, but forgotten about the specifics. Or you might be hearing it for the first time. Whatever the case, give it a listen. I hope you’re glad you did.
growingmoxie.com 