Over the past several months, I've come up with some interesting quasi-posts that I’ll present, countdown style and in bunches, until we hit my thirtieth birthday. Tonight I’ll work through items #30 to #21. So in the words of the immortal Michael Bolton (the musician, not the dude from "Office Space"), let's get to it.
30. The #1 song on the Billboard Rap chart the week of my 20th birthday was “Damn,” by YoungbloodZ (ft. Lil Jon). Yup, you can listen by clicking on the link below (but why, for the love of God, would you?). Most likely, just to close the circle, the number one song on the Billboard Rap chart the week of my 30th birthday will be something awful by Drake. That’s just a guess, but can we talk for a second about how awful “Damn” is, even relative to the average Dirty South rap song that was released in the first half of the first decade of the 21st Century? When I researched this and found out that this was the top song on the Billboard Rap chart that week – for one and only week, by the way – my immediate reaction was “couldn’t it have been something from Ja Rule, instead?” Don’t get me wrong, though: Lil Jon is awesome. WHAT?!
29. The price of a gallon of regular gas in New Jersey the week of my 20th birthday was $1.57. Last month, it was $3.52. From a global perspective, gasoline in the United States remains inexpensive, though it’s hard to swallow a commodity tripling in price over the course of ten years and somehow remaining inexpensive. (Also, lost in this analysis is the constant fact that New Jersey has some of the cheapest fuel in the United States, due to our proximity to oil refineries and a lack of state taxes on the product.) I distinctly remember being pissed off because gasoline went from $1.39 to $1.69, back when I was in college, because that 30 cents a gallon meant an additional $5 to fuel up – which was worth a pack of cigarettes, and I was both a cigarette smoker and broke back in those days.
28. Focusing on the Billboard Alternative Music Charts, the #1 song the week I turned 20 was “So Far Away” by Staind. I’d complain about Stained being awful, too, and I’d mostly be correct, but it beats the absolute shit out of the #1 song the week I write this (“Royals,” by Lorde, an artist who continually proves that teenage girls are annoying as shit in every possible instantiation). It’s weird to me that Billboard still ranks alternative rock songs, because alternative music (as you and I remember it) no longer really exists. It’s changed from guitar-based grunge and pop-punk music to dancey synth-pop, largely produced by artists outside the United States. It’s no different from the type of electronic club music played at ecstacy-laden discotheques in Germany. I’m not sure that there’s any value in Billboard continuing to compare apples to oranges – Lorde does not know how to play any instruments, while Staind was an actual band but had a bit of a whining problem. Neither are really “alternative rock,” and I wonder if the 1996 version of the Foo Fighters – if they magically came into existence and our collective psyches this week – would even crack the top 10 of this chart.
27. A few words about this blog you are reading this evening, which I just realized contains a written record lasting over five years of my twenties. It’s always been a lot of fun to write here, even when life got in the way and I couldn’t produce content as often as I should. There remains an open invitation for my friends, who started this space with me back in the summer of 2008 (and hopefully remember their Blogger passwords), to continue to post here – though Damaged, Inc. has largely become a personal venture over the last few years, it’s always great when my friends post here, as well. It’s also interesting to read how both my content and my voice have changed over the years. What was originally a space for juvenile bitching about life, graduate school, and when-can-I-grow-up matters of this ilk has evolved into a place where I can really post what’s on my mind and expect to hear from people (more often on my Facebook posts regarding the post than in the comments here, but that’s fine, too).
26. And as my twenties proceeded, I was fortunate to mostly stay in shape, but I did lose a bit of hair from my temples. This happens to most – but not all – gentlemen as they proceed from age 20 to age 30. I’m more graceful about it now than I was at age 23, when I started to lose my first bit of hair – I reacted to it by purchasing a high-end male pattern baldness-fighting shampoo called Nioxin, which I still use on occasion (I’m using it now, only because I ran out of my typical cheap shit). I also succumbed to some pretty awful haircuts, because I had no clue how to handle the varying lengths of hair I was confronted with – do I grow long what I have, like Saints QB Drew Brees? Or cut my hair shorter? With reasonable certainty, I can predict that I will continue to lose my hair and one day I’ll be faced with the inevitability of picking up a Bic razor and going full-on Heisenberg with my former ‘do. But until then, I feel like a dude should treat whatever hair he has like a gift, so I’m going to continue to take care of it with Nioxin (which sounds like a performance-enhancing drug, but whatever).
25. Speaking of staying in shape, it amazes me how many dudes my age report being in awful shape – like the kind of shape where serious time is required to get out of bed in the morning. I can hop from laying on my back on the couch to a standing position in one movement, without holding onto anything for support. I would qualify the above statement with the adverb “still,” but I’m not sure I could ever do anything like this when I was 20. At age 20, I was a pretty unhealthy person (most people are at that age, unless they’re college athletes or just plain weird). But at age 30, I’m in much better shape – a reasonable weight, with half-marathon caliber endurance and overall a fine level of fitness. Doing this just sort of happened organically for me; I never really got injured, so it’s been difficult to take more than a week off from working out. It keeps me sane and focused, and I can only help to keep it going throughout my thirties.
24. To me, technology in the fall of 2003 was Facebook and my iPod (I was an early adopter, OK?), eBay and AIM. I distinctly recall still watching movies on VHS back then. That was pretty much what you had, especially when you were a broke college student. I won’t drone on about how things have changed technology-wise, except to say its amazing how interconnected we’ve become – and how dependent we’ve become – on technology. It’s hard for me to spend an hour away from my smartphone, these days.
23. The
New York Yankees, dominant throughout my youth, were pretty damn good in my
twenties. As you grow up, you care about
baseball less and you care about it differently as other issues (work, women,
school, etc.) get in the way, and as you begin to compartmentalize being a
professional sports fan because you start to realize how fallible professional
athletes actually are. I was not quite
20 when Aaron Boone hit his walk-off home run against the Boston Red Sox in the
2003 American League Championship Series; I was exactly 21 years old when the
Red Sox came back from a three games to none deficit the following year to
shock the Yankees. And I remember exactly
where I was – at Old Bay in New Brunswick, NJ, celebrating a friend’s Ph.D.
defense – when the Yankees beat Pedro Martinez and the Phillies in the 2009
World Series. So that thing I said
before about not caring as much about baseball as you get older? Forget about it. I still pay close attention, which is nice.22. It’s cool that, at nearly age 30, my idea of an attractive woman is completely different from when it was when I was 20. When I was 20, it was all about COLLEGE!!! – by which I mean, getting drunk and (hopefully) getting laid. Now, it’s about a woman’s intelligence and presence, in addition to being attractive. Thankfully I found my awesome wife this decade, who has all of the above qualities.
21. And speaking of discovering good taste, I’m glad I developed good taste in beer this decade. Life’s too short to drink shitty beer, and I’ve pretty much always been partial to the good stuff. Over the last three years, I’ve even been homebrewing some really good beer. What’s nice about having a full-time job and a career worth having is that I am able to afford good beer, whether it’s something I purchase at the store or something I craft myself. Beer is something to be crafted, and something to be enjoyed – it’s only rarely (but still sometimes), something to be chugged.
Mini-posts #20-#11 to follow, some time next week!
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