Anniversary Post

Earlier this month, my wife and I celebrated our eighth wedding anniversary.  Pretty cool.  We have a tendency not to do extravagant things for anniversaries.  We were in Missouri this year for a family thing, and we actually spent our anniversary with some friends from Kansas.  But I'm not writing this post about our wedding anniversary, I'm writing it about our dating anniversary.  As our friends and family know, we have been together for quite some time.  Quite a long time.  Practically half of our lives.  

We officially started dating in 1998.  We've been together for seventeen years, guys.  Seventeen years!  We were sophomores in high school.  We hung out with the same group of friends and that is how we got to know each other.  A side note, we went to elementary school together from second to fourth grade.  AND, my older sister watched my wife and her younger brother a few times when they were younger because they lived a block away from us.  Anyway, the first time we went out without a group of friends, we went to see Godzilla.  We were originally planning on seeing a different movie (the Big Hit maybe?), but it was gone so we got stuck seeing that horrible movie.  We had a friend who worked at the theater and I'm pretty sure he let us in for free.  It wasn't long after that, we started dating.   

Throughout high school and college, we went to our respective extended family things.  Get togethers, weddings, parties.  You name it, if we could convince our parents, we would go there together.  We got to know each others' family.  When we got engaged after college, we heard a lot of congratulations, but we also heard a lot of 'it's about time' type comments (jokingly) from our family.  We wanted to get out of college before getting married.  Just made sense to us.   

Despite being together for so long, we still find time to be ourselves.  Everyone knows that type of couple that can't be separated to do their own thing, right?  We do our best not to be that couple.  I'm sure we were like that in high school.  Do we do a ton of stuff together?  Yes.  But there are times when do our own thing.  I've gone to see a live show a couple of times because my wife didn't want to see it.  Would you rather do that or drag your partner to a thing that they didn't want to see? 

We went to the same college after high school.  That made that transitional part of life a little bit easier.  We got an apartment together for our sophomore year.  Since then, we have lived together.  That made the first years of marriage easy.  We had already lived together for years.  Pretty sure I have written about that in the past.  After college was the real world.  The rest is history.  We talk about how long we have been together, but it doesn't feel like it's been so long. 

The Power of Music

One great thing about the technological advances that we have seen in the past decade is the access.  Whether it is the ability to look something up in a manner of minutes to settle a debate or to check the weather for the city you are planning to visit, it is at the tips of your fingers.  It's all there if you want it to be.  Another wonderful thing, is digital music.  Instead of carrying a book of the one hundred or so CDs that you own (let's face it, everyone had one of these monsters in their car), you can carry all your music in your pocket on either your phone or iPod.

Instead of fumbling through the pages and pages trying to find the CD you want to listen to, you can scroll through and find it and play it.  You also have the ability to find musicians you didn't even know existed and fall in love with them.  If you want to have a good cry, Adele can be found.  If you want to rattle the windows in the car after a stressful day, Metallica is a click away.  If you want to great political music, Rage Against the Machine or the Fugees are around.  All you have to do is plug it in and go. 

 

Above is a screen shot from my phone of an album I bought when I was in college.  Now, there are a handful of people that I know that, if they read this, might scream happily at seeing this.  One thing that I find with ska and new punk is that if I come across it at the right time, it just makes me want to roll the windows down, drive fast, and not give two fucks about anything.  Other times, I hear a song come on and think 'Meh.' and skip it.  And some if it is so good.  Listen to Dropkick Murphys 'The Gauntlet' and tell me you don't want to kick some serious ass.  Some of it, not so much.  'We're Desperate' by Pennywise is the worst.  But it's fast, it's loud, it's vulgar, it's everything a college kid looks for in music, right?  There are tracks on this particular album that I didn't even put on the computer because I just didn't like them.  Another perk to the digital age.  Pre-skipping music you don't want to listen to.  Did this album change my life?  No.  Did it make me want to find out more about the bands?  Not really.  There were some bands that I already knew (Dropkick Murphys, NoFx, Bad Religion) and some I didn't (T(i)NC, Death by Stereo, Millencolin).  

The power that music has that allows you to forget about the world is wonderful.  I think back to the last scene in 'Dazed and Confused' when Mitch puts on his headphones, 'Slow Ride' starts to play and he just gets this big old grin on his face.  Whether it is just one song that you want to put on repeat for hours on end or an entire catalog from one band, music allows you to escape.  Music might not solve all your problems, but it allows us to forget about them.  Even if it is for just an hour. 

I will leave you with this gem that is on the album.  Enjoy!