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dragonlady7I have had an awful lot of beer this weekend. This is not really normal for me, anymore, though it surprises me to realize this. I have very much become a one-beer-with-dinner kinda girl, with one more if I'm feeling kuh-razy later, and then to bed. So Friday night when I had four beers and two (horrible) hard ciders I was rather surprised to awake dry-mouthed and tired but otherwise intact. Perhaps I should steer clear of hard liquor and stick to beer in my old age...
Last night I only had maybe three beers, so that wasn't so bad. I am dehydrated this morning, but more of my distress stems from having been up until 3.
Z's uncle has family visiting from Latvia. An older woman, a pair of 37-year-old twins, and a 20-year-old. Z's aunt asked if we'd take the 20-year-old out and do something fun with him one day, so we brought him down to the Music Is Art festival to see what was up.
He looked about 35, so we probably could have taken him to bars, but being an actual thirty-year-old myself-- and, I think, looking it-- who gets ID'd all the time, I just thought it wasn't worth chancing. So instead we got a twelve-pack of beers and came home once the festival was over.
The music at the festival was sort of so-so and not to my taste. I did laugh my ass off during the last band, though-- these young guys in tight jeans were jumping up and down and shrieking, and I turned to the friend we met there and said, "Doesn't this sound just like what the kids used to do when we were kids?"
"Pretty much, yeah," he answered.
Am I crazy in this? Have "the youth" just not done anything new since my early teenager hood? My suspicions were solidified when their last number of the night, the last song played at this festival, the song to end it all, was...
A cover of NoFX's "Linoleum", the first track off their Punk in Drublic album, released in 1994, purchased by me in about 2000.
Yeah.
Solidifying a theory I have, which is that the last time anything good or in any way different happened in music, it was 1994.
So is this something that is universal? As people get old like this, they start saying things like this? I had sort of thought it would go the other way, that I'd be like "Kids these days, I don't understand the music they listen to, it's so [adjective]," etc.
So anyway. Latvian distant relation-by-marriage, Kaspars, was six feet four and skinny, has excellent English, and informed us that Riga, Latvia's largest city, is a major tourist destination solely for its clubs and parties. There are whole classes of people who just show up to drink in Riga for their vacation week, or whatever.
He is a student at the technical university there, and is used to drinking beer, and has found it a hardship in the US to not be able to have beer all the time, because he's simply so accustomed to it. We went through 10 beers in a couple of hours-- 2 for Z, 3 for me, 5 for Kaspars, and he didn't seem to even notice them. We had some fascinating conversation, though, and I should find out his last name and find him on Facebook. (Well, he said he wasn't on Facebook yet, as there's a different site that everyone in Latvia uses, but as he's hoping to do a study abroad semester, he'll need to use Facebook because the rest of Europe does.)
Europeans have collections of languages. Kaspars' mother-tongue was Latvian, and most of his studies were conducted in Latvian (by governmental degree at least 70% of classes you take must be in Latvian-- a response to the large number of Russians living within the country who have never learned the language), but he said he spoke Russian a lot to his friends, and could think in it. Beyond that, English was tricky but not too difficult, but he really wanted to learn Italian because it was like poetry to listen to. Which I thought a fair assessment. I don't think in any foreign languages; I know bits of them, and can even conduct conversations, but even my best one, Spanish, I generally don't think in. Not entirely. There are too many vocabulary gaps.
Anyway. Food for thought. I am writing this to try and wake up so I can go to work. My back is killing me from standing around all day and then all evening-- I worked 9-5, and then we festivalled-- but I have a heating pad on it now... We'll see how today goes.
Last night I only had maybe three beers, so that wasn't so bad. I am dehydrated this morning, but more of my distress stems from having been up until 3.
Z's uncle has family visiting from Latvia. An older woman, a pair of 37-year-old twins, and a 20-year-old. Z's aunt asked if we'd take the 20-year-old out and do something fun with him one day, so we brought him down to the Music Is Art festival to see what was up.
He looked about 35, so we probably could have taken him to bars, but being an actual thirty-year-old myself-- and, I think, looking it-- who gets ID'd all the time, I just thought it wasn't worth chancing. So instead we got a twelve-pack of beers and came home once the festival was over.
The music at the festival was sort of so-so and not to my taste. I did laugh my ass off during the last band, though-- these young guys in tight jeans were jumping up and down and shrieking, and I turned to the friend we met there and said, "Doesn't this sound just like what the kids used to do when we were kids?"
"Pretty much, yeah," he answered.
Am I crazy in this? Have "the youth" just not done anything new since my early teenager hood? My suspicions were solidified when their last number of the night, the last song played at this festival, the song to end it all, was...
A cover of NoFX's "Linoleum", the first track off their Punk in Drublic album, released in 1994, purchased by me in about 2000.
Yeah.
Solidifying a theory I have, which is that the last time anything good or in any way different happened in music, it was 1994.
So is this something that is universal? As people get old like this, they start saying things like this? I had sort of thought it would go the other way, that I'd be like "Kids these days, I don't understand the music they listen to, it's so [adjective]," etc.
So anyway. Latvian distant relation-by-marriage, Kaspars, was six feet four and skinny, has excellent English, and informed us that Riga, Latvia's largest city, is a major tourist destination solely for its clubs and parties. There are whole classes of people who just show up to drink in Riga for their vacation week, or whatever.
He is a student at the technical university there, and is used to drinking beer, and has found it a hardship in the US to not be able to have beer all the time, because he's simply so accustomed to it. We went through 10 beers in a couple of hours-- 2 for Z, 3 for me, 5 for Kaspars, and he didn't seem to even notice them. We had some fascinating conversation, though, and I should find out his last name and find him on Facebook. (Well, he said he wasn't on Facebook yet, as there's a different site that everyone in Latvia uses, but as he's hoping to do a study abroad semester, he'll need to use Facebook because the rest of Europe does.)
Europeans have collections of languages. Kaspars' mother-tongue was Latvian, and most of his studies were conducted in Latvian (by governmental degree at least 70% of classes you take must be in Latvian-- a response to the large number of Russians living within the country who have never learned the language), but he said he spoke Russian a lot to his friends, and could think in it. Beyond that, English was tricky but not too difficult, but he really wanted to learn Italian because it was like poetry to listen to. Which I thought a fair assessment. I don't think in any foreign languages; I know bits of them, and can even conduct conversations, but even my best one, Spanish, I generally don't think in. Not entirely. There are too many vocabulary gaps.
Anyway. Food for thought. I am writing this to try and wake up so I can go to work. My back is killing me from standing around all day and then all evening-- I worked 9-5, and then we festivalled-- but I have a heating pad on it now... We'll see how today goes.
