Wonderful and Amazing

Yesterday's post was snarky. I thought I would make up for it by showing you all that is wonderful and amazing in my life:

The Horrors of Facebook

I went to high school in a small town on the Olympic Peninsula. (Not Forks for all you Twilight fans) It was a very small private school. I got a really excellent education but I never did like small town life very well. All the people that became lasting friends from those years, moved out of that town almost as fast as I did.

Recently, on Facebook, several acquaintances from those years have sent me Friend Requests. And because I don't dislike them, I've added most of them as friends for the purposes of FB. Some of them have been posting pictures from my high school days. There are class pictures and other candid shots where I am tagged. It doesn't really bother me because I was pretty photogenic and slender in those days and I went in for more the Pat Benatar look as opposed to the gigantic hair look which was fortunate.

In a sick kind of way, it has been fun to reconnect with my old schoolmates and see what they are all up to now. Especially, since I have some pretty vivid memories of kids that grew up in that town saying how they were going to move away as soon as they could. Guess what? They didn't. I did. I am amazed at who is married with a bajillion (its a word, look it up) kids and who is STILL single. Some of their stories are hum drum, some are sad (like a classmate of my sister's with 8 children and her husband of 10 plus years walked out on her last year), some are mysterious and some are just plain strange.

Some of them have not been amused to be tagged in old photos for whatever reason. My problem has been that I simply don't remember some of the kids in my class photos. We are talking 30 people in the entire high school and I just don't remember them! It has only been 20 years since I graduated and yet I seem to have blocked out whole people from my memories. I hope that I was more memorable than they were.

The posted picture is from my senior year. We did a production of Little Women. I REALLY wanted to play Jo but I was working part time and couldn't spare enough time for rehearsals so the director said. She had me be Aunt March instead because she only had 2 scenes and they could "work" around me. So I am second from the end on the right in black. Some other time I will tell you the story of how I made that part so memorable that people still (!) remember me playing Aunt March and mention it whenever I see them. It just happened last year in fact.

The Unbearable Randomness of iPod

For Christmas, my husband suprised me with an iPod Nano. I had hankered after an iPod in kind of a vauge non-comittal way since they first came out. After I got my iPod, I wondered how I ever LIVED without it.

That being said, I do love my iPod but I loathe iTunes with a hate that I normally reserve for people who talk on their cell phones in restaurants. I can upload junk to my iPod no problem but I do not understand iTunes. I find it hard to use and frustrating and a little bit psycho too. I think I may eventually have to take a class in order to get it figured out. (By the way, I am pretty tech saavy to start with so don't go gettin' all up in my grill about how I need to learn to use a computer.)

Today, while doing a somewhat mindless job here at work, I popped my iPod in my pocket and put on my headphones. Since I wasn't sure what I wanted to listen to, I went to Music on the menu. Then I went to Songs on the sub menu and started at the beginning of the list. I have over 500 songs and the iPod puts them in hand-dandy alphabetical order. Here is what I got to hear this morning:

• The ABC Song from Sesame Street as played by the Boston Pops
• Ain't That Just Like A Dream by Tim McGraw
• Alberta (the MTV unplugged version) by Eric Clapton
• All Star by Smash Mouth (GUARANTEED to put a spring in your step)
• Always You by Sophie Zelmani
• America by Simon & Garfunkel
• Angel Band by The Stanley Brothers
• Angelia/Zooma Zooma by Louis Prima
• Animal House theme song from the movie soundtrack
• Annie's Song by John Denver
• Annie Laurie by The King's Singers
• Anon from CHANT as sung by Benedictine monks
• Anything Goes by Frank Sinatra

And the list goes on and on. I made it as far as Bein' Green (it isn't easy bein' green) also performed by the Boston Pops. The sheer goofiness of playing music this way kept me listening and laughing. I was never sure what song and artist I was going to hear next. My friend, JacQualine, was listening to her iPod too as we worked and at one point I turned to her and said, "Do you sometimes wonder why in the world you put a song on your iPod?" I had just listened to April in Paris as performed first by Ella & Louis and then by Frank and realized that I didn't really like the song no matter who sang it. She just nodded her head and laughed.