Gettin' Up There

Have you seen Jamie Lee Curtis lately? She was on a commercial for some yogurt/diet thing and she is old. I mean, not old per se, but more than middle-aged. Her hair is gray and her face is kind of wrinkly.



Also Patrick Swayze. He has a new show and is not looking good, though I guess he's also suffering from pancreatic cancer. But these are people that I knew, as it were, for most of my life. And now they are getting older.

Trading Places, in which Curtis plays a prostitute who helps Dan Aykroyd regain his wealth and stature, was a sort of holiday tradition in my house growing up. The movie came out before I was born, sure, but it’s set during the Christmas season and so it would (and still does) play every year on TV around that time. It’s as traditional as It’s a Wonderful Life for me. But now she’s getting old.

I know celebrities get old, of course, but the ones I grew up with (-ish) are just now starting to. Sure, Kurt Cobain is dead, and so is Biggie and Pac and Pimp C and Jay D, but they all died young and it was always kind of a surprise. Anyway, they lived large and, let’s be honest, no one expected those lifestyles to work out most of the time. There can only be so many Keith Richards. And I know Joey Ramone’s dead, and so is John Belushi and Joe Strummer and George Harrison, but those people were all before me. They were my holdovers from my parents’ generation, not from my own. Maybe Jamie Lee Curtis is, too, but it’s still weird to watch descend into senior-citizenery. What about when Macaulay Culkin goes? Won’t that be a trip?

Broken

The CD drive on my computer doesn’t work. I don’t know why, but for some reason over a year ago whenever a CD or DVD went in, it could not be detected and my computer wouldn’t play it. I could have had the problem fixed, I’m sure, but as it is it’s only a minor nuisance; enough so that I complain about it, but not enough to outweigh the imposition of going through the motions to find out what is wrong and pay to fix it. I have slowly grown accustomed to it.

It is not great though. I also cannot import CDs into my computer, so any new music that I receive has to be downloaded from the internet if I want to put it onto my iPod, my most common form of music playing. I like to listen to music most of the time, and it has been strained. I try to listen to records, since I reckon that if I am not playing music through my computer I might as well get as “organic” as can be. But records take a lot. My wax library isn’t nearly as large as my digital one, and I have to physically get up from whatever I am doing and flip the record over or change it out every 20 minutes. This is not the end of the world by any means, just a minor annoyance, as I said before, but it changes the way I interact with music. It’s not that I used to be passive and now am active, but instead that I have to literally engage with the product of the sound. I have to get up.