Aural Intensity

They say that scent is the sense most strongly related to memory. Hmm, I don't know. I have a decent sense of smell--I can sniff out a boxwood tree from a mile away because they're so putrid and vile--but I have never once gotten a whiff of something, pleasant or otherwise, and been mentally transported back to some other time and place.

For me, this proverbial trip down memory lane comes with music. When I hear certain songs, I am instantly brought back to a time and place from the days of yore. (At 32, am I allowed to call something 'yore'? I wonder.) I used to chaperone dances at GV, and the DJ would invariably play some "old school" songs to break up the monotony of the current hip-hop and top 40. When those songs came on, I would, without fail, turn to a colleague standing next to me on Grind Patrol and say "this song came out when I was [insert age or grade here]!" The next Monday in class, I might tease my seniors about grinding to music that they played at my middle school dances. (Ok, so I wasn't actually allowed to go to middle school dances, but they don't know that.) Although I probably wouldn't bat a thousand, I can with some degree of certainty tell you what year and maybe season a song came out if I have an emotional tie to it like that.

Of course, a lot of these songs (some of which are not good songs, mind you) for one reason or another, remind me of guys I dated. I can't hear "Shoop" without thinking of High School Boyfriend 1, who bought me Salt N Pepa's album Very Necessary and a bottle of Clinique's Sunflowers perfume as a little present that he gave me in the parking lot of my high school one day when he came to surprise me after school. HSBF2 and I used to play guitar and sing, and one of our favorites was "Give a Little Bit" by Supertramp. "Mo' Money" was a popular song my freshman year of college, and I remember spending Friday nights at Sig Ep dance parties with CBF1 and our friends; I can also remember-sadly-where I was when the Backstreet Boys' video to "Larger Than Life" debuted on MTV, because he and I were sitting in the Hard Rock Cafe in Tel Aviv. CBF2 sang in the coed a cappella group and had "Be With You" as his solo, and my senior year, my a cappella solo was Alanis Morrisette's "You Already Won Me Over," which I sang to my then-boyfriend, CBF3. Several months later, he came to visit me in California, and when I picked him up from the airport and turned on the car, it was playing on the radio. RWBF1 made me this fantastic mixed CD as a gift, and songs like "Bonnie and Clyde" by Jay-Z and "Born Too Late" by a little indie band from Pittsburgh take me back to my first year of teaching and living on my own in Philly, dating a guy across the bridge in NJ. Nickelback's pathetic-attempt-at-satire "Rock Star" always makes me smile, because STBEH and I used to sing it in the car; there's a line about quesadillas, and getting takeout from Chipotle was never the same.

Lest you think me nothing but boy crazy, not every song-memory I have is romantically linked. PDiddy's remix of Sting's "I'll be Watching You" brings me back to the summer after I graduated high school, driving around town with Brittany; "California Love" by the late Tupac is a favorite for me and Kristen, because nearly every time we'd have an impromptu sleepover in her basement, we'd fall asleep watching MTV and wake up to that video playing at some ridiculous hour of the night. Back in 7th grade, Kristi and I taped--yes, taped--"Jump Around" from the radio and painstakingly did the play-pause-play-pause game in order to write down the lyrics so we could learn them all. (Seriously, tapes?) My volleyball team made several warm-up mixes that we played before games, and countless songs remind me of the nerves I felt before every match, coupled with the absolute joy of getting to know 20+ kids in that capacity. I even remember which Christina Aquilera song one of my Philly kids choreographed for their dance show, and how shocked--I mean, cartoon eyeballs bugging out of my head shocked--I was when one of my favorite female students got on stage as a dead-ringer for the pop star.

Music ties us to a time and place, even if sometimes it's seemingly meaningless (can you hear "What is Love?" without doing the head nod? Doubt it.) Books may allow us to escape into another world, but music brings us back to portions of our own worlds. At this very moment, I'm on the couch, snuggling with my favorite pup, watching a VH1 90s one-hit-wonder retrospective, reliving all of the memories--painful, joyful or otherwise--from middle school, high school and parts of college. And it never stops--years from now, I'll look back on this time in my life, and think fondly about the significance of "Bust Your Windows" and "Sunday Kind of Love." There are songs that don't exist yet that will make me think of people I haven't met yet.

Nietzsche said that without music, life would be a mistake. I say, all of our mistakes come with music.

And for some, the mistake is the music. But enough about Vanilla Ice.

I do know what I don't know...

This week's episode of How I Met your Mother featured a subplot about gaps in knowledge--things that "everyone knows" that you are horribly unaware of, mislead to believe or unable to do. On the show, some of the gaps included not knowing how to use a screwdriver/tools, believing the North Pole to be only a fictional place, and pronouncing the word chameleon 'cham-eh-LEE-on', as well as the inability to wink. A friend of mine and I had an email exchange about whether "skills" and "knowledge" should be categorized under the same heading, but for now, we'll go with it.

This got me thinking to what glaring holes exist in my information base.

• In third grade, I was convinced that a thesaurus was a book about dinosaurs. I mean, right?
• Also in elementary school, I didn't get why the word "hump" was funny. I've mentioned this before. (As well as the fact that as a senior I thought 'doggystyle' meant anal. Oy.)
• Until 2002, I had zero clue what a "down" in football meant. Or why having four was worse than having one. I mean--wouldn't four be better? But no, fourth down is apparently a bad thing, I now understand. I also now get why on earth you might punt v. attempt a field goal, pass v. throw in a give situation, etc. Again, I don't get the finely tuned nuances of the game, but I get the bigger points.
• That said, I am aware of the fact that the rules are different for college, but don't know them. And despite being currently enrolled at a Big 10 football school--albeit one dealing with a huge scandal--and having lived in a state that worships a coach, I don't care.
• I can't drive stick. A couple of people (specifically, three exes) have tried to teach me, but it usually ends up as a very tense situation in a parking lot. Perhaps my error is attempting to learn a skill that could do major damage to a vehicle while sitting next to a person in a position to get mad at me and have it carry over into other aspects of my life. Yes, that must be it.
  
• I can't do the butterfly stroke. Not many people can, I guess, but I spent one season "swimming" (aka, floundering around in the pool after school and being totally useless during meets) and feel like I should have the ability to at least fake it. Oh, who am I kidding? I can barely do a flipturn without freaking out.
  
• Geography. Just, like, all of geography. In eighth grade, my social studies teacher asked me to point out England on a map; I couldn't do it. These days I can handle America and Europe, mostly, but Asia and Africa? Forget it. Most of Central and South America give me pause, too, except places like Chile (on the bottom!) and Brazil (the big one on the right!). Just the other day I looked at a map before starting a book about Afghanistan and said, "huh--so that's where China is." Eegads, this is embarrassing.
  
• I have never seen any of the Star Wars movies, Back to the Future, The Princess Bride, and a few other classics.

We all have bits that somehow escaped us or that we were horribly misinformed about. The aforementioned email friend admitted that he thought Novicaine was a spray until he was eighteen, because at a cavity-ridden age five he clamped his mouth shut, and in a moment of desperation the dentist lied. Another friend had never heard of TurboTax--doing your taxes online? What? In the 21st century? Preposterous. My mom lacks the entire "how to operate computers and/or the Internet" filing cabinet in her brain.

We also all know weird things that our spongy brains sopped up somehow, like whether Bruce Wayne's grandfather went to Princeton or Yale, the location of the seven pressure points (my mom made me memorize them--and their names--when I was little), the Presidents in order (again, I didn't learn that song, dammit!), or every word to "Ice, Ice, Baby."

Seriously--every time I go out dancing, I sort of disgust myself with the fact that, if held at gunpoint, I'd have a better chance of living if I had to sing "Baby Got Back" than name the capitals of most foreign countries. Awesome.

Went a little like that...

Have you heard that ridiculous song by the even more ridiculously named group 3oh!3 called "My First Kiss"? Well, since it features Ke$ha, it's pretty terrible. (Yes, I know that I have mentioned before that I actually like her songs; I can like them without thinking they're good. I understand this is confusing. ) The chorus goes something like:

My first kiss went a little like this
And twist
And twist

These lyrics are dumb, of course, but seem to imply that first kisses go like "this"--aka, wow--and I think the "twist" part means, well. I don't know. But the entirety of the song seems to indicate that this first kiss will be spectacular and she won't be able to resist him as a result.

Really? Because I think for most of us, our first kiss went a little like that. And by that, I mean....it sucked. Mine was in 6th grade during recess surrounded by an audience of my peers. It was sloppy and gross--I felt like I was getting slobbered on by a dog who was trying to consume my face. I am sure that he felt the same way. This boy was my "boyfriend" for many months in middle school--almost a year, I think--and I don't think it got better. I mean, who knows how to kiss when you're 12? And you can't communicate about it when you're 12, either. So you endure sucky kissing. Eventually, I figured out how I like to kiss and be kissed. (Practice makes better, I suppose.) And I would like to think that, at nearly 32, I could communicate this, either by "showing" or "telling," to the person whose tongue had just been in my mouth. (I don't mean to sound cynical or unromantic, but isn't it just a little weird that one of our mating rituals involves swirling your tongue around with someone else's tongue? Don't get me wrong--I like it; it's just a little bizarre if you try to intellectualize it.)

I am sure we all have some horrendous first kiss stories, but I'm also sure we all have some wonderful first kiss stories, too. I was a bit of an, ahem, make out whore in my day, so I had a lot of first kisses that were also only-time kisses. Some were great; others were, well, eh. Or worse, icky. Some I have no recollection of, naturally; some were just bland, and then some others...

What is more important, I think, is the first kiss you have with someone with whom you are considering a potential partnership. My first college boyfriend and I drunkenly made out after a frat party during freshman orientation weekend and went on to date for almost two years. The next college boyfriend was the exact opposite: at the end of our first date, he leaned in gently to kiss me on the cheek in the doorway of my dorm room. The third installment of the college boyfriend trilogy...nope. No recollection, though I do remember some of the one-and-onlies in between. My main young adulthood boyfriend and I dated for nearly two years, and I don't know what our first kiss was like, either, though I vaguely recall it happening at my apartment after we put together some Ikea furniture. My soon-to-be ex-husband kissed me to make me stop talking; I guess he was trying to be smoother than that, but I kept blathering on and on...

Some first kisses are sweet and nice and nervous, and you have to sort of grow into it together. Others are passionate and urgent--often fueled by alcohol, though not always. Yet others start as one and build into the other. Sometimes, it's totally obvious from initial contact that you are just not going to be compatible, and other times....well. I think we all know you can tell a lot from "just" a kiss. And the subtle nuances of the mechanics of the act itself can be stressful: which way to tilt your head, where to put your arms/hands, did I eat something weird, how long to hold on., what if we bump teeth, etc. these are the little details that angsty teenage diaries are filled with.

There is a lot at stake for the person who "goes in" first--what if you've completely misread the situation and kissing is not on the table? Ouch. (In the movie Hitch, the title character says to only go in 90% and let the other person take care of the remaining 10%.) But that's not always possible--one of the best, if not the best, first kiss I ever had was a total risk on my part, and I had to be stealthy about it. He was/is much taller than I am, and I wanted it to be a surprise, so I had to wait until I didn't have to do that awkward I'm-much-shorter-than-you-but-am-trying-to-kiss-you upward neck strain; we were in a bookstore arguing about Vonnegut (me: anti, him: pro), and when he sat down in a chair I sprang it on him, certainly breaking Hitch's 90-10 rule. Later that same day, we had a scene-from-a-movie nearly perfect kissing session in the rain that he initiated. These are moments that deserve far better than an awful pop song featuring singers with punctuation marks in their names.

There is a Dentyne commercial that claims the average person has 28 first kisses. I guess all we can hope for is that more of them go like this than like that.