Music for Aardvarks' Parents

A few weeks ago, when I was visiting my brother and his fiancee, they put in a CD that I liked. My first question was, "people still buy CDs?" My second question was, "Who is this, I need to buy it immediately?"

Anyway, about a week later I stumbled across the same album on iTunes, and I bought it and have been listening to it for a few days now. And while I like it a lot, mostly because it sounds kind of like what you might get if you took Lyle Lovett and David Grey and Nick Drake and put them all together in a washing machine, there was something that sort of bothered me about some of the music. So I started listening more closely to the lyrics. And I realized that a certain set of lyrics made me queasy:

Maybe we could sleep in
I'll make you banana pancakes
Pretend like it's the weekend now
And we could pretend it all the time
Can't you see that it's just raining
There ain't no need to go outside

So then I realized what I didn't like about the album. It's for people without kids. Because no one with kids sleeps in on the weekends and makes banana pancakes and all that that implies. My banana pancake days are over. Or at least, they're on hiatus for the next ten years or so.

I am, not surprisingly, a big fan of nonfiction in all aspects of my life. I like books that are about people who are at similar stages as I am in their lives. I like music about things that might happen in my life. And while I'm sure it's all very nice that Jack Johnson sits around eating banana pancakes on weekends, I don't want to hear about it. I want to hear songs about babies who can only roll over one way, or about parents who run out of formula in the middle of the night. I want songs about exersaucers. And if there are no songs about exersaucers, then I at least want to hear about Victor Vito and Freddie Vasco who ate a buritto with tabasco, they put it on their rice, they put it on their beans, they put it on their sweet potatoes and on their collard greens.

See what I'm saying?

I still listen to the CD, because I bought it, after all, and it's not Jack's fault that he doesn't have kids. Yet. But it made me realize that even though part of me feels like the old me, now that my clothes are starting to fit again and I'm able to get a human amount of sleep and I have returned to doing things like going to yoga and having dinner with friends, that I have been forever changed in more ways than I first imagined.

So over the weekend I told Steven the whole story about the CD and my theories on why I didn't want to hear about banana pancakes and how I had decided that maybe it was a bad purchase. Then I played him the CD.

"I don't think your not liking the CD has anything to do with banana pancakes," Steven said.

"It doesn't?"

"No. I think you don't like the CD because it sucks."

Thanks, sweetie.