Tower Records, Tacoma Washington, 1978

That book above the No Smoking sign was the ONLY way to find out who sang a certain song or figure out the name of a song from the first line unless you walked around asking everyone you met if they knew the song or had the album liner notes in front of you.

The books were actually pretty hard to find in most record shops. When I was in high school we had to road trip an hour away to find a shop that had one. We would go in with notebooks full of random song lyrics and take physical notes to bring back to other people.

History can be fun and not depressing.

My senior year of high school was in the mid 1980s. I spent much of the school year working an after-school job at a stereo shop that sold CDs, the then-new technology for music. The CDs, which were still mostly classical, were there mostly as accessories for the expensive CD players. And of course, they had a Phonolog.

Teenaged girls were not expected to sell stereos, just ring up CDs. I didn't have a huge lot of work to do except for one time-consuming job: updating the Phonolog with the new pages for all the new albums released each week.

Imma need y'all raw doggers to tell me what your prescriptions are. My right eye is significantly worse than my left so it's disorienting to have one eye be half assed and the other eye assless. Do y'all have even, half assed eyes? Or quarter ass eyes? Do your eyes share ass amounts?!

I started out super near sighted, but had cataract surgery a few years ago and now I have one super near-sighted eye and one pretty near-sighted eye. The thing is, the eye that got corrected as part of the cataract surgery used to be the eye with the stronger prescription.

It was extremely weird to live as an adult through a time when my brain rewired itself to switch which was the detail eye vs the range-finder/depth eye.

I still don't want to do computer stuff without glasses (phone is fine if I hold it close) and I certainly don't want to drive, but I can shower and wander around my own house all right even with the wildly different prescriptions. The worst thing that happens is the detail eye tires out faster if I don't put my glasses on.

So since it was my anniversary yesterday I'm going to talk about how this happened to me. My spouse was my college boyfriend's study buddy's boyfriend's BFF (so moved in the same circles) but we were only vaguely acquainted in college. We used to hang out at the same local pub, which played a lot of live Celtic music. We know that at one show, where there were 20 people, I was there with my ex and spouse was there with the woman he was dating.

Spouse became the merch guy and sound engineer for one of the bands we both liked. We know that I bought a CD from him at one gig because I bought the CD and he was the only one selling them, so we like to joke that the first thing I said to him was "I'd like a CD, please" and the first thing he said to me was "$15, please".

There's also a hilarious/awful story about the dude who was trying to get me to fall in love with him while I was splitting from my ex that spouse plays a minor role in. We didn't meet each other at that show, but it was another case of "we have all the mutual friends" even though we didn't know each other.

We officially "met" at a D&D game more than 10 years after we started college; I'd been married and divorced; he'd been through several relationships. I'm really glad we met when we did because we were ready for each other in our late 20s and probably would not have been in college.

Yesterday (April 1) was our 24th anniversary and we're still very happy together.

i love how theres no rules for pronouncing words in English, you literally just have to learn and hear someone say every single word

if anyone is wondering why this is, it's because they stopped teaching American children (and many British) the rules (which exist, and have been standardized and written down for centuries) sometime at the turn of the 21st century. if you are gen x or older, have English degree-holding parents, and/or had any really old teachers who were still teaching into the "fuck grammar" era of public schooling, you unlock a special level of English comprehension where you can pronounce 99% of words perfectly without ever hearing them at all, as well as the ability to code switch to a higher-"class" dialect of English at will, which is extremely important for any social interaction where you have to deal with people who are judging you for such a thing, which happens a lot more often than you're aware of unless someone has already told you about it. usually no one tells you about it unless they're teaching it.

there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a "de-snobbification" of english education where everyone's regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don't think it's their job to fix your high school teacher's fuckups. (it is, but that's a different post)

this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn't before

this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about "vibes based literacy".

anyway the lesson here is every time the education establishment announces they are about to make education "less formal" and that this will benefit "everyone", because hooray we all thought learning cursive and sentence diagramming and Greek word roots was boring, right? what they are actually announcing is that you will still be judged for not being able to use those formal skills, but now only rich people will be able to learn them from tutors as basic education becomes increasingly privatized.

specifically on the topic of pronouncing words, a conlang nerd sat down and brute-force compiled a numbered list of rules for correctly pronouncing english words that gets it right for nearly every word 23 years ago (the date explains why his phonetic transcription is so weird, sorry)

The U.S. public school system has a genuinely weird hatred for grammar. I went through secondary school in the ‘00s, and we got extremely minimal grammar instruction paired with a lot of comments like “y’all are so lucky i’m not having you diagram sentences, i had to do that in school and it was just the worst.” In college I did learn how to diagram sentences, and not only is it not nearly as unpleasant as I was led to believe, it’s actually really helpful in understanding how sentences are structured.

Later, when I spent a year teaching 11th and 12th grade English, I eventually broke out the sentence diagrams because it was clear most of my students had no understanding of sentence structure and it was screwing up their writing. (The most pervasive problem was subject-verb agreement, because they couldn’t identify which nouns were supposed to go with which verbs: they had a habit of writing things like “the rooms of the house is” or “the tree full of apples are” because they made their verbs agree with whatever noun was closest and didn’t get why that would not always be correct.)

And, sure, it’s a valuable thing to normalize dialects of English. The idea that one dialect is “proper” English and all the others are somehow wrong is not only classist and racist, but it’s just bullshit, linguistically speaking. However, code-switching into formal English is nevertheless a valuable skill — even if we don’t teach grammar in schools, your potential employers will still judge you for it — so you should learn the rules.

When I teach Introductory English to college freshmen, I generally split the difference: I tell them that I’m not going to take points off for grammar, but I will make comments on their paper pointing out where their writing differs from Standard American English. And we have multiple readings & discussions about dialect and the fact that no dialect is inherently more “correct” than any other — which, I’d like to point out, I never got in high school, despite the ostensible de-snobbification. The impression I got instead as a teenager was, “there is a single correct version of English, we just refuse to teach it to you because it’s boring.”

I am still skeptical about the assertion I often see that not teaching students to write cursive means they won’t know how to read cursive — those are two different skills. I knew how to read cursive in kindergarten, because I had a picture book where the words were printed in a cursive font, and I figured it out. It’s not hard; most of the letters look pretty much the same. I got some minimal instruction in how to write cursive in second grade, but I was never very good at it and I couldn’t do it now.* Still read it fine, though. I don’t really see that reading cursive is a skill distinct from reading, say, messy handwriting or unusual typefaces.

*Anecdote: During my last year of high school, we were sitting down to take a standardized test of some sort, I forget which, and there was a bit at the beginning where we were required to copy out some kind of academic integrity statement — in retrospect, very silly — but the instructions very firmly said we couldn’t write it “in print”. Hands went up. We asked the proctor if this meant we had to write it in cursive. “Yes, that’s right,” they said. We had to explain that none of us had written so much as a word of cursive for about a decade and didn’t remember how. So the proctor wrote out the statement in cursive on the whiteboard and we all laboriously copied it down, which i’m pretty sure was not the intention. That is, to this day, the only time I have written cursive since the turn of the millennium.

I'm Gen X and I went to private schools, not because of religion but because the public schools in my area weren't great even in the early 1970s according to my parents. I learned to diagram sentences in the fifth grade. It's not that difficult when you're in learning mode already.

I know this is the most 28 year old thing I could possibly say but what if I have actually experienced everything and run out chances in life???? Think about it. Think about it. It’s three am and this is very reasonable.

ok but if you talk to older adults (and I have spoken with a bunch of senior citizens about this) one thing you will hear a lot is that, barring unexpected tragedy, life happiness tends to increase steadily from your teens through to your 60s. The decades I’ve consistently heard described as the ones where people made the most “progress” are usually their 40s and 50s–when they’re older, more financially stable, and have had time to figure out who they are and make progress on life goals.

A lot of people I’ve spoken to don’t describe being really “happy” or “comfortable” with themselves until their 30s or 40s. The impression I get is that so very many of us spend our 20s recovering and soul-searching–that is, investing in our future wellbeing in quiet, less visible ways. Especially nowadays, major life milestones don’t tend to happen so often in our 20s–and that’s okay.

Building a career, owning a home, starting a family, and in general just figuring out a “life plan”–the average age for all of these things is on the rise. And again, that’s not a bad thing. Some of the biggest regrets I’ve heard older folks share were about committing too soon (to the wrong job, the wrong relationship, the wrong town, the wrong lifestyle) and wasting too many years “stuck” and unable to leave.

Plus, the definition of success is changing–many young people will be happier taking less conventional paths in life, and for the most part we have more freedom to do so. But that can leave us feeling insecure, since it requires inventing our own milestone markers. Many of us have no idea where we’re going to be in 10, 15 years–and that is less and less of a problem. Changing careers (multiple times even), entering new relationships, moving towns, living abroad, making major life changes at any age–all of that is getting more and more common.

My point is: you never run out of chances. There are always unexpected opportunities waiting for you around a corner. And success and happiness accumulate over time. Being older is not a disadvantage–you have had more time to accumulate. Right now, what you’ve accomplished might not seem valuable, because it hasn’t yet translated to the more visible rewards you will earn later in life. But I promise the knowledge and personal growth you have gained in your 20s is an investment and an achievement as real as any other, and it will pay off in time.

TL;DR You are enough. You are doing enough. Give yourself permission to take your time.

I'm 56 and hoping that the cancer surgery I just had means I'll beat cancer without chemo or radiation. I feel like I'm about to start life all over again but with all the knowledge and experience I lived through in my 20s and 30s and 40s. It's not too late to re-start and everything you're doing now will lead to that happier, better, future adult life.

(pretend you have other vacation options as well)

pls reblog for sample size etc

follow for more occasional useless polls :)

Needs an option for "I used to but not anymore."

My family are big cruise fans. When we (I'm a triplet) graduated from high school, my grandparents took us on a Caribbean cruise. I had a wonderful time. It was the first time in my life I was ever drunk and it happened doing suicide shots at a Margaritaville in Jamaica.

I went again in my twenties on another big family for my grandparent's 50th wedding anniversary. My brother-in-law proposed to my sister on the beach during that trip. His parents even flew down to the island that was our stop that day so they could be there for the big moment along with about 20 members of my family.

I would recommend cruising. One price, lots of destinations, no worries, minimal planning. And then something happened. I got to an age where you're not taking family vacations anymore. Instead, you book your own trips.

I went to New York and Philadelphia and Atlanta and Baltimore and to New York again. I even went all the way to Sydney, Australia. As I started seeing more of my country, I realized a few things.

Number one: while my family may not believe it's not a vacation without surf and sand, I am not a beach girl. I burn easy, tend to overheat quickly, and don't particularly enjoy swimming. Nor is ocean swimming great for my mobility issues. A wave once knocked me down in the surf and I couldn't stand back up. My brother-in-law had to come rescue me before something bad happened.

Number two: cruising is a way to visit lots of destinations and experience none of them. Most of your time is spent on a floating petri dish with all the charm of a shopping mall. The few hours in port funnel you to a handful of easy tourist trap activities. Preferably on a branded excursion from the cruise company. There's no sense of place or culture or new experience. It's just a different beach accessed from what is essentially America, but on a boat.

Travel, in its best form, changes you. Seeing new places, new experiences, new people expand your worldview. It helps empathy take root in your soul. I'm happy to ride the public transit in a new city, see art, get a sense of the place where I am.

If I ever cruise again, it will only be to Alaska, because that's not a trip I can easily manage and arrange. But would I recommend cruising as a way to travel today? No. No I would not. I'll take my time the slow way, spending days at a destination instead of hours, and see how my soul feels when it wakes up to a new view.

I went on what I think of as an ideal cruise when I was a teenager in the 1980s. I was also one of about five people under 40 on this cruise, so I have weird taste and I'm OK with that.

This cruise went around the eastern part of the Mediterranean, starting in Greece and covering things like Delphi and Santorini as well as Ephesus and Troy in Türkiye. Every night after dinner we'd get a lecture from university professors (from English universities, because this was an English cruise line) about whatever the shore excursion was going to be the next day. I was one of those kids who read Edith Hamilton's Mythology at a formative age and here I was, not even out of high school, seeing the places that those myths and legends happened/came from with a university professor of classics as our guide. It was amazing and I'm aware of the good fortune that I had being able to be on this cruise.

Looking up the history of the cruise line (Swan Hellenic), I realize my parents must have gotten a berth on one of the last of these cruises before they were sold, which makes me even more grateful for the chance to enjoy such an amazing trip for a classics nerd.

I would enjoy a trip like that with friends very much if we could do it safely, but modern cruising otherwise has little to no interest for me.

Spouse and I ran across these guys one year when they were busking at SXSW. We were living in Austin and had the local's wristband, which is cheap and will get you into most of the small shows free. David Byrne was one of the marquee names at that year's SXSW, and he also saw them and was so impressed that he asked them to his personally curated stage at Bonnaroo that year.

We went to see them that Sunday at the end of the conference at a restaurant/live music venue near downtown (RIP Threadgills) and I was interviewed for Norwegian TV, which was documenting what Katzenjammer was up to at SXSW.

They put out three albums and have since broken up, but they were a super fun band.

For a while in my life I legitimately considered moving to Germany. There’s multiple reasons I inevitably ended up staying in the US but one of the big ones was that one time when I was in Germany and wanted some salsa the closest thing I could find was basically just tomato sauce.

You crave a burrito. You ask your aunt, hey. Can we make burritos? And she says, sure. But we can’t use tortillas. They don’t sell those here. And you learn to your horror that she plans to use flatbread. Which she insists is basically the same thing as a tortilla. It is not. It’s not. It’s adequate but good lord it’s not a tortilla.

There’s the near impossibility of dual citizenship, the pay toilets, my difficulty with the language, being really far away from most of my family, the difficulty of finding a job as a foreigner, the lack of diversity especially in rural areas. But also in there. Is buying a bottle of supposedly habanero “hot” sauce and it being so mild that I could drink it.

I know how to make tortillas, guys. Perhaps also read the rest of the post. With a lighthearted tone, preferably.

You have my deepest condolences.

Okay so I’m American and I live in Scotland and let me tell you about this fucking abomination:

I once found corn tortillas in a Sainsbury’s. Oho, you may think, that’s a lovely find! But no, my friend. These were flour tortillas… with cooked corn rolled into them. Individual kernels. Like one may find blueberries in a pancake.

I still see red when I think about it.

I have… no words. Beyond stunned.

In honor of my tags passing peer review, i would like to inform everyone that when i make quesadillas my german gf dips them in mayo

When I was in Ireland I distinctly remember seeing a commercial for "extra mild" salsa. I still don't know what that even means. Just chopped tomato and onion in a jar? My friends and I had to have pickled jalapenos shipped in. It was hell

In Bavaria I once encountered "chili con carne" which was offered to me on the grounds that hey! You're from Texas, you'll like this.

It was fine, in that it tasted good and if you'd just told me it was a stew made with ground meat, no problem. But it had never been within a mile of anything spicier than black pepper and I seem to recall sweetcorn and cut green beans.

There is honestly quite a lot that I really like about Bavarian food, particularly their way with carbs, but to this day I when I think about that chili, I just shake my head and mutter "bless" under my breath.

Back in the early 80s, I lived with my family in North Yorkshire. This was a time when the only McDonald's in England, as far as we could tell, was in London. American food hadn't penetrated the British market yet.

Because we were near a USAF base, we could get stale Old El Paso taco shells, but to get beef ground to the proper consistency, we had to have the butcher grind it specially.

But the worst thing that claimed to be American that we ate in England was at a supposedly (Tex) Mexican place in London. The nachos were made on a quartered fried tortilla with Mozzarella cheese and an olive slice.

My father, who wasn't prone to swearing in front of me, said in sheer disgust, "That's not a nacho, that's a goddamned pizza!" It was also the last time in the years we lived there that we ate Tex-Mex that we didn't make.

As it happens your humble correspondent knows members of a probably-now-defunct a cappella group founded at the grad student pub at Rice University in Houston called the Lager Rhythms.

here’s the thing okay

pierced ears were considered taboo for most white American women roughly from 1920 to 1960

but they were totally okay and widespread among that demographic for centuries before the shift

so if you’re a mom in like 1930 and you’re trying to explain to Little Susie that ear-piercing is only for Harlots and/or Barbaric Foreigners, how do you handle the fact that there is a non-zero chance her grandmother has pierced ears?

I simply cannot believe that EVERY SINGLE LATE VICTWARDIAN W.A.S.P. WOMAN stopped wearing earrings and let her holes close later in life

this question keeps me up at night

I have to explain this ALL THE TIME to customers who want to know why I don’t have any pierced earrings from the 40s and 50s and it never stops being funny

I have some gorgeous earrings from the 20s that I bought in vintage shops when I was a teen/college age (in the 1980s) and I had to have all of them converted to hooks over the years. But I had a phobia of piercing so at first those vintage earrings were all I could wear.