the birthday project: lucky thirteen.

My thirteenth birthday fell on a Thursday in June of 1993. In celebration of what was, at the time, a colossally monumental day (OH MY GOD I AM A TEENAGER), my parents had a really embarrassing picture of me as a kid published in the Announcements section of the Hamilton Spectator. Some of my friends found it before school and had it blown up and taped to my locker when I got in. I had never felt so embarrassed and loved at the same time; it was an emotional combination platter that would become more familiar to me in the years ahead.

In some ways I was one of those kids who was always very mature for her age. In other ways, it was basically a miracle I didn't still drag my security blanket to school. Case in point: my thirteenth birthday was the first year I didn't ask my friends to come to my party in some sort of costume (dress for your dream vacation!) or under the pretense of some hyper-involved craft (plaster mask making! DESIGN YOUR OWN PIZZA!). Instead, we ordered pizza from Pizza Pizza, and then my parents dropped us off at the movies to watch Jurassic Park UNACCOMPANIED BY ADULTS.

I'm pretty sure Jurassic Park was rated PG-13, because I was concerned that one of my friends, who was still only twelve, might not be able to get in. The hype leading up to the release of that movie was unlike anything I'd ever experienced--for reasons that now seem silly, the whole damned universe was so incredibly excited to see realistic dinosaurs on the big screen. While I remember practically nothing about the movie itself (in spite of the fact that our family later bought it on VHS and my brother and I probably watched it twenty times), I do remember that feeling of being caught up in some kind of zeitgeist. Perhaps this was the beginning of my life as a pop culture vulture.

I think we lied to my parents about what time we needed to get picked up so we could just stand outside the movie theatre yelling at passers by for awhile. I felt alive then, suddenly careening toward independence, dizzily wondering if now that I was a teenager, a boy would pull his car over and ask if I wanted to go for a drive. Of course, no boys pulled up (no boy in his right mind would try and interrupt seven thirteen year old idiots on a sugar high in the Centre Mall parking lot), and my parents came to collect us just as it was getting dark outside.

A lot of things changed for me that summer. I stopped listening obsessively to Broadway musicals and started listening obsessively to Pearl Jam, Sloan, and AM 640, with its unique combination of Top-40 hits and late-night phone-in shows. I inherited my first pair of Doc Marten boots. I craved a maturity I hadn't earned yet. And sometimes late at night, alone in my bedroom, I began to feel the creepy, tiny stirrings of the sadness that would wash over me in the months to come, the sense of helplessness in my own body and my own brain that would colour the next few years of my life. But the night of my thirteenth birthday, I was still just straddling that precarious line between childhood and adolescence, screaming at the top of my lungs.

It's been a long long time.

A few years ago, I had this very sobering moment while listening to Weezer's Blue Album. It must have been around 2004, and the awful truth dawned on me that I'd been enjoying and dissecting that record for ten years. Holy shit, I thought, I am getting old.

Several years on, this same thing is happening more and more. And every time it does, I feel another little crow's foot bore its way into my face. I guess maybe it's a testament to my amazing taste in music that I listen to things that are relevant and poignant and touching even years after their release (notable exceptions: the Vengaboys, Aqua, and several others too embarrassing to list here, although I would posit that Aqua's Turn Back Time is in fact a very moving song). Yes. Let's go with that. But it's also probably a testament to how much I love going back to particular sonic memories. I've written about this before, but I'll say it again: aural nostalgia is the best kind.

So here is a list of the top five songs I've been emoting to for far too long and the embarrassingly ancient eras they evoke.

Happiness--Elliot Smith. The endless GO-Train rides of the summer of 2000.



Deathly--Aimee Mann. A bad breakup, a worse makeover, and a long trudge home in the snow from the movie theatre in 1999. Also, several months spent lying on the living room floor in Vancouver.



My Name is Jonas--Weezer. Approximately seven thousand house parties between 1994 and today.



Sloan--She Says What She Means. East Hamilton in the mid 90s was a pretty great place to be, until your parents found your secret stash of Absolut.

(I could probably include most of Sloan's catalog on this list. For a long time I felt like I was the hippest person in the universe because I owned a copy of Smeared on cassette.)

Autumn Sweater--Yo La Tengo. Makin' out, breakin' up, beach-walkin', sleep-walkin', you know, all the good stuff that seems pretty weird and shitty at the time. Ah, the halcyon days.




It should be noted that the main criterion for this list is that I first heard the music on or around the time it was released. I could write a whole other list for the oldies, and of course, Kodachrome would be number one, followed closely by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians. (Party Mix 4-eva!)