[You may have noticed that this post is exactly the opposite of disappearing from the internet, but the funny thing about it is that the result of making that resolution seems to be that I'm experiencing a flood of inspiration and tons of ideas for posts, which funnily enough are two things that had disappeared with the stress of everything that made me want to quit the internet for a little while in the first place. Funny old world, innit?]
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Something you may not know about me is that I’m disabled. I’m not in a wheelchair, and I don’t need to walk with a cane. I don’t own a seeing-eye dog. I don’t even own one of those nifty handicapped parking permits that extremely fat people sometimes get as some sort of backwards reward for not exercising, but my physical limitations are real enough. You see, I can’t sing. It is the great tragedy of my life so far.
I wasn’t going to play along this week* but on the way home from work on Tuesday night, this song came on the radio that I hadn’t heard in what seemed like forever, and suddenly I was back in the summer before sixth grade, sitting in my mom’s mini-van as she drove my sister and I to our first swim-meet of the season. We were listening to the American Top 40 with Casey Kasem, breathless with excitement mostly fueled by ice cream. It was inevitable that this song would be #1; it had been for weeks and weeks already, but there was still that chance, you know? That it might not be, and that we wouldn’t get to hear it playing in that spot of honor. I may never have been a crazy fan-girl where they were concerned, but Hanson’s “MMMBop” is one of the three songs that defined me in that awkward transition between being a kid and being a teenager.** We call people in this stage of life “tweens” these days, but that word was years from being spoken by anyone back when I was in its thrall. I suffered all the symptoms of tweenagedom without any of the accompanying benefits. I wasn’t cute, I had no sense of style, I had braces and the beginning of bad hair that would follow me until junior year of college, and my biggest thrill consisted of weekly trips to the library.
“MMMBop,” Hanson
