Me with Assateague Ponies, the requisite bus length away.
Consuming: Lots of strawberry margaritas, t-shirts, sand, and sun on our beach road trip. We stayed at beach hotels of various types in Rehoboth, Delaware, Assateague, Maryland, Chincoteague, Virginia, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Cambridge, Maryland and Cape May, New Jersey ranging from chain hotels to a swanky golf resort to an old-fashioned place with a great view. We saw wild ponies, dolphins, lots of seabirds, deer by the side of the road, and I saw little fish and a snake in the water at Kitty Hawk. Almost no media. The only TV we watched was The Weather Channel (which convinced us not to go to South Carolina into a heat wave with rainstorms). I read only one book, Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins, which took me all week even though there was a lot of reading time–though to be fair I spent a fair amount of time just gazing at water. It’s tempting to reread Life After Life, to which this is a “companion piece”, but not that tempting since it’s equally long.
Producing: Nothing much for work, but part of the reason for this trip was to investigate places near beaches we might retire (in 20 years). I have learned about myself something I should have already known. I don’t want to be too far south and I don’t want to be where you have to go through miles of farmland and poverty to get to civilization. Chris doesn’t think living right by any beach is smart, and I agree that with global climate change most of the beaches we know about now may end up underwater, but if we go a little south of here to the mid-Atlantic states and pick something a few miles from a beach, we will be happier. I love Cape May, though the surrounding communities seemed kind of sad.
Grace from Nurse Jackie. Showtime.
Anticipating: Lots of work before the sabbatical officially starts. Now that Nurse Jackie is over I can finally finish the paper I’m giving about socially committed girls in TV dramas in Iceland in three weeks, so that will comprise much of my new few posts.
We love music, but don’t listen to a ton of it in our apartment. I can’t usually work with music on, and we watch so much TV during the evenings when Chris is home from work that we don’t usually think about it. After many years of driving to work with the radio, now I use my subway time for reading, not music listening. I should be a ton more traumatized by the fact that I accidentally deleted 1100 or so songs off my old phone, (illegally gotten years ago, so not restorable), but since at home I can listen to Spotify or Pandora, or Sirius, or YouTube, it really isn’t a problem.
Freaks and Geeks. NBC.
So road trips are when we listen the most. As I wrote about last summer, we listen to oldies radio, usually 60s on 6 or 70s on 7. Whatever we can sing to . . . yes, we’re those people you see singing in the car. What I did not count on on this trip was that, now that they’ve removed the satellite radio from my car (it’s been causing battery issues for years–but they could have asked), and I’ve moved it to my phone, that the charger I bought just a few weeks ago AT THE APPLE STORE would often tell me it wasn’t authorized for my IPhone (that I bought earlier this year AT THE APPLE STORE). So for the first half of the trip we listened to regular radio. It was probably the first time in over 8 years that I’ve heard static on radio stations. Between that and radio ads, which I can’t stand, I frequently changed the station (Chris drove the whole way), trying to find something new.
Mad Men. AMC.
We were in many rural areas where we’d lost stations of various formats, some of which made sense–The Vault was what one might call Dad Rock, even if my dad wouldn’t be interested–and others that didn’t, and just played anything older than maybe 5 years. There were periods on route 13 when I had to turn it off all together as we couldn’t find anything but country or Christian rock (tough on the way back when Chris was starting to get laryngitis, so we couldn’t even play a car game). There was one cool show I was sad to lose. We never heard what station it was, but Wolfman Jack was talking and songs included something called “Fujiyama Mama” by Wanda Jackson, and Johnny Cash singing “A Boy Named Sue.” Neither is remotely PC, but they were fun to hear.
My So-Called Life. ABC.
The charger worked for another couple of days, and then flaked out again, so we bought another at a Staples in New Jersey right before we bought fresh produce (after all the corn I’d seen growing, I needed some). We usually listen to 60s on 6 or 70s on 7 so we can sing–or at least I could by the last day (I’ve since picked up Chris’s illness, though I’m mostly just tired, not hacking and coughing and for now I can still talk, though I don’t really feel like it and I slept all day yesterday).
Whitney from The Affair. Showtime.
We heard a Casey Kasem countdown from the week ending June 25, 1977 (you’ll have to scroll down to it) that had to be the wimpiest week in rock history. It was so awful we had to keep listening just to see how bad it would get. There were only two songs on it with any soul at all–“Sir Duke” by Stevie Wonder, and “Got to Give it Up” by Marvin Gaye, the number one song of the week (in another shout out to timeliness, Casey also talked about Phil Spector when he introduced Shaun Cassidy’s version of “Da Doo Ron Ron.” Cassidy sucked all the soul out of it. I would also argue for Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” Chris puts in a bid for the top country song of the week, Luckenbach, Texas, to count as having soul, but the rest was just the worst. Barry Manilow (and not “Copacabana”), Andy Gibb, Andrew Gold, two different versions of “Gonna Fly Now” from Rocky, several country songs (can you tell I don’t care for country?). Nothing that’s going to Mars.
Glee. Fox.
After that, after a few minutes trying to see what Party Music was (nothing we like–neither of us have never been partiers) we went with the Soul City station on Sirius, which I never knew about before. They advertised a Road Trip Radio, but I could never find that. Anyhow Soul City was right up our alley. We heard Aretha and Marvin and The Jackson 5 and sang every word all the way home.
Girls Who (Don't) Wear Glasses 