Chelleology

I have these old VHS tapes sitting in a shoe box that contain hours and hours of MTV from 1984 to 1986.  There were about 20 tapes but my mother had taped over many of them and I was only able to salvage four of them.  One of the tapes I have watched so much that the tape finally split.  I was viewing these tapes a few days ago and thinking about what MTV used to be.

I was just a few months away from my sixth birthday when MTV first premiered in 1981.  My parents didn’t care if we watched MTV, my father just didn’t want it on all the time.  In the hours between school letting out for the day and my father coming home from work MTV was always on.  It became a staple mine and my sister’s lives.

In 1984, my family was sent to Germany where there would be no MTV for us.  My sister’s Sunday School teacher began taping our favorite TV shows and hours of MTV to send to us.  He was how we survived for those three years.  We eagerly anticicpated his next package to us.  We were hooked!

It had to be around 1987 when MTV went down hill.  They began showing things other than music videos.  They were showing TV shows.  At first, it was cool.  It was a short break from playing music videos to air The Real World.  Back then I was a Real World junkie.  New York will always be my favorite season.  But then we began seeing more and more tv shows.  Even VH1 was following suit.  It wasn’t the music documentaries… they were fine.  It was the other non-music crap that ruined MTV.  Do you know what they had on MTV all day yesterday?  America’s Next Top Model!  WTF does that have to do with music?

I keep waiting for MTV to get it together but with today’s young viewers, they don’t know what MTV was like in 1981 and they grew up with the crap MTV put out for entertainment.  Lucky for me, I have the last several years of real MTV on VHS and I cherish those tapes because the real MTV died decades ago.

I just got done watching a documentary on heavy metal on VH1 Classic.  Has anyone seen it?  It was very good and brought back a lot of memories.  Music has never been the same since the 80’s came to a close. 

During the third installment of the documentary, the PMRC was discussed.  I remember the hearings but not in great detail.  I was only 9/10 and living in Germany so most of what I heard was via word of mouth and hearing adults talk about it. 

It’s no surprise to me that the ring leader of this movement was Tipper Gore.  I always think of Tipper and the PMRC everytime I hear someone scream about Republicans legislating morality.  I am a Republican and I’m telling you the PMRC was a real attempt at legislating morality.  Here’s Tipper at the hearing telling us what songs are really about.  Seriously, where does she get that Cyndi Lauper’s song “She Bop” is about masterbation?  And tell me exactly how masterbation is immoral?  This music was about to get slapped with a sticker based on Tipper’s interpretation of the song.  My favorite band, Def Leppard, was one of the 15 bands targeted by Tipper and her posse. 

It’s nice to see that the whole thing blew up in the PMRC’s face.  The stickers just made the music all that more popular.  “Oh, shit!  There’s swearing and sex in this music?  I better stop listening to it.”  Believe me, parents still didn’t care and most establishments (minus Walmart) sold the album to kids. 

If you want to talk blatantly offensive songs, let’s talk about gansta rap.  Notice, I said ‘gangsta’ rap not rap in general.  When rap first came out, it was fun.  The music had a great beat with great lyrics.  “Parent’s Just Don’t Understand” for example.  But then gansta rap came along.  There is no misinterpretation there.  Gangsta rap was about killing, crack, promiscuous sex, etc.  They weren’t shy about what they were rapping about.

Well, cheers to metal music and the summer concert season.  Next week, we are seeing Brett Michaels and in about 9 weeks we see Def Leppard.  I’m just bumed about Waterstock being canceled this year.  Apparently, metal bands are making such a huge come back that it takes a lot of money to get them in to do a Saturday festival.  So, instead they got Kid Rock to play in Des Moines on a Wednesday night.  That just means they are going to pull money from the local element because no one is going to take off work to drive several hours to see one band.  I hope they find out they made a bad decision and they’ll bring Waterstock back.

I do apologize for missing a week of blogging.  My mom was coming into town and if your house isn’t nice and neat, she’s likely to clean for you.  Then I wanted to spend the week with my mom undesturbed.  My mom and I have always been close but as I grew up I started feeling closer to my dad.  It’s like you need your parents at different stages of your life. 

I was a little annoyed that my mother visited my sister first.  I knew that I would be getting calls from my sister every couple days complaining about my mom.  Then my mom comes up and she spends the first 48 hours complaining about my sister.  I had to think of creative ways to cut my mom off and change the subject and refocus her attention on something else.  I was not going to have my mother’s anger toward my sister ruin my time with her. 

Anyway, I introduced her to a couple of my friends and showed her my office.  I took her to the Amana Colonies and showed her some of the places we hang out.  It was fun but like a lot of moms, she can be exhausting.  She likes to tell you all the gossip around town (completely forgetting that she’s already told me all this).  I’m no longer in NC, I don’t really care what happens there anymore.  Then she wants to talk about all my ex-boyfriends (in front of anyone who will listen).  She’s family though and you have to love her.

I was sad to see her go.  I know I’ll see her and my dad in a week and a half in Missouri.  I always have to have a few days to get over the initial depressed feeling I get when family leaves and I have to struggle to get back into my routine.  It just sucks that it happens to be on a three day weekend. 

I’m a very structured person and I have to have a schedule or a routine to feel okay.  So, I will be bummed for the rest of today and then tonight I’ll be surrounded by friends (specifically Greg and Jolene) at Jameson’s and we will probably go to the Catacombs afterwards.  I think that’s the best thing for me right now.

Ah, ha!  I found him.  Jeez.  It only took me 8 years.  I’m talking about Jeremy Scott Smith.  He goes by Scott but just to clear up any confusion between him and my husband, I’ll refer to him as Jeremy.  You can ready about him on my own blog at http://frogprincess.blog.com/Friends/. 

I hadn’t taken the time to look for Jeremy since last May.  I had gotten really busy and I was frustrated with the search.  Then my mom called me and she was cleaning out my old room and asking me what I wanted to keep and what I wanted her to get rid of.  She mentioned a few friends of mine and wanted to know what they were doing now.  Then she brought up Jeremy.  She had renewed my faith in finding him.

Late last night I went searching and found the ECU BSU Alumni boards.  Since I hung out at the BSU with Jeremy between classes and in the evenings, I thought I would post asking if anyone knew where I could find him.  In about 12 hours, a friend of his, Baxter, emailed me Jeremy’s phone number.  I was kind of hoping for an email address instead of a number because it’s easier to break the ice again.  My calling him was a sneak attack.

A sneak attack is exactly what it was.  Maybe I should have prefaced my call with a text message.  I caught him off guard.  At first he didn’t remember who I was.  Apparently, he had a greater impact on my life than I had on his.  It felt like two strangers talking for the first time.  I have no doubt that he was glad to hear from me once he figured out who I was.  I’m really hoping that we keep in touch and get our friendship back on track.  It’s really important to me.  It’s so rare that someone touches your life like this guy touched mine.

Another friend that was dear to me that slipped through my fingures is Johnny Ikner.  If I had tried to find him a year ago, I might have reached him but from what I’ve gathered on the internet, his father committed suicide during his battle with a terminal illness and he just sort of vanished.  I’ve reached out to the BSU minister at Pembroke to find out if maybe he knows something.  I haven’t heard anything yet.  It kills me that I wasn’t there for him during his father’s death. 

When I moved to Iowa, I cut off everyone from North Carolina, except for my best friend Dove.  Now I regret doing that.  It’s these very people who got me through some very tough times when I was living in Nort Carolina.  I guess that’s my I’m trying so hard to find these special people and at the same time embrasing the new friends I have found in Iowa.

Last weekend, our local paper ran a story about the government setting up shop at the Cattle Congress Fairgrounds (about 10 miles from my house).  The government’s purpose is classified but they did say it was a ‘training exercise’.  In Iowa?  Yeah, right!  No government agency wants anything to do with us except in a farming capasity.  But in this town?  Wouldn’t they be out in a desolate farming town?

Then it dawned on me the next day what they were really here for.  It’s an illegal immigration bust.  Apparently, the local paper and every illegal immigrant in town because today there was a story about the illegal immigrants in town being so nervous that many of them didn’t show up at work.  The illegals are living in fear and I’m rather enjoying the tizzy they’re in.  They broke the law, they are sucking up my tax dollars and they expect us to cater to them when it comes to the language barrior.  What?  Are we supposed to lay out the red carpet for them? 

Beside the border states, Iowa has one of the highest populations of illegal immigrants.  It’s no wonder, we have a lot of factories around here… the biggest being Tyson.  The government trailers are going to be here until the 23rd so I’m wondering who is going to be raided.

Of course, I’m finding this is a great opportunity to screw with a friend of ours.  He is Mr. Conspiracy Theory.  Everything is a bloody conspiracy stemming from George W. Bush.  We’re thinking about telling him it’s a wire tapping plot! 

When I first moved to Iowa, I was in a relationship (if you could call it that) with a guy who had no intentions of leaving North Carolina.  He made that abundantly clear throughout the entire time we dated.  So, when the time came for me to move to Iowa,  I had intended to break up with him.  There was a lot more to it than just location that caused me to want to break up with him.  It was that our relationship wasn’t very strong to begin with. 

First off, we were very competitive… a downside to being in the same career field.  When he succeded, I was disappointed in my self and harbored some resentment.  As much as he denied it, he was the same way when I succeded.  I once applied for a producer’s position and got it.  When I shared the news he said “I didn’t go for it (the position) because I knew you wanted it and I would have ended up getting it.” 

Second, he had a list of things he did not like about me.  He listed things like I had fat thighs, sick often, doesn’t wear enough dresses, etc.  For a girl that’s insecure in the first place, this did not go over well with me.  But I wrote it off as a defense mechanism because he knew that I was leaving North Carolina with or without him the first chance I got.

When I got the job in Iowa, I was excited and this guy (whom my friends refer to as the “List-Maker”) was clearly upset.  About a week before I left, I overheard him on the phone with his friends trashing me and trashing my new job.  I was so hurt that he trashed me and didn’t make any effort to come with me, that when I went visit my parents, I ended up sleeping with a very good guy friend of mine.

It was about three months later when the List-Maker came to visit that he found out about my infidelity.  Despite this, he insisted on continuing the relationship.  I agreed to continue on despite knowing the relationship was long past being doomed.  Even though we stayed together, he made sure I knew that he came to visit me to propose.  I know he was bluffing though.  If he really had intentions of proposing on that ill-fated trip, he would have shown me the ring or even took an interest in my life in Iowa.  There was no ring and he was very rude to my friends.

Needless to say, it was only a few months later that I broke up with him and ended up meeting my husband.  He left bad poetry on my answering machine and begged me to stay with him.  I declined and requested he leave me alone.  I found out several months later that he told his friends he dumped me because he was “tired of my shit”.  That’s when I knew this guy had issues.

I got married in 2004 and he found a girl and married her a year later.  Now, I will not trash her because first, I don’t know her.  Second, she has a lot more to worry about than the opinion of her husband’s ex-girlfriend.  I just wish them the best.

So, I just found out tonight that the List-Maker and his wife are having their first child.  I still harbor a lot of hurt feelings and never felt like I ever got closure on the whole situation.  The mean side of me thinks “That poor girl.  She has no idea what she’s in for.”  I mean, the constant holier-than-thou attitude he carries tend to wear on a girl. 

But the nice side of me thinks that maybe she taught him to be a man.  I just hope that he doesn’t treat her like he treated me and that they have a happy marriage and a healthy family.