YouTube & The 1980's

The past few days I've had Europe's "Final Countdown" humming across my chapped lips. In fact, just now I googled "Europe + Final Countdown" and that new-fangled site called YouTube pulled up their 1986 rock video. Look at all that hair! That gloriously well-kept buttrocker hair, not to mention the synthesizer and electric guitar rift. Fascinating.

You know, YouTube wasn't around when I left the States two years ago, and iPod ownership has increased exponentially since I've been gone. When my group entered Lesotho in June 2005, only two of us brought iPods. I was not one of the technologically advanced two. These days, practically everyone brings an iPod to Lesotho, even to the remote areas of Mokhotlong and Thaba Tseka.

Others are now toting MacBook Pro laptops that have phased out the phoneline jacks for dial-up internet connections - it's like the bittersweet passing of eight-tracks and cassette tapes all over again. Believe me, my childhood would have meant nothing without Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues eight-track played in my father's white 1982 Ford SuperCab truck. My brother's adolescence, in fact, was designed around his Def Leppard and Whitesnake cassettes. And now eight tracks and cassette tapes are gone, gone, gone.

Continuing on this eighties theme, I remember releasing my brother's turtles into the Sioux River in Sioux Falls, South Dakota as a kid. Every summer he would catch snapping turtles, painted turtles, and box turtles and keep them as pets, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for a year. When he would release them back into the river, they would often paddle around in a 12" x 30" space similar to the size of the aquariums he had kept them in at home. It took a few minutes before the turtles realized that their world had opened up and that they were indeed back where they belonged; that is, they were home.

Maybe that's how I'm feeling, too. I'm less than one week away from re-entry into my "natural environment" in the Midwest United States. I have a feeling that I'll try to make my world smaller and more manageable for a few months. I may not feel that the Twin Cities are my home or that there is an expanded world before me. But hopefully, after a little while, I'll splash around outside of the space I know and slip back into my home.