Filed under: music, random | Tags: aging, college, growing up, madeleine, memory, the postal service, the speed of time, time
Give up!
Looking through my music collection today I realized that the album “Give Up” by The Postal Service is fully 7 years old. This means that it has been 7 complete, tumultuous and jarring years since the first time I remember thinking to myself that I was finally old enough. As we were dragging my boxes, my computer and my speaker system up the stairs of the dorm, I could barely hear my parents over the sound of someone playing “Such Great Heights” loudly enough that we could still hear it in my hall, one flight up and all the way across the floor. I had a minifridge, my parents left me there and I didn’t have anyone to answer to. My brothers had left starting 7 years before that and I remember believing I would never get to that point. I think the record was on repeat, or I’m completely conflating the track with my memories, because I swear it was playing when they left, too. I remember this clearly. I was ecstatic, nervous and a little scared but full of joy.
If you’re my age, the song may remind you of this as well. How strange that an album could make me feel this way.
Give Up carries the ghost of a memory–an elated feeling of not having to wear a tie at school for the first time in years, of finally leaving my conservative private school. I was allowed to wear band tshirts to class. I showed up hung-over. I felt like an adult, though I certainly didn’t act like one.
I met one of my best friends the next day, right after moving in, because he was wearing a Thrice t-shirt. I approached him, a little nervously, to tell him I thought Thrice was cool too. I was worried he would question me about it and embarrass me because I had really only heard one of their albums. We became fast friends, though, because we had both been too lazy to sign up for orientation in time and were crammed into a dodgeball orientation group. This is a better indicator of why we get along than most things could be. How dodgeball was supposed to orient us is beyond me, but it must have oriented us toward something, because we both made it through to grad school. I gave a speech at his wedding last summer.
Realizing that this album is this old is especially strange for me because the album also marked one of the first occasions on which I felt I was cool when buying a record. I might have read the review of it on Pitchfork, which also made me feel cool, too. I listened to it a number of times with a girl that it still reminds me of, though dimly, in a much hazier way than I ever could have imagined or believed at that age. Someone I thought I would obsess over forever has become not much more than an impression of something that I feel I used to remember more clearly, the echo of a feeling that used to occupy my time. Her name comes up every now and again. The record also reminds me of all the upset, sensitive girls I knew when I was in high school and college, who started posting these lyrics to their AOL away messages. Lyrics from this album were probably among the first to show up on Facebook profiles.
After listening to Dntel, and continuing to listen to Death Cab (though not any more), I always thought that this album was a poor translation of the two and a less-than-amazing meeting, but now listening to it I feel like it’s one of those albums that ended up impressing me and meaning more to me than I expected even until this very moment.
Which is all to say, to the people my age: we spent a lot of time with other teenagers being upset, upsetting each other, upsetting ourselves, growing up too slowly and too quickly. This was a very popular album when we went to college. It was probably hard not to hear it if you went to an artsy school like Hampshire. This is an album that was released 7 years ago. 7 years before that, I was 11.
When I was younger I felt it would take my whole life to close the 7-year gap between the day my oldest brother packed up his car for school and the day I would finally get to leave. Now I feel as though I’ve lived most of my life in the 7 years since I did. Time never seems to move at just the right speed.
Suggested reading/watching/listening, or, people who have said it better than I can:
Speak, Memory – Vladimir Nabokov
Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time
And, well, LCD Soundsystem.
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