Louisa May Alcott Live Blogging

Yeah, I’m liveblogging the Louisa May Alcott American Masters Special on PBS. And I may have already started drinking. What?

Well, Duh!

Plunking your kid in front of the TV won’t make her a genius.

File this under I can’t believe this is news but an article published on Yahoo Shine today claims that the revelation that the Baby Einstein videos are nothing more than, “a mind numbing way to occupy infants”, is apparently, “rocking the parent world.”

All I can say is…really? The idea that TV isn’t good for kids under two is “rocking” the parenting world?

I don’t have children of my own which in some necks of the woods qualifies me for nothing but withering looks when I issue an opinion on child rearing, but I do have multiple degrees in education and once upon a time I used to work for the largest toy retailer in the city of Boston. The Baby Einstein videos were on a constant loop on a small beat up TV in the infant’s department. Being within ten feet of them while I scraped gum off the floor, scooped candy into tiny cellophane bags or gift wrapped a $300 mohair teddy bear as a present for a toddler who would undoubtably gnaw the ear off of it was enough to give me, a grown woman, a migraine. People, have you ever seen these videos? They’re like bad acid flashbacks. Seriously, my mind hasn’t been bent so severely since the light show at that Phish concert I got dragged to back in college. Baby Einstein videos aren’t educational, in fact I’d argue that they have more potential to damage a kid’s attention span than make them smarter. They’re the equivalent of video catnip. In short, they are a shitty, stupid and ridiculous product that just happens to have a marketing scheme that plays into the vanity, insecurity and laziness of modern parents. My kid can have a head start over all the other kids and all I have to do is plop him in front of these videos!

As a sales associate I would constantly try to steer potential gift givers away from the Baby Einstein videos,”How about a monogrammed baby blanket? A set of handmade wooden blocks? A hardcover heirloom-quality edition of Make Way for Ducklings?”

Like an evil parent from a Roald Dahl novel the parent would reply,”Oh he already has enough books, let’s get him some videos.” Enough books? I grew up in a family where one could never have enough books. The idea that a parent would choose a video that was obviously garbage over a book was mind-boggling to me. Who are you? The Wormwoods?

“A child can’t have too many books!” I’d opine cheerfully. The Beacon Hill mom would dismiss me with a wave of a perfectly manicured hand decked with a diamond that was probably worth more than the house I grew up in and say in a tone that barely masked her contempt that a complete philistine who wore a name-tag and a polo shirt to work would dare to give her parenting advice, “The Baby Einstein videos were designed to be educational. It’s brain science. I’ll take two.”

Time and again people would ask me my opinion on the Baby Einstein videos and I’d tell them I didn’t think they were developmentally sound. Time and again people would tell me I was wrong, just because the packaging and the advertising told them it would make their kid smarter. Never mind that anybody with two eyes can look at the videos and see they are junk. Never mind that the parental wisdom that children under two shouldn’t be watching TV has been around forever. Why are we so quick to trust what advertising and packaging tell us are true instead of our own guts? Are we that insecure with our own judgement? Are parents that lazy?

I’m laughing to myself today thinking about all those condescending bitches who used to send their drivers around to the store to fill the family Cadillac Escalade with birthday gifts for their toddlers (I saw a lot of that, it was downtown Boston before the stock market crash) instructing their maids to purge all the Baby Einstein merch from the nursery. “Get that garbage out of here, I read on the internet that it isn’t educational! Now Blake  Jr. will never get into Harvard! “

Ha fucking ha, bitch.

It warrants a mention that parents have been looking for a way to occupy small children since the beginning of time. And no, women in the work force or feminism is not to blame for this particular form (or I’d argue, any form) of crap parenting. Yes, parents of both genders are busier than ever so an excuse to plop your kids in front of the TV while you fix dinner is more seductive as it ever has been. But let’s be straight here people, my grandmother and her  mother and just about every other mother who went before them were stay at home moms. Did they spend their days playing mentally stimulating, developmentally appropriate educational games with their kids? Hell no, they smoked, played bridge and got their hair done while the kids ran around and played outside. And out of those generations of children, plenty of them still were top in their class, got into ivy league schools and landed good jobs, no cracked out kiddie videos required.

Know what is developmentally appropriate? Building a fort with the couch cushions, coloring with those big fat crayons and playing in the sandbox. In fact, I’d argue that almost anything is more appropriate for toddlers than watching Baby Einstein videos. But how would I know? I’m not a parent, I’m just a person with common sense.

Sometimes I’m not so sure I want to have children, but articles like this make me want to breed just to make sure that another generation of children will grow up knowing what it is like to play in the mud, put on their own puppet shows and live with a life that’s not over-scheduled and inundated with pre-packaged crap before they’re even old enough to tie their own shoes.

 

 

 

Fever 2 Tell: Underwhelming You Since 2007

You might have ehrm, noticed that I really dropped the ball on that whole, “post a day”, idea. I managed a whole two consecutive days of writing (let’s hear it for my work ethic!) and then, um, life happened.

I’m rehearsing for two shows right now, facing a particularly icky deadline at work (nothing makes you focus more that the reality that less than 24 hours from now they will expect your computer to be mummified in bubble wrap and packed in a box to be taken away) and I’m planning a trip to Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival! (There are hundreds of plays to see! Check out their website and help me pick some!) So you see gentle readers, I’ve been busy. And I will continue to be busy. Maybe this was a really bad week to decide to write every day?

Regardless, my readership seems to have doubled in the past week, so thanks! To show my appreciation I am giving my readers a special treat, less of my whining and more video clips of my favorite Scottish things!

Enjoy!

xoxo

Fever 2 Tell

So I Married An Axe Murderer:

Trainspotting: (If you don’t think I won’t run around Edinburgh reenacting scenes from my favorite Irvine Welsh novels and taking pictures of myself doing it, then you don’t know me very well.)

Is Love Dead?

There is a fascinating conversation going on right now over at NPR’s On Point about the current status of Romantic love. Writer, essayist and critic Cristina Nehring claims that for modern people passionate love has become not an ideal to celebrate and strive for but a source of embarrassment and vulnerability.

Who’s to blame? Well there are the usual culprits, i.e feminism and the “hook up culture” (yawn) but thankfully Nehring goes beyond the tired scapegoating of feminism for the unravelling of  everything good and decent in our society and probes at the truth beyond the hype. 

Modern people live such chaotic and hectic lives that finding true love seems sort of frivolous in the face of trying to gain those status symbols that show we’re living worthy lives. Whether it’s a doctorate, a six figure job, or a chance at fame, taking time to cultivate romance seems like an unnecessary detour on our paths to achievement. After all, love may be fleeting, but that Fullbright Scholarship is forever. Heck, now they even write books about the dangers of marrying for love! 

 I see a lot of myself in Nehring’s description of the intellectual woman who feels the need to apologize for  or hide her passionate feelings as if they are somehow a handicap, something that makes her less strong, intelligent and credible. According to Nehring I’m in good company. In her research she found that great women from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Margaret Fuller and Simone de Beauvoir all had precarious relationships between their intellectual and love lives. 

As a young woman I was repeatedly warned away from getting over involved in my relationships or letting my love life distract from what my mom used to call, “the big picture.” At some times in my life I really did allow my goals to fall by the wayside in pursuit of several (doomed) relationships. After that I vowed to put my own goals first and for the most part I have. But how do you balance the single minded pursuit of your own happiness and still allow yourself to fall in love? 

For ambitious women the lurking fear that romantic love will turn us into doting and subservient partners focused on catering to our significant other’s needs instead of our own is a very real one. We fear that the lure of partnership and family will steer us away from our goals, so the solution is to avoid romantic attachments altogether. The result of this very real and justified fear says Nehring, is a culture where we’ve compartmentalized love and sex. We have no problem talking about our one night stands, our favorite methods of birth control, even fertility. But love? Forget it. 

She’s right. I feel totally free to dish about my favorite brand of lube over cocktails in mixed company, but talk about how much I love my boyfriend? I wouldn’t dare. I know it would clear the room in under five seconds. And I’d feel like a total goober for even mentioning it in the first place.

So does this sound familiar to you, gentile readers? Would you rather give yourself a fleet enema than talk about your crush in public? Is romance dead? Ridiculous? Something created to sell Hallmark cards? Did it ever exist in the first place?

What’s your take on modern love?

Love Me, Love My TV

Growing up I wasn’t allowed to watch very much television. My parents gave me the familiar spiel about how TV rots your brain and how I’d be better off reading a book or playing outside. However as an adult who has done more than her fair share of child-care for somebody that doesn’t actually have kids of her own I have realized that half the reason had to have been because most children’s programing is really effing annoying. I mean, have you ever seen Sponge Bob!? Some people love it, to me watching that show is like having a bad acid trip while locked in a room with a bunch of hyenas hell bent on clawing the flesh off your bones.

All those years that I thought my parent were being strict, loving, compassionate people who valued my intellectual curiosity and development so deeply that they didn’t want my childhood marred by advertising and junk culture, but in reality they probably just wanted my sister and I to turn off the tube so they could get some damn peace and quiet.

The moral of the story is that Kid Sister and I didn’t get to watch much TV so what we did get to watch we really had to make count. Although I probably only watched about an hour of TV a week as a kid, the shows I grew up on really did influence me. So here we go kids, the top TV shows that made little Fever who she is today:

Fashion Sense:

Clarissa Explains It All

Oh how I shamelessly ripped off Clarissa’s fashion sense as a pre-teen. I remember watching the premiere and going straight up to my room to desperately try and reconstruct my unfortunate mid-90s wardrobe of over-sized flowered palazzo pants and puffy poet blouses into something cooler.

Clarissa’s life was everything a young Sassy reader like myself could possibly covet. She was an aspiring journalist (I soon after published “zines” with my friends that were xeroxed off of notebook paper and sent around via the mail. Back in the days of dial-up before every teen with an opinion had a blog with which to broadcast her every inner desire this was how we rolled, biotches!), with a hip, floppy haired best guy friend (OK, so at that age I made fun of any boy who approached me until he rolled up crying in an emasculated ball which is probably why I didn’t date much as a teen, but a girl could dream), and an awesomely decorated room (that boys were allowed in!) with a real life giant Swatch watch hanging on the wall. (Only the coolest of the cool kids had those giant Swatch watches, and I could never convince my parents to get me one.) What more could a child of the 90s ask for?

Sense of the Bizzare:

The X-Files

Just listening to the theme music on my shitty computer speakers makes my stomach churn deliciously in horror. It’s Friday night, circa 1997. My parent are out of town. What are my sister and I doing? We’re not hosting a kegger or sneaking boys into the house, we’re curled up in the dark in our suburban living room under grandma’s afghan watching the X Files and scaring the ever loving shit out of ourselves.

Pop Culture:

The Adventures of Pete & Pete

Most people’s first exposure to Godfather of Punk Iggy Pop might have been through a mix tape or a local college radio station. Mine was because of The Adventures of Pete and Pete, where he played Nona’s dad.

There were a million great cameos on Pete & Pete; Luscious Jackson played the school dance, Michael Stipe guest-starred as an ennui-ridden Popsicle man (let me know if I’m missing any others) but to me the real beauty of this show was it’s spot on portrayal of sibling relationships, first love, and the simple joys of growing up in the burbs.

Sick Sense of Humor:

Ren & Stimpy

When my sister was little I remember her kindergarten teacher telling my mom that bathroom humor was only a passing phase. Oh, how I know my mom wishes that were true. To this day I still can’t resist a good fart joke. I have no idea how such a demure woman gave birth to two such twisted individuals. Perhaps we were irrevocably warped by watching a show with a character called “Powdered Toast Man” who entreated his subjects to “cling tenaciously to his buttocks”. And of course, who could forget log?

Propensity for Loving Doomed Cult TV Shows:

Eerie Indiana

Remember Eerie Indiana? Neither do most people. It was like a kiddie X-Files with a little Twilight Zone thrown in there for good measure. My sister and I couldn’t get enough of it which means of course it got cancelled after like two episodes. Fortunately, the show’s creators don’t seem too worried about copyright infringement, as there are plenty of full episodes up on You Tube.

Budding Liberal Idealist:

The Wonder Years

Is it just me, or is there very little the Baby Boomer generation loves more than reflecting back on itself? This might explain why The Wonder Years was one of the few shows my family watched together, even my relentlessly channel surfing dad was transfixed.

Aging hippies love regaling their punk ass kids with how tough ‘Nam really was and how groovy that Jefferson Airplane concert was. The Wonder Years gave the ‘rents a chance to re-live those times without my sister and I stomping off to our rooms, slamming the doors and blasting Pearl Jam.

The ironic thing was that as I followed Fred Savage’s character throughout that series I actually felt like I grew up with him, losing a bit of my innocence along the way. For those of us who grew up in the gay 90s when the future was bright and the culture wars of our parent’s time seemed archaic, The Wonder Years was eerily prophetic of the times to come. Just like Kevin Arnold, we watched our parents behave like hypocrites, screwed up our first real relationships and lost faith in our government. I don’t think our parents ever dreamed that we would inherit a world that would become just as tumultuous as it was in the 1960′s but here we are, arguably worse off than we were a generation ago. It’s enough to make a person want to protest. Or grow their hair real long, or quit their job and travel the country in a VW Bus. Except these days we’re getting fired from our jobs, everybody’s way too freaked out about the economy to notice that we’re losing a war and gas is too damn expensive to facilitate any epic road trip/life altering experiences. Thanks George Bush!

So there you have it, my top handful of influential programming. It’s not a bad lot, if I do say so myself. Maybe it’s even a good thing that I drew so much inspiration from TV instead of all the books I read. After all, it could have been worse. Thank Maude I never went through a Little House on the Prarie fashion phase.

Gold Diggers, Skinny Bitches and Trophy Wives, Oh My!

Cue the Kanye kids; I feel a blog entry coming on…

Want to learn the secret to true and lasting relationship fulfillment? Don’t want to work when you’re over 40 (or perhaps at all)? Wondering why all your type A female friends are “slaving away” while all the bimbos you know are off getting hot stone massages? You need Smart Girls Marry Rich. Penned by the same altruistic mavens who brought you (the thinly veiled vegan-orexic propaganda) Skinny Bitch, Smart Girls Marry Rich is the ultimate guide to achieving security and happiness in your long-term relationship (hint: it has nothing to do with your dude’s sexy blue eyes). Because who else would you trust to give you relationship advice than the women who bestowed upon us the sage like nutritional adage: “Healthy = skinny, unhealthy= fat”?

OK, I know (or perhaps I just hope) that supposedly instructive tomes such as Smart Girls Marry Rich and The Rules are just a bunch of inflated crap that’s designed to be incendiary so the authors can get on talk shows and sign six figure book deals, but I just can’t look away. It’s not just that they fry me… they fascinate me. There is something about looking at a view so violently opposed to my own that I can’t write about it without squirming in my chair. Maybe it is because it forces me to examine and defend my own views, or maybe it’s because I love a fight. At any rate, here’s my take on Smart Girls:

First of all, I can’t stand self-help books that divide all women into two opposing camps. Either you are a miserable, overworked career harpy or a pampered, cerebrally challenged bimbo. Has anybody ever met anyone who truly embodied either of these stereotypes? What if the overworked career woman actually (gasp) finds her job fulfilling? And for the last time, why is it automatically assumed that every woman who doesn’t work outside the home lives a life of leisure? The hardworking (mostly) stay at home mom that raised me would take exception! She worked her ass off bringing up two kids, running a household and helping my dad sustain the family business. To this day girlfriend has never had a hot stone massage, although she sure as hell deserves one.

I may be about to start a feminist shit-storm by saying this, but I’ll say it anyway. Women, whether we’re high-powered career types, stay at home moms, or some amalgamation of those things, make choices. None of these choices are inherently weaker than others, they are just different. I think it is actually pretty cool that at some point in my life I will be able to make a choice to shift my focus from career path to mothering, to some sort of collage of those two things, and back again, as it makes sense for my family and I. I get to decide how to put my life together. Chances are the man I start my family with will never get to make those sort of compromises because it is assumed that the only way any natural red blooded heterosexual male would ever want to contribute to his family is by working a very narrowly defined 9-5 job. We all say how terrific we think stay at home dads are, but the overall subtext is that any man who would give up a life of ambition to focus on fathering is lazy, emasculated and unmotivated. We feel sorry for stay at home dads and the women who marry them. How can she respect him when she makes more money than he does? How can he feel like the man when he’s changing diapers?

Don’t even think your partner might relish having a more equal hand in creating a home bringing up your family. According to the Smart Girls you’re kidding yourself. Ask for anything aside from a traditional male partner who will play his part to provide, provide, provide and you’re asking for trouble. And he better be established before you tie the knot because a self made man whom you support in achieving his goals will leave you once he gains success. Once again, my parents who married in 1972 with 500 bucks between them and went on to start a successful business and own multiple homes would bristle at this assumption.

Nobody asks guys if they “still want to be working at 40.” Nobody expects that men would all be happier if they married wealthy and live their lives sipping Mimosas by the pool. Yet time after time, women are told that we’re supposed to feel unfeminine, nay, unnatural for having a drive, curiosity and ambition that might challenge us to explore (and even find deep satisfaction) outside the domestic sphere. Women’s work is incredibly undervalued in our society, yet we’re instructed that we give up all our chances for power, security and a happy life if we attempt to pursue other types of work. Clearly, the only power that is is safe and appropriate for me to have is the power to get a man to buy me stuff.

Smart Girls really plays into the whole security hysteria that is plaguing our culture right now. Everyone likes to think they could have avoided the stock market crash. We all would like a little more stability in our day-to-day lives. It is tempting to believe that marrying rich can provide that stability. I understand the point Smart Girls makes about the fact that romantic love is fleeting so a marriage that lasts a lifetime needs to be built on something more stable, but I disagree that money is what makes a marriage stable. Just ask all those bankers who are getting divorced by wives who “didn’t sign up for” life in the middle class.

I thought the whole point of an egalitarian society was that we don’t have to depend on our partners for material things so instead we can depend on them for the things that money can’t buy, you know… love, compassion, understanding, emotional support, all the stuff Bernie Madoff can’t embezzle away.

Maybe this is just an oversimplification by one of those single, career oriented, childless harpies. Perhaps once I’m gestating little Frances Bean Peaches Bjork Jr. in my womb I’ll start thinking about the cost of cruelty free prenatal vitamins, cloth diaper service, day care, braces, Rock n’ Roll Camp For Girls and Harvard and send my mate out packing to pull down six figures.

Until then, here’s one thing I do know: life’s a bitch kids. Getting up every day, going to work, making ends meet, raising kids, its hard work. I can’t imagine it all being worth all the toil sacrifice unless I’ve got someone I love deeply in my corner, fighting that fight right alongside me. Life is shitty enough, why the hell would I want to come home in the evening to someone I wasn’t crazy in love with?

I’m So Happy This Exists…

If you grew up in the 90′s chances are you’ve heard of Sassy, the cultish teen magazine that served as the primer for a generation of alterna-tween girls (A.K.A future BUST readers of America) before the phrase tween even existed. Ah, the 90s, an idyllic time when kids dyed their hair with Kool-Aid, MTV played music videos and the bright future we were set to inherit did not involve crushing national debt and two seemingly endless, multi-trillion dollar wars.

Back then I wasn’t even sure if I knew what love was, but when I saw Kurt and Courtney together on the cover of the April 1992 Sassy I was quite sure that was what I wanted it to look like.

Well, minus the heroin and the suicide, but gee, they sure looked happy back then, right? Shortly after getting my grubby adolescent mitts on that issue I got into my “moth eaten librarian sweaters and baby barrettes pilfered from my baby sitting charges” fashion phase. I even spent an evening with my head underneath my bed (lest my mom burst in unexpectedly and catch me), strands of my hair floating in a plastic dish of slowly congealing jell-o (there was no Kool-aid in my house and I figured jell-o had similar dying properties) in an effort to look more like Kurt. Or Courtney. I really wasn’t sure which one I wanted to look more like, androgyny was in that year too. Such was the power of Sassy.

Sassy was the first magazine I’d ever read that told me it was OK to like boys who looked like girls (or even like other girls, for that matter) and that there was no shame in going to school with your head smelling like Aunt Rosie’s Jello-o mold if you were doing it in the name of expressing your individuality, man. Other teen magazines taught you how to fit in, Sassy readers wanted to stand out. They had Miss Teen USA, Sassy had The Sassiest Girl In America, an honor that as far as I could see was bestowed yearly upon a plucky teen who embodied the ideals of intelligence, social awareness and nonconformity, plus a killer fashion sense.

If it wasn’t for Sassy I certainly wouldn’t have heard of bands like Sonic Youth before college, let alone gotten my first whiff of sex positive feminism. It seems a tad over-dramatic (and pathetic, if we’re being totally honest here) but Sassy played a part in me becoming who I am today.

Had I not know that there were other girls out there like me, girls that wanted to write zines, make their own clothes and change the world, what would I have become? I’m thankful to say that I don’t know the answer to that question. There were numerous books and albums and artists and life experiences that have made me into the opinionated, eccentric all around badass feminist and fashionista extraordinaire that you see here today, but Sassy helped point me in the right direction.

The thing is, I am nowhere near as original as I thought I was in 1994. Sassy had the same impact it had on me on thousands of other teen girls and now we’ve all come of age and are looking to buy various nostalgic paraphanalia. There were other Young Girls With Opinions and Stuff who clung to their issues of Sassy with the fervor of a crush-induced mix tape and two of them have written a book, How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter To The Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer.

Sassy officially ceased to be in 1996, and since then I have never seen another publication aimed at teen girls that has a fraction of the honesty and intelligence of Sassy. How Sassy Changed My Life, exists and I am so happy it does, if only because it proves I’m not totally lame for carrying a literairy torch for a teen mag from the 90s.

More Body Drama…

It is just a body image kinda day…

I wasn’t gonna write another entry today but I sat down in the waiting room at my doctor’s office and there it was staring up at me from the glossy pages of People Magazine of all places…

Body Drama

Penned by ex-Miss America Swimsuit contest winner Nancy Redd, this promises to be a graphic, no holds barred book about the female body that tackles all sorts of ugly topics including body hair, ugly vulvas, stretch marks, acne and more. Apparently Redd wanted girls to get an honest look at “normal” female bodies and thought they should know that all the little tricks that models use to look good are just that– tricks, and nobody, not even a swimsuit model, looks perfect in real life.

Redd solicited real women to model and bare themselves, cellulite and all for this book. I’m probably not the only woman who recognizes that if this book ends up to be as graphic and no bullshit as it promises to be, then halla-freakin’-luia, there is a real need for it. Embarrassing story time… I can remember at the tender age of 9 or so, yanking my dad’s Playboys (I’m sure he read them for the articles!) so I could see, “What I will look like when I grow up.” No lie, that’s what I really thought. Imagine my surprise when the puberty fairy didn’t bring me a pair of perfectly round bouncing D cups. There is an incredible derth of realistic bodies in the media for both young men and women and I’m sure many children got their schooling on anatomy the same way I did, from airbrushed magazines. No wonder why Americans have such a warped sense of their own bodies!

The book isn’t out yet but I’m already eagerly anticipating it, and I’m sure this won’t be the last time it will get a shout out in my blog. if it is everything I anticipate it to be I’ll be getting myself a copy… and I’ll be asking my local library to do the same and leave it in a prominent place in their young adult section. I’m really liking all the backlash against unhealthy stereotypes that I’m finding in the media these days. Hopefully this means that the next generation won’t grow up with the same body hatred so many people my age have…

See This Film Now!

There isn’t anything I can say about this film that won’t sound gushy or overly-intellectual so I’ll spare you the drivel. All I can say is that I’ve been in love with Persepolis since I read the first graphic novel in 2003 and the author, Marjane Satrapi, is one of my heroes. She isn’t a hero for all the generic reasons, she’s a hero for living her life and being herself even in a world where it’s dangerous to do so. I’m not sure if I’d be strong enough to make those choices.

The film is faithful to the book without being limited by the graphic novel genre. The simple, expressionistic artwork that makes Satrapi part Edward Gorey and part Edvard Munch translate seamlessly to the screen, and you’ll be enveloped in this simple, evocative black and white world before the opening titles are through.

There is more to be said here about art, feminism, family, the cultural revolution in Iran, and the way I see current American attitudes shadowing that mentality, but again, I’ll spare you.

Just see it.

Read This Book Now

Warning: This book is gonna make you wanna run over to the person you love’s house in your socks and PJs, hug the crap out of them, and make them promise not to die young. And if that’s not possible because it’s like 4 degrees and icy outside at the moment, you’ll just have to hug your stuffed Kermit the Frog doll in lieu of said loved one. You’ve been warned.

You may also see yourself reflected in it a little bit. It may just make you appreciate what you have a little more, but may make you a little bit scared of losing what you have. It will make you think of all the music you dig, and all the music you’re embarrassed of digging. It will make you wish you hadn’t read it, but it will also make you feel privileged to have witnessed all those truths about love, partnership and yeah, loss set to a killer soundtrack.

Love Is A Mix Tape is the true story of Rob Sheffield, born and bred Irish Catholic Boston boy and Rolling Stone rock critic. (A double whammy that I can’t help loving.) His journey from junior high music geek (and the horrifying discovery that girls come to dances to gasp DANCE and not to rock out to Stairway), socially awkward Yalie, harried husband and yes, widow, is chronicled here one mix tape at a time in clever prose that would make any music junkie squee.

Read it and pass it on to anyone you love, especially anyone who loves music.

And don’t stop making and giving away those mix tapes.