Self, Breakfast With Girls

Five years ago, newly graduated from college and convinced I wasn't sufficiently fed up with academia, I took a year of classes at Grinnell College. I rented an apartment in the basement of a house on Elm Street, half a block from the house where I was born and raised. (Situational irony, anyone?) I straddled the difficult townie/student divide relatively well, I think, and weathered that surreal year with considerable aplomb.

Grinnell College has a five-week winter break between semesters. To anyone who thinks this is a bit excessive, I reply: you're absolutely right. Even worse than a five-week winter break is five winter weeks spent in one's hometown, living half a block from one's parents, with most of one's friends gone back to their respective home states for the vacation.

That's how I ended up mastering JetMoto with Mark for four hours, on average, every night. That's how I developed a reluctant familiarity with THC. That's how I read one book a day. That's how I drove to Newton, twenty miles away, just to go bowling. That's how I ended up sleeping fourteen hours a day. That's how I ended up drinking rum drinks by myself while I watched bad movies in my apartment. That's how I ended up looking forward to late-night talk shows.

That's also how I fell in love with Breakfast With Girls, an unlikely winter companion, seeing as how it was released the previous summer and shimmers, crackles, and buzzes with instant musical gratification, its songs coated in a sheen of sexy pop-song brevity. There's depth to some of them, though (the centerpiece "What Are You Thinking?" and the finale "Placing The Blame" [which cribs shamelessly from "Day In The Life" (in spirit if not in sound)]), and those were the ones to which I found myself returning over and over again, employing the rarely-implemented Repeat One feature on whichever stereo was spinning the copy of the disc I'd burned from Wes.

I perfected cabin-fever languor during those early weeks of January, drinking beer well into the night as Mark and I listened to this album on repeat, with all the lights off and the PlayStation's volume turned down. Pretty pathetic, I realize. Wouldn't wish such a sedentary purgatory on anyone. But I look back on it fondly all the same, perhaps because I am a masochist, perhaps because nostalgia inevitably ameliorates even the most unmemorable experiences, or perhaps because the unmatched thrill of discovering a new album/artist was the saving grace of that otherwise unremarkable stretch of ennui.

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