History - It's all about perspective

I was talking to a friend the other day and he was telling me that his daughter was taking a course her freshman year in college called "The History of Rock and Roll." We decided that was a pretty cool course for a university to offer.

Then, I said, "Actually, if you think about it, that's a lot of history. Rock and roll really took off in the early '50s. That's more than fifty years ago."

My friend looked at me with an expression that said, regardless of the truth of my statement, he wasn't totally convinced that 1954 was over fifty years ago.

I went on to say, "Think of it this way. We graduated from high school in 1974 so, assuming our freshman year of college was 1974, your daughter studying the origins of rock and roll is the same as if we had taken a class studying the origins of movies with sound."



"Fuck."

"Yeah," I said, "You know what else? The '80s were twenty years ago."



I sometimes wonder why people talk to me at all.