Feeling Nostalgic?

I find it funny how spending money on seemingly worthless things makes me feel better sometimes. For instance, I bought a friend back home something that I'm sure will make her happy and the act of buying it for her made me happy. I'm like that, all giving and shit. Part of my nice guy charm that is like Kryptonite to all persons with vaginas. In re-reading the first sentence of this post, I realize that I may have inferred that what I bought this lovely lady is worthless, but that's not the case at all. What provoked this entry was the online purchase I just made of badges, or pinbacks if you will, from a random live journal site I stumbled across. $20 secured me 25 buttons that I will no doubt fasten to my brand new Old Navy courier bag (the one I bought yesterday for $4.97) along side the existing buttons displaying the cast of Ferris Bueller's Day Off and a Billy Idol that have adorned my old bags for the past year. I have no idea why I started putting pins on my bag, I guess part of it was my way of rebelling from being a stock broker. I'm kind of like a 12 year old girl sometimes, in that I buy and support the silliest things. In any case, I'm kind of excited about my new badges.

I think what lead me to even looking for badges online was the reading I have been doing this weekend of the new Chuck Klosterman book. There isn't a passage about badges in it, but the book itself makes me nostalgic and reminds me of my younger days. And in my younger days I wore buttons on my trenchcoat just like any other misunderstood alterna-kid struggling to survive in the waste land known as catholic high school. If you haven't read any of Klosterman's works, I humbly request that you do. It's easy reading, very disgestable and pop culture filled. I'm sure my friends from college would all get a kick out of this guy and his observations on music, drugs and women. Ever since I read Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs last year, I've been touting the good name of Klosterman to all who will listen. For me, reading what he writes is like a kick in the balls. As a journalism student who had ambitions of writing about pop culture as a career, I feel like the ultimate failure. Everything this guys writes about is something that I should have written about. Our style is similiar, our observations are incredibly in sync. I want to be Chuck Klosterman. Anyway, I have thought to myself that this is a guy who went through the same experiences, the same change in tastes at precisely the same time that I did. We both went to high school in the 80's, explored college, grunge and weed at the same time. It's like we have been living parallel lives, orbiting each other. Although I have never met the man, nor do I think I would want to, I was happy to read in his latest book that he spent the summer of 1994 in Minneapolis and frequented a bar there that I know I played in that very same summer. It's entirely possible that a guy who is now a rock critic for Spin magazine was in attendance at one of my gigs, my new literary hero was in the same room as me and I had no clue. I can only hope that he was and he had the ability to recognize how incredibly talentless we were. Maybe one day he'll even write about it.