Comparing Past Junes

I've always been a nostalgic person who looks back at years past with an analytical mind and a ton of memories.  With approximately 30 years worth of tangible memories under my belt, I thought it would be a fun exercise to split the years apart, on a month-by-month basis, into grids of three a decade apart and see which year I look back at most favorably.  My earliest consistent memories are from the summer of 1983, so I figured I'd start there.  I'll do this every month until next May and see if I can draw and conclusions from the analysis.  It might just be that I'll have done a personally satisfying thought experiment without any worthwhile conclusions to glean.  Either way, let the contest begin....

June 1983 vs. June 1993 vs. June 2003
Winner:  1983--I was five years old and spending my days at the Albert Lea Child Care Center, immersed in a world of collectible "Return of the Jedi" glasses from Burger King and mid-80s action show awesomeness in the evenings.  None of these three years is worthy of a sweeping win, but 1993 and 2003 were less inconsequential than 1983 in the grand scheme.

June 1984 vs. June 1994 vs. June 2004
Winner:  1994--The best month of my best summer during my high school years, I had a fun visit to northern Minnesota for my cousin's high school graduation and went in the company of another cousin and we had a great time.  I also really got into country music during the format's most creatively satisfying year and I had my first thorough revisit of mid-80s TV, authenticated by late night reruns of "The Fall Guy" and "The A-Team" on a Minneapolis TV station that sometimes came in.  And of course, the unfolding drama of the OJ murder arrest added some extra spice to the proceedings.

June 1985 vs. June 1995 vs. June 2005
Winner:  2005--I was enjoying a lazy summer at the folks' place having been recently canned from my newspaper job and really got into the laid-back lifestyle, which basically amounted to my first real vacation in three years following the strenuous newspaper schedule.  My best memory was taking to eBay to purchase several mid-80s TV Guides that I had long since lost which featured end-of-season ratings information to glean through.  I was also regularly communicating with a hot blond named Whitney who I had chatted with for a couple years at that point but got into a pattern of daily e-mail exchanges with in the early weeks of summer 2005.

June 1986 vs. June 1996 vs. June 2006
Winner:  1986--It's a dubious win here because there was nothing specifically great about June 1986, other than my parents building up my hopes that a vacation to Disney World might be forthcoming later that summer, but there was still enough fond memories for the month to except the mediocre June of 2006 and the terrible June of 1996.  Wednesday nights with back-to-back "MacGyver" and "Hardcastle and McCormick" reruns were a high point along with my highly memorable visit to the Thunderbird Hotel in Bloomington for my first baseball card show, complete with an autograph signing from Willie Mays!

June 1987 vs. June 1997 vs. June 2007
Winner:  1997--After more than two years of making myself miserable in anticipation and ultimate attendance of college, the summer of 1997 was my long-awaited redemption.  I got a breezy summer job at the rural electric co-op with enviable hours and even got to work with an old buddy from high school.  From road trip fever to revisiting 80s TV action show favorites rerun on the FX cable network at the time, I reconnected with all my passions and just got to enjoy life again in a way I hadn't really done for what seemed like a lifetime.  Most people's experience returning home after their freshman year of college ended up being a huge disappointment for any number of reasons.  For me, it was one of the best summers of my life, and never was it sweeter than in the summer's opening month.

June 1988 vs. June 1998 vs. June 2008
Winner:  1988--The summer of 1988 is one I'll always look back at fondly, particularly for it being the pinnacle of my one-year obsession of the cable network Nickelodeon.  My cousin from northern Minnesota was also a Nickelodeon fan and he came for a visit in late June, melding both worlds.  Beyond Nickelodeon, I also really got into the soap opera "One Life to Live" that summer as I stayed days at my babysitter's place in Hartland. 1988 was also the "drought" summer with steamy 100-degree temps day after day, and at least at that age I rather welcomed the heat.

June 1989 vs. June 1999 vs. June 2009
Winner:  1989--Easy to defer to the childhood summers in a competition with no clearcut winners, and it's hard to go wrong generally with the summer of 1989.  I started off the summer traveling with my grandparents to visit my cousin in northern Minnesota and getting my first steady diet of Nintendo, specifically the game "Bubble Bobble" which I still have a soft spot for.  From there, it was summer reruns of my favorite season of "MacGyver" and was my final summer at the babysitter's place, only this year with cable TV and reruns of "The Fall Guy" and "T.J. Hooker" airing daily.  I look back at this as my last "childhood" summer and it easily trumped the middling memories of June 1999 and 2009.

June 1990 vs. June 2000 vs. June 2010
Winner:  1990--Having this trio of months together is unfortunate since 1990 and 2000 were my best summers of all-time, but it's not quite as tough for the month of June because 1990 easily bested June 2000.  Every week of the summer of 1990 brought something new and memorable, and in the month of June I had my first taste of genuine freedom, being able to stay up late and no longer having to go to the babysitter's during the day.  This meant TV viewing until all the networks signed off, watching among other things, "Entertainment Tonight" where weekend anchor Leeza Gibbons was my first celebrity crush and my opening foray into puberty.  I went with my cousin to Valleyfair late in the month and recorded the remaining reruns of "MacGyver" from season 5 that I had missed when they first aired.  And June was actually the least memorable month of this very pivotal summer.

June 1991 vs. June 2001 vs. June 2011
Winner:  1991--While not as spectacular as the summer before, June 1991 still offered a good selection of great memories including the 7th grade class trip to Valleyfair, the Minnesota Twins' 15-game winning streak which got me back into baseball in a big way, and the final spurt of fascination in my baseball card collection before it flamed out forever.  I also held my first "MacGyver Marathon" beginning that June and despite merely being a retread of stale videotaped leftovers, it was very exciting.  June 2001 was pretty solid as well but 1991 easily bested it.

June 1992 vs. June 2002 vs. June 2012
Winner:  1992--I was briefly tempted to go with 2002 here, because despite ending up as a summer from hell, the first month of the summer served up some good memories and held a lot of promise.  Since that promise was eventually squashed though, I fell back on Old Reliable with 1992.  After a mostly enjoyable trip to Duluth early in the month where my dad served as a delegate to a political convention, my summer settled into familiar territory, defined by my daily consumption of Minnesota Twins games on the radio and my lottery-style cobbling together of cable "MacGyver" reruns when making weekly visits to my grandparents, hoping to capture the episodes I hadn't already recorded.

Tune in next month and see how I compare three decades worth of Julys.

I Just Don't Have The Passion For Elections And Road Trips That I Used To

When I think back to 10 years ago this summer, it's striking just how much less connected I am now to what were my driving passions in 2004.....endless analysis of elections before and after the vote....and my road trip routines.   My passion level for both have seemed to grow and fall in tandem, both originating in the early 90s when I began to do some of earliest exploration of Minnesota towns in particular while assisting my dad with his brief vinyl repair business.  Not long after that I received my first World Almanac which featured county-level election returns from across the country.  In the late 1990s, the escalation continued as I started to expand my horizons to explore new territory on my Minnesota road trips in tandem with my receipt of the Minnesota blue book, which broke down 1996 general election returns down to the precinct level.

But it was the year 2000 when everything came together for what would be my peak period of road trip and election passion.  Several opportunities arose for me to take road trips to uncharted territory in 2000, so much so that I formalized an effort to get to all 734 incorporated towns in Minnesota.  And of course, the closest and most exciting Presidential election in history occurred in 2000 as well, further conflating my dual obsessions.

The peak period for road trip fever for me was 2001-2004, as every over-the-top drive assured me of charting a stack of territory I'd never visited before.  After 2004, I retained most of my passion for road trips for a few more years, but my Minnesota road trips in particular lost their urgency after 2007 when I completed my tour of every town in the state.  As for elections, I held on at peak passion level from 2001-2006, and the frequency of my politics-related posts on this blog tells the story of my declining intensity.  Back in 2006, the first year Mark My Words was online, the blog was abuzz with several election-related posts per month tracking the Democrats fight to win that year's midterms.  For a variety of reasons, the frequency of my political/election posts on this blog has greatly diminished, but the primary reason is that the passion for full-time election obsession is gone.

So why is the passion gone?  For road trips, it's a matter of having visited everyplace within a reasonable driving distance of my hometown.  In 2014, I find the most enjoyable road trips to be the ones where I visit a lot of new territory, but having already explored so much within driving distance, it's getting harder to find trips that take me to places I've never been.  If I go someplace in North or South Dakota, for example, I have to drive several hours in familiar territory to get to whatever the destination is, meaning I spend a lot of time checked out coming to and from.  I'm adjusting some of my road trip patterns to the south and east as opposed to the north and west and hope to have some more interesting road trips in the years ahead as a result.  With that said, I think my patience and attention span for these road trips is no longer what it used to be, so I don't anticipate the era of wide-eyed, youthful passion for road trips to ever return in its 2000-2004 heyday.

My loss of zeal for elections first became evident in 2007.  For the previous three election cycles, I spent until the next cycle feverishly categorizing and recategorizing numbers into tidy charts and grids.  It never really got old and I ate, slept, and breathed election analysis before and after the first Tuesday in November.  But in 2007, I quickly grew tired of this usual pattern, even after the very impressive midterm election victory the Democrats pulled off the year prior.  And while I couldn't get enough of the pre-election coverage in earlier cycles, the 2008 primaries burned me out and I was checked out of the 2008 election until after Labor Day.  Now I really got into the 2012 election lead-up but have only been running quarter-throttle for this midterm cycle as I did in 2010.  As for the obsessive charting and categorization of election returns after the election, I still do it, but it tends to last for about three months after the election and then vanish for the next 20 months unlike a decade ago when I charted these election figures continuously.  My increased cynicism about the futility of election outcomes no matter who wins has not helped in sustaining my passion level either.

I'll always have a soft spot for both road trips and elections.  I still feel some level of excitement even for the road trips that have lost the majority of their luster over the years, and some of the road trips still prove thoroughly exciting, enjoyable, and memorable.  Furthermore, I still get a major case of election fever every fall, even on odd-numbered years, and take to my VHS cassettes to watch recorded coverage of past elections before burning out on it in time for the holidays.  I suspect this pattern will continue on both elections and road trips.  It's sad in a way that my youthful giddiness for politics and road-tripping has ebbed in the last decade as I'd like to get that passion back at times, but time and people change (even me occasionally!) and resisting that change is futile.