It’s that time of year when I rewatch Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl Halftime Show multiple times per day.

It is so fucking good. I love it. In the future I will force the robot health aides at my nursing home to watch this with me.

After watching the full performance with my youngest I had a hankering to watch Gaga’s old Bad Romance music video. I pulled it up on YouTube, hit play, and was immediately taken aback by the low video quality!

“Wow,” I commented to my kid. “I forgot how old this is! I forgot how poor video quality was in the 2000s!”

As a history-lover, I am finding it very exciting to be getting older. I was alive when this music video came out! I remember when Lady Gaga wore that meat dress to some awards show and people were super offended and lost their minds! If you gave me a list of her albums, I could pretty easily put them in order of release date because I was there and I vaguely remember it.

I had this happen recently when I was watching a documentary about the Bush family. I was taking in all this new information, watching these elections unfold in the 1970s and 1980s with the same interest I have in any historical moments that I wasn’t there for. And then we got to the 1992 presidential election.

I remember that election! It’s the first one I remember! I made a construction paper sign for Bill Clinton! I remember being confused about how Dan Quayle had the same name as the ridiculous little birds that ran around in our alley!

I was there and I remember it!

What a fantastic advantage to have actually lived through something! What a gift! I love that moments from my childhood are far enough in the past now that we’re making documentaries about them! In just thirty years I will be the equivalent of the old guys on History Channel with their USS Endicott hats who slowly relay their personal anecdotes from “dubya dubya two.”

Of course, I don’t have any good war stories. I didn’t have a front row seat for any major historical event. I can’t think of a single documentary topic that might lead to me being interviewed, now or anytime in the future.

My kids at least have one thing. They were five years old and seven years old respectively when the covid-19 pandemic hit. They were old enough to have vague memories of those years, but young enough that they will be some of the last people alive who remember that pandemic. I am hopeful that the AI documentarians of the future will deem them worthy of interviews!

And I will continue along just being delighted every time someone makes a new documentary about a major event in the 1990s, and then the 2000s and then the 2010s. I am going to be insufferable around the time I hit seventy, just wanting to talk about my inconsequential perspective on some random event from 2012.