Sheltered

So I realized I'm really out of touch with mainstream music, and really just pop culture in general. I don't know the latest bands, I have no idea what celebrities are popular other than the things I see on the tabloids while standing in line at the grocery store, and I haven't really watched any of the new TV Shows. But I really don't have any desire to. I really have no reason other than the fact that sometimes when I'm talking to people they reference these things and I'm clueless.

I was thinking about it again today and I really have never been in touch with what's considered cool and what's not. Well, I have to take part of that back, I know that what I like is generally not considered cool so I have the second half figured out. I mean, even as far back as elementary school I was way out of touch. I listened to bands that none of my classmates had heard of. I loved REM, Rush, Phil Collins, and Collective Soul. I really didn't watch much TV and I remember how weird I always felt when all the other kids talked about Step By Step, The Real World, and Blossom. I watched Discovery Channel. And the weather. How do you fit in with that when you're a third grader and all you watch is educational shows (by choice, my parents really didn't care what I watched) I tried to fit in, I would smile, and say that I watched the shows, I would pretend I listened to the music (I can't even remember what music they talked about because I never listened to it and have no idea what was popular aside from grunge and none of the other kids liked that apparently).

The only time I ever really got involved with pop culture was in middle school, I watched MTV, listened to the radio, followed celebrities, watched popular movies. And then I realized that I didn't really care. So I went back to being out of touch and not really caring what anyone else was doing. In high school a lot of the times I guess I was ahead of the game and knew about a lot of bands before they got popular but I always listened to weird shit and most of the time it didn't get popular.

It's really a lot better this way. Sometimes I get weird looks when people get into my car and I'm still listening to grunge (most rock aside from indie rock sucked after that). I do listen to a few new bands, but mostly just stuff people think is weirder than grunge.

The whole point of this blog is that I realized during my childhood I was almost sheltered from pop culture. I don't think that was my parents intention really, because it's not like they were sheltering me because they thought it would be a bad influence, I think they just thought the shit they were into was cool and I thought I would like it too. And I'm not sure if it was more they didn't expose it to me or more I didn't really care for it. Most of the time I just emulated my uncle (who is still the coolest person I know) and he was always kind of out there. My mom usually just tells me I was born a decade too late.