Nothing Compares 2 U

I read somewhere or maybe I heard it on an episode of 7th Heaven (because it SO sounds like something you'd see on an episode of 7th Heaven, doesn't it?) that a sign of aging was the inability to accept new ideas and concepts. Kind of the same way as a teenager your parents would be all "TURN OFF THAT AWFUL MUSIC, REBECCA ELIZABETH!" or maybe it was just MY parents. I don't know. I'd always assumed that the sign that I was getting old would be when I began to grumble about the damn kids playing on my lawn.

I remember when CD's replaced cassette tapes as the Next Big Thing and my mother was horribly upset by this. She seemed wildly disgusted by the idea that the music was going to be broken up into tiny bits to be recorded onto a digital disc (or...something, I'm not an expert on much of anything besides getting out of doing an honest day's work) and refused to buy them for quite awhile. Eventually, of course, she succumbed, but I always thought that it was pretty funny how she carried on about it. She grimly held onto her tapes, slowly rewinding them and wearing them out while I merely depressed a button and my music flipped seamlessly from one song to another.

My husband, The Daver, is my source of all things social media related, is always telling me about The Next Big Thing, and predictably I resist, mocking it until eventually I give in, starting a new account somewhere else. I made fun of blogging until I started my own, where, thankfully I still mock myself, because you cannot take yourself too seriously, and I made fun of Twitter until I got an account there, too. Ditto for Facebook, and LinkedIn, too. Pretty much anywhere you can find me, I've mocked before I've signed up, gritting my teeth and eating my slice of humble pie.

And I suppose what's funniest about it all is that the thing that I mocked most mercilesslly--blogging--is what I enjoy most. It's the one thing that I snidely compare all others to when I critique them. “Well,” I say to The Daver as he tells me about This New Thing. “It'll NEVER replace BLOGGING for me,” and so far, after six years nothing has. I do Tweet and I Facebook and I Digg and I Stumble and I do everything else, and nothing, nothing, compares to my true love, blogging. Here, and at Mommy Wants Vodka. Even if it is incredibly self-absorbed and narcissistic and obnoxiously self-important.

Because, well, so am I.