Currently atop the long list of "Ways in Which I Am a Great Trial to Kate" is my odd obsession with VH1's "I Love the 80's". The shows are sort of a hanging curve over my pop-culture plate, and I find them weirdly hypnotic. If I stumble across it while channel-surfing, I'll sit and watch it, even if I've seen the episode in question three times before (for some reason, they show the same three or four years over and over).

This is, of course, largely a matter of the Golden Age of pop culture in general being twelve (1983, in my case)-- that's about the point where your tastes in music, books, clothes, and so forth stop being received wisdom from your parents, and start being a matter of active personal choice. However regrettable those choices may appear in retrospect, it's hard not to harbor a little bit of nostalgia for the major pillars of whatever era you came of age in.

There are a whole bunch of aspects of 80's culture that I never fully partook of-- I couldn't stand most of the top tv shows at the time, for example, so I have a hard time working up any enthusiasm for "Dukes of Hazzard" tributes-- but my fascination with ephemeral pop music was born in the early 80's, which accounts for my continuing fascination with Dexy's Midnight Runners...

This is all by way of a long lead-in to another mix tape post, mostly because we were talking about the VH1 show over the weekend, and I'm not feeling all that inspired to write about anything else. This isn't one of those deliberately random tapes, though-- this is my cheesey 80's mix tape, that I keep around for when I need comfort music of an especially dippy variety.

The tape actually has its origin in my sister's career as a competitive swimmer. Back in the mid-90's, she and the rest of the swim team were stuck in a hotel at some away meet in some desolate corner of the Midwest, and sometime during a long, strange, weekend, one of them phoned in and ordered the Totally Eighties collection that was being hawked on tv at the time. (They weren't actually aware of this until it showed up in their mailbox back on campus, but that's what happened...) She taped a selection of songs, and sent me a copy, and I edited it to replace some of the more ridiculous acts (Tone Loc, Billy Ocean) with other stuff I had lying around.