I'm Getting Her Google For Christmas

So, I've got these friends.

Let me start this again. My friend has a friend and that friend is married to someone...difficult.

I shouldn't have started like that.

She's...man.

See, I'm educated, but I'm not what you'd call informed on a lot of topics, and the topics about which I do find myself informed--TV shows, comic books, candy--tend to be things that I'm surprised other people might not be interested in. I suppose I can be a little cocky about it. If I were a doctor, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't expect you to know the things I'd know about, say, surgery. But since my circle of friends is largely of a generation spanning only ten years or so, and since we're all from relatively the same place, geographically, then I expect there's a common ground that we share in terms of pop culture.

Is it just me? If we have nothing else to talk about, if our jobs don't line up and our politics are opposite, then shouldn't we be able to find something at the level of small talk in the world of what you might watch on TV, or what kind of music you listen to, or if you think Nick Nolte's rep as crazy is unfair considering he's actually quite talented?

See?

But no. There's nothing to talk about, because if you start with her, then you get a short little "I don't watch TV" or "most movies are terrible", and what can I do with that?

So, the question came up, one of my friends couldn't think of a name, and I could: "Who was that model in the Whitesnake videos?"

So I said "Tawny Kitaen", which, by the way, is correct, and for a certain type of person, common knowledge. I'll allow that she's just not that type of person. But if you weren't the kind of person who knows that Tawny Kitaen danced on the hood of a car in Whitesnake's video for Here I Go Again, then wouldn't you just accept that as the answer, since who cares? Because it's Whitesnake and seriously, who cares, again? Who cares, some more? Who cared, ever?

But she says, in a really agressively argumentative tone: "It was not! It was Alicia Silverstone!"
Do you ever feel like someone's all up in your face even if they're across the room? I'm pretty sure I flinched.

And so I explained, because I'm sort of a dick, I guess, that Alicia Silverstone was a child when Whitesnake was making videos, and that instead, she was in a series of Aerosmith videos a decade later.

The response? "I don't listen to music". I'm trying to make this clear: it was not some sort of mea culpa, like she was embarrassed and apologetic about not listening to music. Like I'd be in all those moments when you want to talk about what's in the news and I have to admit that I didn't read the paper today. In those moments, I try to convey that I'm interested in the news, and it's my intention to learn more and stay up-to-date, but today, I just missed having enough time to catch up. No. Instead, she claims not to listen to music as a source of pride. Like anyone who does listen to music is just wasting time on shallow things, like music is porn or junk food or blog-reading, all of which I'm quite fond, thank you very much.

By the way, I watched one of each just now (Whitesnake and Aerosmith). Tawny Kitaen is very operators-are-standing-by, but Alicia Siverstone is a fox. I'm just saying. Life's too short not to know the difference.