I rode the bus to school the majority of my school days. I always hated it because no matter where we lived I always seemed to be the last stop in the afternoon. I was the first to get on, the last to get off, and that made for a very long bus ride every day.
I honestly don’t have very many memories of riding the bus, but there is this one memory that has been lodged in my head forever, and it has to do with waiting for the bus in the morning for a year or so in high school.
My father is the type of guy who gets up and has to sip on coffee for two hours before he can get ready and leave the house. I can pop up and just straight in the shower and I’m good to go. This meant that every morning while I was getting up for school and he was getting up for work, we’d have a period of time where our morning routines would cross over.
My dad loved to zone out to the Weather Channel, which in the 90’s consisted of the same thing every eight minutes or so. There were no videos or meteorologists, just low quality graphics, text, and soothing jazz. I actually miss that version of the Weather Channel that wasn’t created for ratings but just for the good of the public, but that’s a rant for another time. So, every morning, he’d sip his coffee and just stare through the TV as we watched the same weather information on a loop for thirty minutes or so until I got ready to get on the bus.
One day, after a decade of doing this, I finally snapped and asked to watch something else. He handed me the remote and I turned to MTV, which played actual music videos this early in the morning. To give you a time period of when this was the two music videos that come to mind are The Corr’s Breathless and Evan and Jaron’s Crazy for this Girl which should place this around 2000 when I was sixteen years old.
For a while we’d watch music videos but if a commercial came on or I didn’t like the song, I’d change the channel. TBS was airing Saved by the Bell, so TBS became my go to channel when the music sucked. By this point, I’d seen every episode of Saved by the Bell several times over but it didn’t matter. Back then you just watched it. So slowly my music video mornings changed into Saved by the Bell mornings and my dad discovered the greatness of Kelly Kapowski, which is a bit creepy when I think back on it.
This period of time didn’t last long in my life, as I got my driver’s license a few months later, but for a few short months every morning I got ready and listened to some music that I liked or watched a TV show I enjoyed and that seem to make my morning just a little bit better.
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