“Dad Magazine,” a parody magazine cover by Jaya Saxena and Matt Lubchansky published monthly at website The Toast (the-toast.net).
When I recently came across one of the headlines for the January 2015 cover of Dad Magazine—”Wow. That was 30 Years Ago? Wow”—I knew that everything in my life had, without my having noticed, changed.
Only the covers of Dad Magazine actually exist. They are the parodic work of Jaya Saxena and Matt Lubchansky, published once a month on the website The Toast (the-toast.net). They are, I like to think, loving mockery of the things that dads tend to think and do, or not do. (Other recent heads: “Is This the Year You Finally Finish That Thing on the Porch?” and “Rolling Coolers!”)
I had never thought of myself as a dad until I saw Dad Magazine. My dad is a dad. My dad has a garage full of ladders and keeps a super close watch on the price of gas. I’m just a guy. Not a cool guy, I’ve never claimed that. Just some guy. Nobody you’d notice.
But that 30 years ago thing, well, I’ve been doing that for a long time now. Longer than I’ve been a dad, I’m sorry to say. Like, Don Mattingly won the American League MVP award in 1985. That’s 30 years ago??? Wow. Wow.
Thirty years ago. When Mattingly won the AL MVP, 30 years ago would have been 1955. Which means my 1985 is now 1985’s 1955!
Wow. Just wow.
To a 12-year-old today—that’s my age then—Don Mattingly, 54, is some old dude, the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers or something. He’s an authority figure. He’s a dad. I remember when his son, Preston, was born. Preston is 27.
I realize that all people reach a point in their lives where they realize something like this. I’m at that point right about now, as you can see. No longer the finely attuned observer of the foibles of others. I am the observed. The foibler.
I’d really rather think that I’m not noticed for my habits and peculiarities, I’d rather not imagine people rolling their eyes as Joe goes off on another tangent about something that only seems significant to him, or seems to forget something we’d just discussed.
Good news for me is that my kids, at 4 and 1, are too young yet to be the ones rolling their eyes. Although my son is showing signs that he’s keeping a wary watch on the old man.
He’s learning how to read, so I am always encouraging him to read books to me, rather than the other way around. He usually resists, so one of my methods is to deliberately misread the words of the book, in an attempt to get him to correct me.
Apparently he’s has enough of this tomfoolery, if his recent comment is any way to judge. After one of my latest deliberate slip-ups, he admonished me, without a hint of a smile, “Dad, c’mon. You can do better.”
I must take comfort in the knowledge that I am not alone in this descent to predictability and senility. All dads are daddish; that’s why we’re so mockable. Some dads are cooler than others, no doubt, but few are outside the reach of all their children.
Or outside of the reach of their phone apps. In April, Spotify, the music-streaming service, released some of the information it had compiled about the listening habits of its users. In case you hadn’t realized that your music-streaming service is watching (hearing) your every move, well—it is.
Research by Ajay Kalia, published at Spotify’s blog, insights.spotify,com, showed that listeners’ tastes evolve rapidly until the age of 25, maturing by age 35. Fourteen-year-olds tend to listen almost exclusively to most popular artists of the day, while 25-year-olds are just starting to show a marked preference for music beyond the top 40. Between the ages of 35 and 41, the average person’s tastes stay exactly the same.
And then there’s age 42.
Guess how old I am.
At age 42, the research showed, people—note that the study did not specify “Dads,” but I’m saying it was implied—they regress. They start listening to popular music again. There’s a very prominent dent in the graph at that age, which some have identified as the very image of a midlife crisis. (By 45, most people have returned to their old favorites; crises over?)
So if you’ve got Jason Derulo and Ariana Grande on your iPod (I don’t, but I haven’t been 42 that long), don’t worry: you’re exactly where you should be. You’re a dad. You might be in midlife crisis. You probably are repeating yourself a lot. Repeating yourself a lot. I’m not sure. What were we talking about?
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