Have you heard? I am estranged from my family, something I sometimes don’t think about at all, and other times I think about too much. This is the first major holiday season where I haven’t felt as down about it, which is perhaps sad in another way. Time is weird.

I am sitting at a coffee shop working on my second novel—but for this brief detour—listening to my “New 90s” playlist. This novel is less twisty in terms of plot so I can listen to songs with actual singing, as opposed to to the electronic and ambient music I usually prefer to listen to as I write.

Something about the faster pace of the pop music is keeping me on track, too (again, but for this detour). As I’ve said before, in another life, in addition to being a Disney blogger of sorts, I am a music blogger. Seriously, there is a defunct blog out there that holds a few album and single reviews written by yours truly. I miss doing that. Anyway, with such a predilection comes a habit of making playlists for almost every type of circumstance.

The past few years I have found myself deeply exploring 90s popular music, not only because I like the music but because (1) it was the later 90s where I came of an age where I became somewhat aware of popular music and (2) it’s the era where my parents didn’t show us as much of what was on the radio, so to speak.

I have theories about how our parents’ musical tastes impact our own musical tastes, and as a parent of a young kids, I realize that I am less aware of popular music right now (whatever that means in the streaming age), which I suspect is similar to how my parents were during much of the 90s when raising me and my brothers. Thus, this period will be a gap of music I likely won’t play for my kids as much. (Other than Taylor Swift’s output, of course).

Anyway, it is this type of thinking that has resulted in me compiling a massive “New 90s” playlist that I listen to as I study the songs that comprise the list. Alanis Morissette’s “You Learn” just came on, the unexpected trigger for today’s rumination on estrangement because it was a song my younger brother and I often laughed about, at times randomly singing the chorus, incorrectly of course (“you learn, you learn, you learn, you LEARNNNNN”).

You know, those types of things only siblings do and laugh about. And for a moment, I am reminded of the good times I had with my family, the best times, really, before it all went the way it did. And for a few minutes I am happy and not so much sad because things are the way they are and I can’t change them now, it seems, but because I can remember the good times, and enjoy that glimmer, if only for the three minutes and fifty-nine minutes of a song from yesteryear.

You lose, you learn.