Me in three years time.

Isn't it strange how little time we, as teenagers, spend thinking about our parents lives before we came along? We almost appear to forget they HAD a life before we were born, or if we do manage to make this realization, we tend not to dwell on it long, for fear of loosing our own sanity.

Today I can safely say I lost that sanity.

You see, some twenty years ago, my dad somehow came to posses a state-of-the-art £500 video camera. It was rubbish by todays standards, but that somehow never occurred to him.

So what did he proceed to do with this state-of-the-art camera?

He had his roommate film him dancing in circles around their flat.
In a biker jacket.
With nothing but one small tuft of hair on his head. (He wasn't quite bald back then.)

He and his roommate edited this footage into a tape, which recently got converted into a DVD, which i recently had the *ahem* "pleasure" of watching.

Now, don't get me wrong, it was funny as hell, but there was something in this footage that scared the living crap out of me. Originally I thought it was simply the shock of seeing my usually sensible father acting like such a spaz (he wasn't even drunk or anything!!), but after some thought, I can now safely say it was something quite different.

In that footage, my dad was only three years older than I am now.

A trivial observation? Maybe, but it raises the type of thoughts that i mentioned previously. Before i was born, my dad very much had a life. (If you call that kind of activity "having a life".) Hell, this wasn't just before I was born, this was before my parents even met, before I even existed!

And yet there's my dad, dancing away on a TV screen, as if it happened yesterday. Soon, I will be at that same point in my life as he was back then, where my life is very much my own.

And maybe, someday afterwards, my children will watch hologram discs of ME, at twenty years of age, being a complete nutcase as well.

Or maybe I'll be a kind parent and realize they'd be better off not knowing.