I listened to it a few times and loved, especially “Nightswimming” (I had yet to realize how many people would have similar experience of that album and song). About midway into the semester, my roommate Danny and I had a paper due on the same day, and our friend Lex from the floor was in the same class as me. He brought his portable Mac down (at that point it was one of the cream colored boxes that Mac made famous), and the three of us set up shop in the room to write our papers.

We started around 10:00pm and I put in R.E.M. on Danny’s stereo, and hit repeat. Danny and Lex were mostly hip hop fans, but as middle class white kids in the early 90s could also claim citizenship in the Alternative Nation. R.E.M. was totally up their alley. While working on these papers, we also tried to decipher the lyrics to “Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” and practically every other song on the album. We worked on our respective papers, side by side, for 8 hours that night, pounding Mountain Dews and Tootsie Rolls (I was obsessed with them for a short period). I crashed at 6, when my paper was done, and got a little more than four hours of sleep before my first class that day (Understanding Mass Media). That night remains one of the best memories of my college experience.

Fall’s not here yet, but something’s in the air that tells me that it’s time to pull out the R.E.M. playlists again, and maybe, just for old time’s sake, drink a Mountain Dew while writing.