The Perfect Wave

Tim and I were boogie boarding in Crystal Cove earlier this week and had this conversation. I tried to recreate it as best I could for you as follows: M- What if my wave never comes?
T- You have to be patient. Your wave will come. You don't want to jump at the first wave, ride it half way to the shore, and then realize that that wasn't your wave. You can separate from your wave, but that gets messy.
All my friends seem to be getting their waves, but I can't find a wave that's right for me.
M- What can I do to make sure that I'm ready for my wave when it comes?
T- You've just for to be in the best place you can and go for it when it's right.
M- How do I know when it's right?
T- It's just a feeling that it's tough to describe. When your wave comes, you'll know.
M- What if my wave never comes? What if I spend all day swimming and I have no wave?
T- Even if you are waveless during this day, we believe in a future day when everyone will get their own wave.
(Dallin chiming in)- Personally, I like my waves all natural. If a wave has been altered, it's just wrong.
M- I wasn't ready, and I think I missed my only chance for a wave.
T- There's not one right wave for every person. Some waves are bigger than others, tall waves, short waves, some that break earlier, some later, you never can tell when a wave will come and surprise you.
T- If you're not careful, a wave will chew you up and spit you out. Some waves are more dangerous than others.
M- Isn't every wave beautiful and perfect in its own way?
T- No. No they aren't.
M- It can get confusing when you're in the bay area- sometimes there are waves that go both ways :/
T- You know, you can't compare every wave to the one that got away.
And Dallin's wise words of wisdom to wrap it up- No man can ride three waves at once. Occasionally two, but never three.

Fine, Fine Line

Last night, I was looking up music on YouTube. I was listening to a couple of songs from Avenue Q, and decided to search "Laura Cardy MIM". I watched her sing a couple of songs, and this morning I found myself humming "Fine, Fine Line" and missing my friends once again.
I've got some of the greatest friends in the world back home in Phoenix. I've really enjoyed living in Berkeley and getting to know people here, but my heart is still back home. I'm really looking forward to getting back there soon :)

The Fortunate

I'm going to be honest for this one- when I looked up the lyrics for the song, I fully expected to be completely wrong on most of them. I figured it is one of those songs that I've heard a bunch, but never really paid that close attention to. And as I was singing to myself in the shower I stopped and thought, "wow. Those lyrics don't really make any sense to me at all."

Turns out I was singing the actual lyrics. If you check out Cartel's "The Fortunate", let me know if the song makes sense to you.

So now that I've established that I don't know what the song is about, what do I write about?
I'm going to choose one of the catchier lines and put my own thoughts into it. Several times, the song goes:

Heyyy don't pay no mind.

We are the second, you're minutes behind

I take that as a call to live in the present. Cartel is being very realistic in realizing that they are a second. Their time is probably going to be very short in the limelight. It's not that they aren't any good, it's just the nature of the music industry. (I also think it's funny that the majority of the comments on the video are people talking about whether or not they found Cartel on Pandora. I did!)

While that is not the most positive of thoughts, it feels like they are saying "it could be worse. We could be minutes behind." There are plenty of groups who hesitated with a fear of the future- I'll probably never know about them. There are plenty of groups living in the past, remembering what music used to be like- if I knew them, I've probably forgotten most of them. 

I wish I knew what the future held for me sometimes. I don't know if I ever would have guessed that I would go to work one day in a suit and tie so that I could have a job interview conducted half in German and half in English where I would be grilled on protein chemistry. Things happen from one day to the next and amazing experiences like this emerge. One of my favorite quotes on this subject comes from the Music Man. It's an awful manipulation by a guy who is a sleazeball, but I feel like it speaks truth:

Oh, my dear little librarian. You pile up enough tomorrows,

 and you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. 

I don't know about you, but I'd like to make today worth remembering

So I'll turn this manipulation on you :) was there something today that you thought "Oh, I'll do that tomorrow. I can't do that right now"? Well then, pull a Nike, and, "Just Do It."

Or, you know don't. But you may wake up one day to find that you're minutes behind.

Dark Blue

First off, I think I like the music video for "Dark Blue". A lot. But I'm not sure that I get the video. I started out like "wow, this is super cool!" and then by the end I was like "wait... what?" Go ahead- go give it a watch. I'll wait.

Right?


So then, I'm pretty sure this post isn't going to be about a 2 month-long jive competition, but to be honest, when I start typing, I really don't ever know where I'm going to go with it.
I really like the question that gets posed like a dozen times in the song:

Have you ever been alone in a crowded room?

That's the kind of question that sends my mind running and starts all sorts of trains of thought. What does it mean to be alone? When do I feel most alone? What kinds of crowds contribute to feeling alone? Is alone a bad thing?
I don't really have any solidified answers to a lot of these questions yet. One thing I do know is that being able to discuss questions like these is a big part of what makes me tick. I love sitting down with someone and discussing why's and wherefore's. I love getting stumped and looking things up on Wikipedia. I love answering questions with questions, and then making connections to things unrelated at first glance.
The extra-credit question at the end of my Transport Phenomenon II: Heat/Mass Transfer "heat" exam was "why is the sky blue?" There was some outrage among fellow classmates because that was really not an issue of heat transfer and a very vague question. I couldn't have loved the question more. I spent the last fifteen minutes of the exam (at least!) writing the best answer I could. I don't remember how much credit I got, but it was fun if nothing else.
I have to thank my parents, because, somewhere along the way, I never lost my curiosity. I don't think I ever specifically asked either of them why the sky is blue (although that is the classic child-like curiosity question), but I did ask a bunch of questions. I don't really ever remember getting shut down- on the contrary! They moved the encyclopedia set to my room so I could look up "Vesuvius" and "Venus" in my spare time. It was the start of a great love of learning.
For me, the color of curiosity is dark blue.

Lights

As I was showering the other morning, the worst part of getting music stuck in my head struck: I had a song stuck there but didn't hardly know any of the words. I was stuck half humming lines like:

They show the lights are maybe

cold in the stone, show me baby co-o-old.

and:

Cause I'm calling, calling calling you

(repeat ~12x before realizing I don't know the next line)

The worst part was that I wasn't sure enough on any of the lines to really be able to google the lyrics. I tried humming the tune into soundhound, but that didn't work. Finally, one of my searches brought up Lights by Ellie Goulding. Even then, I wasn't sure that I had found the right song as I read through the lyrics. I'm not the most poetically savvy individual, but I couldn't make heads or tails of the song. After listening to it (a very 80's music video too), I realized it was, indeed, the correct song.

And then I had to figure out what sense I could make out of the lyrics to lead to a blog post :/

Luckily, as I was searching for the song, I came across something that made me much more excited: I found out that Boyce Avenue did a cover of her song. It's good (better than the original I would say), but the real reason that I got excited was that it was an excuse to put Boyce Avenue's channel on play and just let it stream.

If you haven't checked out their music, I would highly recommend it. I think one of the most impressive things you can do is take something that is good, stay true enough to it that it is clear that the foundation came from the original, and wildly rethink it to make it better. A great example of this is their cover of "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry. By simply changing the perspective and altering a few words, a whole different spin is put on the song and (from my somewhat conservative point of view) greatly improves the song.

One more example:

In 1900, L. Frank Baum wrote a novel "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" which later became The Wizard of Oz. In 1995, Gregory Maguire re-imagined the world of Oz and destroyed all that was good and praiseworthy in the story. I attempted to read it (for reasons I'll get to shortly) and couldn't bring myself to finish it. There are few books that I have not finished, but Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West was so filled with trash and such a farce in the face of what Baum had created so many decades before.

Fast forward another 8 years. Stephen Schwartz premiered what I feel is one of the best musicals of all time. Wicked tells the story that Maguire was trying to tell: the history of Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West. Their past friendship and the world that Dorothy dropped in on were things which gave the musical purpose and meaning. Schwartz's genius was in making the show funny, quick-paced and beautiful. It was so inspiring to me after I saw it, that I went and checked out the book that it is "based" on to read. That's why I got as far as I did in to the book. I kept telling myself, "the musical is so good, I just need to keep reading, it's going to get better. I know it is." But it didn't. Schwartz really did take something that was awful, keep enough of the premise to have the foundation in place, and then recreated the rest into the musical which is still wildly successful today.

As Ellie Goulding says:

Noises, I play in my head

Touch my own skin and hope that I'm still breathing

whatever that means :)