'Til I Hear You Sing

It's taken me a couple of days to actually get to writing this post, just been a bit busy.

On Wednesday, Alex and I went to see the filmed showing of "Love Never Dies" performed by the Australian cast last year. I'd seen the show in London during the Summer of 2010 (as chronicled in my blog) I really enjoyed the show when I saw it then, but it really didn't get very good reviews. About 3 months later, they closed the show for some pretty major reworks.

One of the reworks was changing the how the show begins. In stead of a drawn-out reminiscing sequence, it is this song.

If you didn't listen to it, go do so now, please.

Yeah, I've got to say, I love this song.

I couldn't tell you if it is the voice, the music, or the text. They are all so interconnected and beautiful.

The Phantom, Ben Lewis, is fantastic. He does such a good job of playing the phantom. I felt like there was never any doubt that the phantom was crazy in this production, but at the same time, I still felt sympathy for him and wanted to root him on.

The music is beautiful. It's grand and sweeping and enthralling. I felt like it was such a good way to start the show of and make it so clear and real. And, if I'm not mistaken, Ben hits a high Bb there towards the end. Shivers? Yeah, they were there.

The lyrics are what I find the most evocative. There is such a raw longing, that it's tough not to connect with it. And yet, at the same time, there is this twinge of darkness. It's just... not... right. He sings of how he will never feel "more than halfway real" until he has heard her sing again. I think that most of us have felt longing and can empathize with the desire for what we feel like is impossible and unobtainable, but I feel like what makes the difference is how you handle that. For the phantom, the longing has eaten away at him to the point that there is nothing else in his life worthwhile. That's the point where I think you start to understand that something is not right with that man, but you still have this aching hope that he can find what it is that his soul needs. What a compelling contradiction of a character to have as your protagonist.

There are so many other tangents I could write about for this song, but I'll leave it at this and let you make analyses. May 29th can't get here quick enough.

Baking

So, I'm departing from my usual "song-stuck-in-my-head" themed-posts for today. I have a topic that I wanted to write down some thoughts about and I haven't had a song stuck in my head about baking yet.

I was pondering tonight as I was making banana nut cookie dough bread.

(TANGENT! As I was talking with friends at the institute yesterday, somehow, the almost-overripe bananas that I had at home came up in conversation. I expressed my desire to make banana nut bread, but then realized that I don't have any nuts at home. Alex suggested replacing them with chocolate chips, but I also don't have any of those. BETTER! I have chocolate chip cookie dough in my freezer! [I feel like frozen cookie dough is an essential. If I had to make the choice between buying milk and buying cookie dough once I'd run out, I'd be hard pressed to choose] So, the plan was hatched to make some banana cookie dough bread)

:)

Back to my pondering (it was profound pondering, I promise). I have always loved baking. Cooking is enjoyable, and especially when I'm masterminding a meal for a group, but there is something about baking that has always had a special, exalted place in my heart. I used to think it was because baking usually means sweets, and I love sweets. I'm starting to think that there may be more to it than that.

Baking has ingredients.

Please don't laugh too hard at that statement, because it really does embody all the profundity of this post. Allow me to elaborate.

When I made dinner on Sunday, I made lemon pepper chicken and mashed potatoes. The chicken involved sautéing the breast in olive oil with pepper and drizzling lemon juice over it. Fun, but in the end, I was just fancying up a chicken breast. The potatoes were better, I chopped and then boiled them, then got to mash them (one of my favoritest things to do in the kitchen) with spices and cream and milk. That's more than just potatoes, but in the end, it's still potatoes. (Profound, right?)

Ok, so to the point now. Baking. When I started baking this evening, I had bananas on the cusp of overripeness. I had flour. I had eggs. I had sugar. I had baking soda. Sugar would really be the only one I'd eat by itself, and I don't do that nearly as much as I used to. Other than that, each of those ingredients would be pretty disgusting.

It was fascinating to watch though, as I sifted the dry ingredients together, then slowly added in the others, the batter came into being. Suddenly, before my eyes, something delicious was created. I love that.

What a beautiful metaphor that is as well. I like to think that each of us is an ingredient and life is one beautiful baking experiment. Some people are sweeter by nature, some cause those around them to rise, some provide structure, and others decorate. God made each of us individual, and individually, we're each lacking. I think that is why there is an innate drive to connect, to socialize, to love. As we work with each other, great things happen.

On that note, my bread is ready to be pulled out of the oven. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to enjoy the results of a bunch of ingredients becoming banana cookie dough bread :)

Toreador!

En garde!

This morning, I caught myself humming a tune that's an oldie. Oldie in both the sense of when it was written (1845) as well as how long it's been stuck floating around in my head.
Senior year in high school, I decided that I was going to take on a challenge for my audition to the all-region honor choir. My director was fairly brainless so he supported my efforts to learn and sing "Toreador!" from Carmen.
Yeah...
It was kind of a nightmare.
BUT, I loved the song and the chorus is forever implanted in my brain.
Escamillo, the toreador, sings of his profession, bullfighting.
This post isn't going to focus on how disgusting bullfighting is *shudder* but rather on the contest of love that Escamillo is singing of.
The portion that gets stuck in my head starts around 2:15 in the video I linked to above. The text is:

Toreador, en garde! Toreador, Toreador!
Et songe bien, oui, songe en combattant
Qu'un oeil noir te regarde,
Et que l'amour t'attend,
Toreador, L'amour t'attend!
Et songe bien, oui, songe en combattant
Qu'un oeil noir te regarde,
Et que l'amour t'attend,
Toreador, L'amour t'attend!

and the English translation of that would be:

Toreador, en guard! Toreador, Toreador!

And dream away, yes, dream in combat,
That a black eye is watching you,
And that love awaits you,
Toreador, love awaits you!
And dream away, yes dream in combat,
That a black eye is watching you
And may love await you,
Toreador, love await you!

My thoughts for this are a longing for simplicity. Escamillo sings about acts of bravery winning love. I kind of envy how straightforward that world was.

Don't get me wrong, I love living today, and how much quality of life has improved since then, but some times I feel a bit overwhelmed by how much technology has made things. For example:

Let's say I would like to ask a girl out. Here's a sample of how my mental preparation for that could go:

Hmmm... I will see her in passing on Tuesday, but she's always in a hurry then. I could ask her out, but that might be awkward...

How about when I see her at the institute on Thursday. I could ask then...

But that's only a day before the weekend. She'll have plans by then.

Good point... I'll have to try something else.

Lots of people don't really care for electronic communication, but you may have to give that a shot.

I can do that. Let's see, what are my options?

I could call...

Not bad.

I could send a facebook message...

That's kind of chicken.

I could text...

There are girls who'd turn that down on the fact that it was a text asking them out...

Ugh. That's true. I could start with a poke on facebook...

...

Yeah, let's pretend I didn't suggest that one...

Ok. So I'll call. I can do this! I can.

Dialing...

R*i*i*i*i*i*ng

.

.

.

R*i*i*i*i*i*ng

.

.

.

R*i*i*i*i*i*ng

.

(Oh crap. What if she doesn't answer?

are you going to leave a voicemail?

I don't know! Some people refuse to listen to voicemail, but some people prefer it...

.

.

R*i*i*i*i*i*ng

You could just hang up and then she'll see that you called and call back...

but then the ball is completely out of my court.

I don't like that...

.

.

.

"hey, you've reached..."

*CLICK*

Maybe I'll just do some homework this weekend.

So, yeah. I probably over-complicate things and think that the past was a lot simpler than it actually was, but it seems to me that in our efforts to improve and provide more options, we've taken something that was never easy to begin with and made it more difficult and fraught with pitfalls and opportunities to fail.

To paraphrase my good friend, Pat,

En garde!

We Can Do It!

So, it took me most of the morning getting ready and humming this one for me to realize that it was stuck in my head. I've never actually seen The Producers, but the music for it pops up on my Pandora station dedicated to Broadway and Glee cast recordings (don't hate). This morning, "We Can Do It" was on repeat in my internal CD player.
As best I understand it, unscrupulous Max is trying to convince doubting Leo to join him in his plan to rip off investors and run off to Rio with a fortune. The positions that the two take are really interesting to me. Max sings:

What did Lewis say to Clark
When everything looked bleak?
What did Sir Edmund say to Tenzing
As they struggled toward Everest's peak?
What did Washington say to his troops
As they crossed the Delaware
I'm sure you're well aware...

We can do it, we can do it
We can do it, me and you
We can do it, we can do it
We can make our dreams come true
Everything you've ever wanted
Is just waiting to be had


To me, it is such a beautifully simple philosophy. In the instances that Max lists, the challenges which faced the characters were great- Lewis and Clark were exploring the West in a manner which had never before been done without a sure knowledge that they would make it back. Tenzing and Edmund were the first two to reach the top of Mount Everest (talk about blazing a trail!) and Washington was leading a rag-tag group in what he really hoped was a surprise attack. Also, of note is the fact that none of them accomplished these great feats alone. Each of them had to motivate at least one traveling companion, if not more. Because of that ability to motivate (We can do it!) truly great things were accomplished.

As Henry Ford is quoted as saying, "Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right."
That segues nicely into Leo's response:

What do I say, what do I say
Here's what I say to you, sir...
I can't do it, I can't do it
I can't do it, that's not me
I'm a loser, I'm a coward
I'm a chicken, don't you see?

Poor Leo, completely overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, uttered the self-fulfilling prognosis "I'm a loser, I'm a coward, I'm a chicken." I don't want it to seem like I'm condoning extortion or fraud, but the truth of the matter is, confidence sells, and cowardice smells. The fact that Max approached the idea with success already in mind made his chances to succeed infinitely better than Leo, who defeated himself before he ever began.
There is already so much negativity in the world (it seems like the default setting is often set to pessimist- see Amanda's post for some thoughts on that) that it would seem all to easy to simply give up and give in to the voices telling you

GIVE UP! YOU CAN'T!

That's where I'm here to tell you, "yes, you can!" At work, someone wrote a quote up on the board by Lord Kelvin (Dude is pretty cool- he pretty much laid the groundwork for most of Chemical Engineering, and he was super opinionated. Check out some of his quotes). Basically, someone described to him the fancy new way that people had come up with that made it so that you could see through solid objects. After hearing them out, Kelvin is reported to have said "X-rays will prove to be a hoax".
This was a legitimate scientist, the first EVER to have been elevated to the House of Lords based on his science, and he was shooting down an idea. Let me just say, when I was 8 and fell and cracked one of the bones in my leg, I was grateful that x-rays weren't shelved and forgotten a hundred years ago.

So is the message to exude confidence in everything all the time?


Nope.

Another story:
When I was younger, I was the go-to sibling for answers. My brothers and sisters would generally come to me if they had a question about how volcanoes work or what a certain composer had done, etc. I was a nerdy kid (who am I kidding, I still am!) and so I did have a lot of the answers (most of the time thanks to Ms. Frizzle and Bill Nye). I definitely let that go to my head, and eventually it got to the point that I had an answer for everything. Even when I didn't know the actual answer, I figured I could make my best guess, and that would work. My siblings couldn't tell the difference between me actually knowing an answer and making it up, so it all worked out...
Until one day the deception failed. Sarah asked me a question, and I gave an answer. She asked a follow-up question, and I realized I was dead wrong. I changed my answer, hoping she wouldn't notice. Not only did she notice, but she put two and two together and realized I'd been doing that for a while. Worse than no longer being a "fount of knowledge", I felt awful that I'd lost her trust. I've still got a little (ok, a lot) of know-it-all confidence in me, but I try to remain conscious of the fact that I, in fact, don't know it all.

How do you balance a winning, motivating attitude with the ability to stay down to earth and real?

That struggle for balance? Yeah, that's why I love life :)
Moral of the story, "With great power comes great responsibility."

Nothing's Bigger than a Dream

Well, I woke up this morning with an interesting change of pace: I had a mash-up going in my head. Both "Nothing's Bigger than Love" and "I Dreamed a Dream" were alternating back and forth in my mind as I got up and showered. These are two of my favorite songs, but I'm going to focus on "Nothing's Bigger than Love" today and leave "I Dreamed a Dream" for another day (let's face it- it's Les Mis. I'll wake up with it stuck in my head again before long).
In case you don't know me, let me start out by explaining that I am very much a people-pleaser. Have been for as long as I can remember. Not sure why. It could be the cries of a middle child for attention and affirmation. It could just be an innate desire for everyone around me to be happy. It could be a portion of my inner introvert finding ways to make others happy without having to be in the spotlight all of the time. In any case, that is a part of who I am.
And you know what? It works. People always seem genuinely surprised when I do something nice, just because. Every time that I have tried to explain that there is no hidden agenda and that I do simply like making the people around me that I care about happy, I get a look that I can best describe as boy, you crazy. A couple of consequences have followed from this:

• People like to have me around. It's kind of a self-perpetuating cycle: I do something nice for someone and they get happy. Their happiness fulfills that inner people-pleaser, and I'm more apt to look for other ways to make them happy. Win-win, right?
• I have gotten lousy at accepting compliments. They say that practice makes perfect, but it all depends on what it is you're practicing. Too often, I've practiced deflecting or rejecting a compliment, and that has become the only skill that I've developed. If I've ever awkwardly been unable to accept a compliment, I'm sorry. I promise that I am working on it, but I don't often catch myself in time.

What does that boil down to? I really do believe that "nothing's bigger than love". That love is the driving force behind all that is good in the world, and that the best way to benefit from it is to simple embrace love in any form as it enters your life.
We had a guest lecturer in my nanobiotechnology class last week. She started out by talking about forces, and I loved how she began.
Over 2000 years ago, the Greeks had established that there really are only two forces at play in the universe, and everything is a manifestation of one of the two. She asked us to guess what they were after she wrote this on the board:
_ _ _ _
_ _ _ _

We all stared at it for a while, and I finally threw out there "Love?" (I know, right? What kind of an engineer throws out something as vague a concept as love?) Well, it turns out that was right. Greeks said that everything was powered by either love or hate. Fun concept right? Well, she then proceeded to take the next 75 minutes to show us how the Greeks were correct. We call it attraction and repulsion now (ionic, gravitational, magnetic etc.), but it fundamentally comes back to love and hate.
So, I firmly believe that there is nothing bigger than love, and that is where I am going to continue to focus my energy.

We R Who We R

Not proud of my subconscious on this one.
I blame my sister, Sami. She loves Ke-dollar sign-ha. The worst part is how easy it is to get her music stuck in your head. I'll admit it:

This isn't the first time I've had Ke$ha stuck in my head.

I only had two lines stuck on repeat in my head, but (like most of her songs) that accounts for about 40% of the lyrics. In case you were wondering, the two lines on repeat in my head were:
"Let's go-o-o, let's go!...
We are who we are."

This may be a bit of a stretch, but I'm going to connect it to a philosophy of mine that I've used for quite a while and found to be wildly successful. I call it "Just Show Up".
What does that mean and how do it connect to Miss Ke-dollar sign-ha? Glad you asked. I'm pretty creative with coming up with names for things, so it might be a bit difficult to deduce. Basically, when there's an opportunity to do something or go somewhere and I have any possibility of doing so, I just show up. One of my favorite web sites ShowUp seems to have caught on to my philosophy and is one of the best tools for assisting in accomplishing it. But even more than just cultural events (which I LOVE), "Just Show Up" applies to everything. When there is a birthday celebration, a service project, a church event, an information session on campus, a study group, a friend hiking a mountain, or going to the movies, I make it if I can.
Does that mean I never miss anything? Heck no! There are things all the time that I think to myself If I only had an extra two hours in the day... I can't even begin to list all of the times, though, where "Just Show Up" has changed my life. Some times, it has been a life-altering event, and other times, it has been nothing more than a quick smile and lift to my day. On the other hand, I can think of very few times when "Just Show Up" has been a negative. I don't think I can ever once remember hearing someone say "UGH, Matt. Can you just please stop showing up? You are too helpful or involved. etc"
So how does Miss Dollar Sign's latest party anthem relate to "Just Show Up"? Well, as far as I can tell, she lives life to the utmost that she can. While her perspective on the world and what is worthwhile is vastly different than mine, she is just as dedicated to pursuing it as I am mine. When she sings "Let's go-o-o-o-o-o, let's go!", she's referring to a rave in an underground tunnel (I'm not going to post the link to her video. If you really feel the need to see it, it isn't tough to find). While that is not how I use "Just Show Up", it does encapsulate the idea behind the philosophy.
So, if you hear me humming "We R Who We R", 1) I apologize and 2) Know that, for me, I choose to say "let's go!" because I am who I am.

Wouldn't It Be Loverly?

I had an idea (it has been known to happen on occasion). I wake up with a song stuck in my head on a semi-irregular basis. It usually has no rhyme or reason to why the song is there, but often, for the first 20 or 30 minutes as I'm getting ready for the day, one song will be stuck on repeat in my head. After that, things get busy, the song fades, and I usually forget about it.
Well, I'm going to see if I can assign it meaning and blog about it! Random? Yes, yes it is. But maybe that is what I need. I don't really feel like I'm a consistent blogger anyway (see my history for verification), and so maybe this will be just semi-sporadic enough to give me the excuse to use my blog. We'll see.
So, as you can see in the title, yesterday I woke up with "Wouldn't it be loverly" stuck in my head. I haven't listened to My Fair Lady in a LONG time, but there you go, my subconscious pulled it out. Why? Well, let me paste in a few of the lyrics:

All I want is a room somewhere,
Far away from the cold night air.
With one enormous chair,
Aow, wouldn't it be loverly?
Lots of choc'lates for me to eat,
Lots of coal makin' lots of 'eat.
Warm face, warm 'ands, warm feet,
Aow, wouldn't it be loverly?

If I were to ask people around me to make a list of what they would like most right now, I have a feeling I'd find out some pretty interesting things. Feel free to comment on this post with your list :)
I have some things on my list right now, but I think Eliza has a pretty good handle on things with hers. To me, her list boils down to being able to slow down and enjoy a few moments of peace. I can definitely see why my subconscious would be SCREAMING for just that. I have had a whirlwind wonderful week. I have averaged about 14 hour days all week. But it's not just school or work or things which would drag me down. It's also been wonderful things like Family Home Evening (FINALLY back again for the semester!), my first ever opera experience, voice lessons and serving in the temple. I even checked an item off of my bucket list this week. I can honestly say that I wouldn't go back and cancel any of those things. They were fabulous, but I am drained. MLK Day is going to be a wonderful day for me to catch up (though it looks like I'm probably going to fall even further behind tomorrow, lol). It looks like, for right now, I get to keep being a full-time Liver, as Rebekah would say, and I'll have to just dream of the loverly life.

Someone's 'ead restin' on my knee,
Warm an' tender as (sh)e can be...









Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolitttle