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 :)

It's Possible

Anything's possible.
I think I have a hard time remembering that sometimes.
Anything is possible.
I checked out a bunch of music books from the Berkeley library last week, and was playing through some of them this weekend. One of the books I got is Seussical the Musical. I was originally going to audition to be in it this fall at MET, but I don't get back until like a month after auditions. Anywho, as I was playing through the music for this show, the song "It's Possible" really stood out to me. In part, I'm sure because it's one of those songs that drives to the end (I like that), but also because it shows something that I think the world of Seuss tried really hard to foster and champion: Imagination.
Jojo is a Thinker who thinks strange Thinks. They (his parents, an army general, etc.) try to get him to conform, and this song is his secret indulgence in imagination. Taking a bath becomes this epic underwater adventure. In the end, Jojo's Thinks save his entire world.
As I've been at Bayer this summer, I've gotten to see how this same "battle" rages on in the real world. Time and time again, I've heard people praise the ability to "think outside the box" and "be a fresh set of eyes". Concurrently, there are forms to fill out, standard procedures to follow, licenses to adhere to, and acronyms (oh my goodness are there acronyms) to learn. Amid the roar of bustling bureaucracy, the drive of deadlines, and the rigid hierarchy, it seems like it's very easy for one small voice singing "anything's possible" to be heard.
It seems so easy, to me, to let the world wash away the imagination that comes so easily to children. I don't think I ever had that creative of an imagination (I'm kinda left-brained biased), but it's more than just straight-up imagining up fantasy worlds. It's some kind of naivete in which the thought "that's impossible" or "that would just be impractical" is non-existent. It's a willingness to pursue a dream, without an elaborate safety net or back-up plan. It's the confidence that the world is a good place, full of good people. That's what this song stirs up in my memory.
Try to remember that feeling, or, if that isn't what you grew up with, work towards it. Kids are happy, and I feel like it's because they realize that...
               

Part of Me

Whelp, Katy has gone and done it: she made it on to my blog.

In case you were wondering, Billboard's Hot 100 (while interesting [try looking up what was #1 the week you were born. Trippy{which apparently isn't a word in my computer's dictionary}] and comprehensive) is not the true sign of whether or not a song has "made it". No, that distinction actually goes to my blog. That's right- you know it's a good song if I've woken up with it stuck in my head :)

< /sarcasm>

Today's song was really just one line from Part of Me which played over and over in my mind this morning:

You're never gonna break my soul, this is the part of me

that you're never gonna ever take away from me.

I feel like everyone has so much baggage. Call it what you will: layers, or different hats that we wear, or masks, or whatever. I'm going to call it baggage. There are social norms that we conform to, relationships which we mold ourselves in to, defense mechanisms, insecurities, habits. The list goes on and on for reasons why anyone would carry around baggage, and it's as individual as the baggage itself.

What if we could get rid of it? What if we could let go, let the layers simply fall off? Would that be a good thing? I don't know. I've never done it. I like to think that it would be glorious. To see and be seen for exactly who and what you are. So often, I feel like the people that I "know" aren't actually people. They are the layers that I've grown accustomed to. The part of the person that Katy sings about, that is who I want to get to know.

I know that there is some pretty deep (ie confusing) stuff out there about what the ego is, how we define ourselves and such, but I feel like we all have at least a sense of what we are, deep inside. It's easier for me to reflect myself more clearly when I blog, so I hope you get to hear a more baggage-less me in my posts. Someday, hopefully I'll get better at being able to open up in person and share a part of me.

Payphone

This is one of those songs that I get stuck in my head, and it just plays over and over. Despite the fact that that is somewhat annoying by nature, I love the song so much that I don't even try to fight to get it out. I think part of it is the strength of emotion in the song which (even though I think might be taking things a bit too far) is conveyed in (yet another!) break-up song. I promise I'm not hating on relationships or the thought of people staying together! But it certainly seems like my subconscious has been of late.
Anyway, many of my friends can attest to the fact that I will (often at random times) start humming the tune from "Payphone". I thought through the lyrics for this one, and really wasn't sure what I wanted to write about for a blog post. Like I said, it's kind of a depressing, post-break-up song. Last night at the symphony, the theme for the piece I listened to got me thinking.

Change is one of the most powerful (and therefore scary) things I can think of in this world. The song starts out with the lyrics:

I'm at a payphone tryin' to call home

all of my change I spent on you.

What a sad place to be in! I am imagining Adam Lavine standing there on a street corner (the actual music video [with unedited lyrics and the rap bridge included] has this cool comic-book style) realizing that he has invested himself in to this relationship which is now irreconcilably over. In the midst of this pity party, I realized: wait. You spent all of your change on her...? That is a really clever play on words, but it strikes me as entirely and utterly by nature untrue. 

I am a firm believer that you can never be out of change. No matter who you were at one point, what you had to go through to get to this point, or what you think your future may end up holding for you, you can change. And even more-so than that: You will change.

It feels like it very much part of human nature to resist change. Everyone at one point or another can look back and say, "well, that was a change that was definitely for the worse!" Because of that potential consequence for change, I feel like it's only natural to try and find ways to avoid change. 

FACT: Change happens.

Anyone who tells you "my love for her hasn't changed over the last (insert time period here) one bit" is working with a very different definition of change. I would say that, even as each and every one of us grows with new experiences each day, so too must our relationships form and re-form to mold to the continuing complexity that is our lives. 

Now, I'm not saying Adam is wrong for investing change in his now-failed relationship. I'm saying it was wrong to have spent it on her. Like I said, change is a natural part of the world we live in, BUT there is definitely a wrong way to go about it. If he was changing for her all the time, then the relationship may well have become a lie.

One of the posts that I read which got me to really start thinking about regularly blogging myself (and its associated sequel [of which I claim partial credit in the conception]) really encapsulate how I feel change in a relationship should happen and what it can lead to. Rather than regurgitate them, I'll just suggest you read the posts as they stand.

So yes, change is going to happen. Yes, it is going to be an integral part of a relationship. BUT... No, it is not a bad thing. No, it shouldn't be manipulated as a tool to try and force something to work. And no, we should never feel like we've "run out of change."

PS- Thanks to Laura for the Bahama's payphone collage picture!