Music and Lyrics

I like music. Not a statement that would move mountains, but one that is true. I did meet someone long ago who did not. It was like meeting someone who declared that they hated breathing. Totally foreign to my life experiences. Yes, people have different tastes in music, but that was the only person I've ever met who straight up didn't like it at all.

Ariel: What, nothing at all?
Sad Little Person: nope.
Ariel: Not even rock and roll?
SLP: no. nothing.
Ariel: What about Classical?
SLP: not classical. not anything.
Ariel: Really? but what about jazz?

and so on. I think what is the most interesting thing about that person is that they are so unmemorable to me. Nothing even vaguely sticks in my mind about the person. I can't even remember what sex they were. Which is odd for me, because I tend to remember little details about people, not salient details like their name, but little things like their specific sneaker choice, or that they had a band aid on their hand when I met them. All I remember about the sad little person is that he/she/it didn't like music.

I was thinking about that person recently when I was coming home after dropping the brother off at school. I was listening to music in the car, and missed a call because I had the music up to cover the road noise. I can't imagine what the SLP would do on a road trip. Or hell, driving to work. Ipods are everywhere, songs are sung in the metro, on the street, in the shower, music is a pervasive part of not just ours, but all cultures. And the SLP wanted nothing to do with it.

What I think I like most about music is its ability to change poetry into something else. Poetry is really not my bag, not even as an English Major. I could never get my head around it. But once poetry is transformed into "Lyrics" it makes so much more sense. Music is about people you've never met expressing a feeling you've had in much more beautiful way than you ever could. Or sometimes its about challenging you, or introducing you to an experience you've never had, and likely will never have. Or, sometimes its about the universe and our place in it. I think that perhaps there is something to be said for the person with no musical tastes. They are living what the lyrics of every punk song ever written urges us to do: resist conformity. Perhaps I'm just thinking about this too much. Perhaps I should just move on.

I bought a cheap watch from a crazy man, floating down canal
It doesn't use numbers or moving hands, It always just says NOW
Now you may be thinking that I was had, but this watch is never wrong
And if I have trouble the warranty says,
Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On

PAY ATTENTION

to THIS!

Looking for Volunteers

I want to do this! Who's with me????

Update on the Great Corn Flake

Only in Virginia could something like this happen.

Key Quote: ''Something really dramatic just happened with our corn flake,'' Melissa McIntire, 23, of Chesapeake, Va., said Tuesday.

Things that make me happy #1752

I mean seriously, who didn't while away long childhood summers with a jar of pickles and a recording of The Lonely Goatherd, wondering if they could get finer pitch and tone out of the dill-pickled kind? Now you can have a professional-sounding, electronic version for really excellent results. All for only $12.99.

Oh and look! The cartoon is dressed in lederhosen. Awwww.

Perpetual Kid

What do you call a book on tape when it's an mp3?

I love free music. I love free anything really, but free music is really enjoyable. Free movies are also nice, though I try to take only those that are in the public domain, and therefore do not fall under copyright infringement.

What I love even more is the new awesomeness that I have discovered which is audiobooks. I first got the idea from the Fairfax County Public Library. They loan out electronic copies of their books on tape, though in a specific program which prohibits burning a CD from them or uploading them to your ipod or other portable media. This presented a problem, as I had hoped to listen to the books while at work, and taking my home computer back and forth with me to the office is a ludicrous, though comic, idea.

And so I looked further. There is a wide world of books on tape/mp3 that I had hitherto unexplored. Today was spent with a job I would normally have hated, but passed quickly and nicely with Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. While talking of this to a coworker at lunch, she told me of a website that has mp3s of public domain books, things like Jane Austen, and confessed to having spent much of last week listening to Pride and Prejudice and to Emma. Two of my all time favs! She hasn’t yet sent me the link, but will soon I hope so that I too may enjoy the public domain-y books and thereby avoid the feeling of guilt that I have when “stealing” mp3s. (Though really, I own every book I have so far “stolen” so the author or the author’s estate has already made their money from me, and what I am taking is simply a shorter version of reading the book myself into a tape recorder. So there.)

The New Miss Cleo

I may be a little bit psychic.

I present this evidence of creepy psychic behavior.

1. Thursday. I was sitting on the couch in the throws of illness and suddenly it popped into my head that "Friends" episode where Ross has cheated on Rachael and they spend the whole episode discussing it with the other Friends trapped in Monica's bedroom listening to the fight. Specifically what popped into my head was the part where Rachael is ordering a pizza and Ross asks her for no anchovies and she requests that they chop up anchovies and put them in the sauce. Then it came on like 2 hours later. That exact episode.

2. My mother emailed me with an ebay item that she wanted. A cookie jar from Abingdon Pottery that was almost exactly the cookie jar that her mother had had. I obliginly put in a bid and had the idea to look around to get her something for mother's day also of Abingdon Pottery. I found a pretty cool serving dish, the least ugly thing on ebay from AP. That night my mother came home with a present from her brother in exchange for one of his old records that my mother still had. The present was the exact serving dish from Abingdon Pottery that I had put in a bid on not 3 hours earlier. I gasped and told my mother, who only laughed, thanked me for the thought and said we'd have a matching set.

3. While making myself toast on Saturday morning, I inexplicably began to think about the Hope Diamond. More specifically the mail carrier who delivered the Diamond to the Smithsonian. Many tragedies befell the poor man after handling the Hope Diamond. not 30 minutes after eating the toast there was a documentary on the History Channel about the secrets of the Smithsonian. As we turned it on they were discussing the mail carrier who delivered the Hope Diamond and all of the tragedies that befell him.

4. It may run in the family. My grandmother had dreams about famous people dying the night that they did actually die. She had a dream that Adlai Stevenson died the very night he did die. There are other incidents of my grandmother, but I can't think of them at the moment.

Granted most of my "predictions" (I dont think I should really call it that because its really just a thought that pops into my head which weirdly turns out to lie in my future) deal with television and the episodes that are coming up, and not very often. So really I'm just a version of TV guide. But its still odd. And freaking me out a little.