You touched my hand, I played it cool...

Hmmm, classes are over; I don't know how I feel about it. In every one we rushed through the last few weeks of the syllabus and then the professors were like "kthxbai" and now everything seems so incomplete, inside and out of class.

It's not an end, because I'll come back to school and things won't necessarily be the way they are now (and I hate it when things change while you're away and you're not around to contribute/control it/watch it happen…gah, I’m like the only one not sticking around. I wish I were around for all the group bonding that's going to be happening), but likely they will be very similar (except for people going abroad and graduating, which makes me sad).

It's not a beginning of something new, because I'll go home and things will be exactly how I left them, which is partly comforting and partly confining.

Just a disruption from what's been the norm, and I'm sure going back to school after the summer will be equally as disruptive, just like it was last summer. I feel like I have 2 very separate lives, and whenever I have to switch from one to the other, it’s so jarring, even if I wouldn’t trade either life for anything.


Ends of summers, ends of semesters, ends of everything...they always seem so rushed/sudden, which sucks because I look at beginnings of these things as infinite, like I have all the time in the world, and then all of a sudden it's like "nope, sorry". And then I turn into this sappy sad-sack. Like at the end of each semester I start to miss not only the beginning of the semester when everything was new and excitng, but the ends of semesters past, for some reason. And since nobody wants to hang around with a blubbering sentimentalist I guess I’ll save all that for here, when people can click the little X on the top of their browser at any time if I get obnoxious.


Last Spring, I spent reading week...lo and behold, reading! But I wasn't reading for, say, my optional Psych final (which I only really took because I was sticking around for a Fleetwood Mac concert anyway)...I think I was scrambling to finish as many books in the Tales of the City series (one of the things that got me excited for going back to school last fall was being able to finish the series. STFU) and this book from Nylon on female musicians and their style. And a few days I wandered around campus by myself and climbed/sat in/under trees and listened to cheesy 70s pop music (I don't know why I associate springtime with the songs from VH1's 40 Most Sensational Soft Rock Songs...I think that song about there being a warm wind blowing and stars out and really wanting to see someone tonight has something to do with it. Oh, and that "Summer Breeze" song...I think the artists behind those 2 songs were related, actually...ANYWAYS)

If you'd like to humor me, or need new fodder for making fun of me, here you go:

I'd Really Love to See You Tonight by England Dan & John Ford Coley @ Yahoo! Video

What was I talking about before I revealed my awful taste in music? Oh, right...I'd love to repeat the whole wandering by myself and listening to England Dan and John Ford Coley, except (a) I kind of don't appreciate solitude the way I did a year ago, and (b) (more importantly) I think my iPod, Angel, is lost forever. Maybe next year, with a new iPod (I hate how every Birthday/Christmas present I’ve gotten recently has been a replacement for something I’ve lost or broken…this is why I shouldn’t have nice things), I can finally try to relive it, but it'll be with a different iPod (and not my beloved Angel the 30 GB video model), and probably a new musical guilty pleasure.


Just goes to show that you can never really recreate a moment. Which sometimes is great, when you're back in a place/situation/what have you and you'd love to start over there, and recreate yourself and your life in that setting, but other times sucks, when dealing with a perfect moment that you'd love to get back. How sad is it that listening to bad music while sitting in a tree is considered one of the more perfect moments of my life?


Anyways, now I'm thinking of yet another Fleetwood Mac song...I first heard "Seven Wonders" about this time last year...I'd just gotten back home for summer break, and the night before I'd seen FM in St. Louis, as referenced above. I was on a Stevie kick and was wishing that I could've stayed in that concert venue forever and ever with the diehard classic rock fans and the middle-aged ladies in lacy black dresses carrying tambourines. I went to my room and unpacked my bags and looked around my room and had no idea what to do with myself, so I put the Stevie channel of Last.FM radio on and this came on. I'd heard of the song, but had never actually heard it. I thought it was a gorgeous song, and even though it wasn't written by Stevie (she got songwriting credit just because she changed a line from “You touched my hand, all the way down the line” down to “all the way down to Emmeline” after mishearing it. Wut.) it had "her" written all over it:



Fleetwood Mac - Seven Wonders @ Yahoo! Video

Summer 2009 has been the best summer of my life so far (whenever I get sad about leaving school now I think back to how much fun it was), and that song makes me think of it. I listened to the song on the flight to Italy (along with “Babooshka” by Kate Bush…but I don’t think that song was at all indicative of my life then or now. And the video’s just plain creepy)

Kate Bush - Babooshka @ Yahoo! Video

But, yeah, "Seven Wonders" sort of captured what I thought of Capri as I ran down a steep and winding path to get as close to the clear-blue water as possible. I remember thinking that there couldn’t possibly be a place prettier than this, and I have yet to find one. So now the song makes me think of lots of near-perfect moments of the past year, in all sorts of contexts, moments I’ve yet to top, moments I’d love to get back, but if I don’t, at least I have the memories of those certain places at certain times and under certain circumstances. And if I never live to match the beauty of any given situation again (which I probably will…I mean I really do have all the time in the world as far as I’m concerned), at least I’ll know that such moments are possible, and I guess that’s comforting.


Oh, and I like how when I tag/label these posts I can use the same tags for pretty much every one. Sort of defeats the purpose of the labels, and shows how damn repetitive I am.

Remember me to the one who lives there...

Random thoughts before I doze off:
  

• I hope my bulletpoints aren't pink when I publish this...in the textbox they've chosen to take the shade of fuschia I set as my default text color and I can't change them back. I kind of want to just change the default back to black or something. I already have a pink computer to make me feel sillily girly. Since the drag show I went to on Saturday night, where I dressed up as a(n emo) guy and had the look down but couldn't get the mannerisms for the like of me, I've been really conscious of how gender-typed  I am (maybe the color pink shouldn't be considered girly, though...it's a color. I find it pretty. Why are colors gendered?). I don't think being one of those people who constantly deconstructs the gender of everything would be very becoming on me (and constantly intellectualizing everything is an awful way to live), but sometimes I want to do exactly that.Even if I've been known to snark on people that look at things that way. I mean, I'd love to just "be" and not have to worry about social constructs and blah blah, but once you're conscious of that sort of thing it's hard. Reason why ignorance might be bliss #34628
• Is it possible for things to happen at the wrong time? Like, does "too little too late" (or, conversely [and I'm finding equally as problematic] "too much too soon") hold any real weight? I've started wondering if there's actually something to the notion of destiny, but I tend to apply it only when a positive force enters my life, but then I turn around and respond to bad things with "whatthefuckpeopleareintrinsciallystupidandmakebadchoicesontheirowngrumblegrumble". If I'm going to start believing in something as implausable as fate, I'd better start believing in it fully. And I guess you do learn important lessons from bad stuff...though I wish I could learn those lessons and apply them now, in a current (or past) situation instead of for later, in some undeterminable time and place with who knows who or what.
• In high school I thought the notion of "community" was utter BS (mainly because I didn't feel fully a part of the community there...probably because of my own social ineptitude), but now that I'm in college I'm a part of so many great communities and it's super! Every time I go to Quaker meeting or have a rehearsal for my kids theater group or sing Disney and 80s songs all the way back to my dorm from a party with my lovely queer family, I just love the idea of a close-knit community more and more! The only problem lies in them being horribly exclusionary, and I know being outgoing and welcoming people in isn't my strong suit.
• I can't belive I hadn't seen The Graduate before tonight...I mean, I love the 60s and 60s music and everything that went into that movie. Everything about it was so disorienting...the soundtrack, the way it was filmed with shaky camera work and weird tracking shots...the way the narrative arc was totally weird. I mean, he started his affair with Mrs. Robinson like 10 minutes into the movie with no real set-up to it. (Oh, sorry if I spoiled the movie there for you, y'know?) And by "disorienting", I mean "awesome!"

Still the wanting comes in waves...

WANT. I shall wear with my snuggie, and when I get them, Necky and Tiddy Bear

Anyways, some random things that annoy me in life:

-Having no idea who you are, yet every idea of what you want...it's very problematic. Like, you think that you'll be able to figure out yourself by getting what you want but you can't get what you want unless you have some sense of self. Whatev. I'm sure it's the struggle of every 19 year old.

-When the book you want to check out of the library is checked out and won't be returned for a month (FWIW, it's No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July). Then realizing what a hypocrite you are for thinking that when you've had the same books out since September. It's really the last part that bothers me. But I still want the book and all...

-Power outages when you're about to write a paper that's due in like 2 hours so that you have to trek to the other side of campus before you can write it. Still, better than power outages when you're in the process of writing a paper. And if I hadn't spilled my latte this morning so that I had to go back and get a new one, that's what would've happened. Maybe someone is watching out for me somewhere.

-Speaking of both ordering food and getting library books...this one is taken from High Fidelity, which I just finished reading...Okay I was going to quote it but I can't find the right page and eventually I'll need to get off and do my enviro reading...anyways, when you see something appetizing in a bakery display case and you don't know what it is and it's called an "ooey gooey square" and you want one but you don't want to request it by such a stupid name. Hornby used a different (and more humorous) example in the book, but that's been my predicament through my whole college career. I guess one day I'll just go in and ask to try "one of those things".

-Trying to intellectualize things that can't be intellectualized in my mind, like love and happiness and the meaning of life. Though thinking would likely provide some good solutions, some things just require feeling and not thinking. Even if I once got a fortune cookie that read "Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think". That was the worst fortune ever, worse than the one I got (and gave to one of my dolls cause I was eating chinese with them like a good only child does in her free time) that said I'd encounter a strange party sometime soon. And not funny like any one of gotten that sounds great with "in bed" added to the end.

(But really, I can't wait til the world can stop thinking and just be.)

-Nostalgia (I like the Portuguese term "saudades" more, really). Part of me loves being disgustingly sappy and sentimental (Reason why I'm a perfect Cancerian #639), but really...Ow ow owwww. This is why feeling insted of thinking is sometimes bad.

-Otherism, or rather, the "other" accepting/embracing it. I mean, nobody should be expected to assimilate to the mainstream, but there's a point where way too many divisions are created. And building communities based off of a division that the core has made to describe the periphery seems off. And were I to completely embrace all of the ways in which I'm "other" I'd end up closing myself off from society completely in a little community of one. Though I do appreciate community building, so this could just be an ephemeral "it bothers me".

-Lighter note? It bothers me when I'm accessing the shared music folder of someone else on my school's wifi network and the songs are all mistagged and there's nothing you can do about it. But I should just count my blessings that I can listen to Avril Lavigne and Sum 41 without having to contaminate my own iTunes library (sorry if I'm blatantly referring to your library and you're reading this)

-Oh, and the fact that no matter what I do, the above video remains big enough to cover the sidebar of my blog. Gah.

Okay, that's all for now, folks.

Line my eyes and call me pretty

Random thoughts...I've been very thoughtful lately...and to think of all the work I have to do! But busywork will always be there, and the things that pop into my mind seem to be so fleeting, so best to write them down now:

-In high school a Myers-Briggs personality test I took told me that I was a very strong INFP. Our teacher had told us that most people would be in the middle for most of the categories, and that it was perfectly normal to not be a strong anything. I'm sure he didn't mean it like this, but I left the room feeling like a totally weird, unbalanced person (especially since Wikipedia then told me that only 1-5% of people are INFPs of any intensity). I mean, I love being an "idealist" as INFPs are labeled and wouldn't want to be any other way, but I feared (still fear) that having that extreme a personality would alienate me from everyone. I guess being like 97% introverted was what bothered me the most. I mean, being (or not being) thinking and sensing and judging are important, but human interaction is like the essense of life. Anyways, I'd still say that I'm very much an INFP, but that test is self-reported and I was probably in one of my many "down with people" phases...senior year of high school...yeah, definitely was. But for some reason I have a lot of faith in everything right now, even though sometimes signs point elsewhere.

TL;DR? Right about now I really like people. In another time and place, recent events in my life and the lives of many of the people I care about the most would've led me to shut myself off from the world and the awful creatures in it, but I guess I'm realizing that that's always made the situation worse for me. And this time I really didn't want to revert to being that lonely, so I looked around me and realized how many great people I have in my life. It's foolish, but I find myself forgiving everyone for everything. Life's too short to hold grudges. Some anger's good, but you don't want it to be a driving force. I can't say if people are intrinsically good or intrinsically bad...people are just intrinsically people...all living a series of ups and downs. Funny how alive you feel after a cataclysmic event; I'm just trying to embrace it all. There's really nobody I can never see myself forgiving for anything they've ever done to me(forgetting is a different story, but w/e). Logically it might be an unhealthy way to think, but INFPs aren't very logical. Really, the only people that have done unforgivable things in my life aren't people that have hurt me, but those who have hurt the people that I love. The Cancerian trait of keeping everything and everyone in my life might also play into this...also, I don't know where to squeeze this in but I just thought of how sometimes introversion/extroversion is determined by whether someone gains or expends energy from being around people, and for the first time in a while I'm seeing people as a gain and not just a drain of energy and time. So maybe I'm more extroverted in that sense, but just quiet and unassuming at the same time. If I weren't quiet and unassuming I'd be telling people about all the things in this blog instead of writing. But I am a better writer than a speaker, and maybe that's independent of personality.

-My facebook interests, once upon a time, were listed as "pretty people, pretty places, and pretty things". Part of me wrote that to be facetious, but another part actually valued that stuff. I guess I still do; well, everything in life is worth valuing and aesthetically pleasing things are so forthright that it would take a ridiculous amount of energy to ignore them that really isn't worth the missing out on something so lovely.

Okay, sorry for that awfully worded sentence. Anyways, I don't think anything in life is superficial, but sometimes I think we just label things as pretty or beautiful so that we don't have to think about what we really mean to say about something or someone we find attractive. I mean, for me pretty things aren't of value because of material worth, but because somebody took the time to make something in hopes of it bringing joy to others. And pretty places, especially in nature, connect me to everyone who's ever seen what I'm seeing at that moment; I wonder who they were and where they came from and what they felt as they stood there. And while I'm seeing God in people more and more (what would I do without Quakers?), the closest I've ever felt to a higher power was when trekking through the rocks of Capri. The walk itself that I'm referring to was actually pretty hellish, but the sight cliffs, birds, and crystal blue water are the only things that have nearly brought me to tears based on appearance alone. I mean, maybe things can come to fruition by chance, and I'm sure the islands were manipulated by humans to maximize their potential as a tourist destination (thanks, Rich Nations and Poor Nations), but that shade of blue had to have been mixed by somebody until they got it right...and people can't do that.

But what about the "pretty people" part? I mean, being attractive gets people attention and admiration and sometimes can result in a career as a model or someone's muse, but what does it really bring someone in life? I mean, there are people who I could stare at for days on end and it would bring me some sort of joy knowing that such beauty exists, and I'll admit that whenever anyone tells me I'm attractive I feel a little pang of pride. But I'm sure some of the people I find attractive are quite unpleasant and someone finding me attractive doesn't necessarily mean that they appreciate me for everything I am (though I like to think I'm a likable person in general). I consider the word "beautiful" to encompass more than just outside prettiness, but every time someone tells me I'm beautiful I wonder if they just mean "attractive". Yet I'm trying my best to believe that there is not superficial anything. I guess "attractive" is just another trait like "nice" or "honest" or "athletic" or "smart" and just another part of the world. And it should be taken as such, and should be placed on equal footing as any other characteristic anybody has. Nothing wrong with pretty things, but nothing super special about them either.

-Yet I have still felt a little empty lately. Like, I can think of all these things and I can go about my daily life and learn things and have adventures, but it seems vapid without having someone to come back and tell it all to. But I guess I'll find that someone some day. For now, that's what blogging is for...

but there's a danger in loving somebody too much, and it's sad when you know it's your heart you can't trust.

If for some reason you're still reading this:

I don't understand anything right now, and I feel like a total idiot. How silly of me to think that you were happy with me. It isn't like you said you were, like a bunch of times before suddenly having a change of heart. I don't know what to believe. I said I was going to save any angsty shit for my (friends locked) lj, and my livejournal friends are prolly gonna get an extra special earful sometime soon, but I just had to post something here, now, for some reason. So, in light of recent events, and because I've been reading High Fidelity, the bible of music and breakups (did I jinx myself by taking it out of the library when things were good?), here's a list (couldn't narrow it down to top 5, because that kind of thing's for people that have it all together) of some of my favorite break-up songs:

Fleetwood Mac- "Dreams"



There are so many FM/Stevie songs I could've gone with...I mean, Rumours is like the ultimate breakup album of all time. Heartache, Betrayal, Regret, Making the other regret way more than you--it's all there. Oh, also, this one, "Silver Springs". Nuff Said. I am sad that I couldn't find the video from "The Dance", though. There are some songs that work better with Stevie being older, with a more worn voice.



Sleater-Kinney- "One More Hour"



'For You Things Were Just Night And Day'
I'm pretty sure I was in a relationship and fairly happy when I first heard this song on XPN while driving past the mall with my mom. But I fell in love with it immediately and for some reason I knew it would be a comforting song to me, someday. So I immediately went home and googled whatever lyrics I could pick out to find out what it was. I had heard of Sleater-Kinney, but never actually heard their songs. Turns out I liked them. Anyways, raw emotion, pure talent, and right about now I appreciate having a song about a lesbian relationship around to console me.

No Doubt- "Don't Speak"



I'm pretty sure Tragic Kingdom was the first CD I owned--though I might be blocking out some Spice Girls tape or summat that I got first. Anyways, clearly as a 6 year old I didn't understand the idea of losing somebody and being in denial about it and just wanting it all to go away. It would take me quite some time to understand all that went into the song, in fact, but at the time I still could sense something so real about the song.

You know what all of the above have in common? They were written by one member of the band about another member. Like, they were chained to their exes, forced to perform/listen to songs about their failed relationships forever and ever (okay, so S-K broke up ten years later so I guess Corrin and Carrie are off the hook now, but seriously, Fleetwood Mac?). I could avoid seeing this somebody almost completely if I wanted to with no damage to say, my career. It's not like I'm touring throughout the country with her.

Anyways, moving right along...

Atomic Kitten-"Last Goodbye"



I don't know, it takes me back to when I was like 14 and was happiest when left by myself; I'm sure it's not healthy but I miss the feeling of not needing anybody.

Scandal- "Goodbye To You"



Why aren't break-ups spunky and bubblegum colored in real life? Why can't I transform into Patty Smyth right now? It was a toss-up between this song with the band or her duet with Don Henley, "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough". Actually, I'll close this list out for the time being with that one.



I've loved all these songs for a while, but never really connected (I hate that word, "connect"), with them until now. I don't know if making this list has made things better or worse, but it's let me get stuff out and that's what I needed.