bet you'd just love to see me dancing to prince...

I am a huge music fan.  I'm always telling people, I listening to everything.... but polka.  Can't get with the polka, sorry.  But I really do listening to the rest, country, pop, electronic, alternative, rap, showtunes, opera, classical, easy listening, folk, rock, dance, punk, ska, blue grass, acustic, big band, blues, jazz, foreign, rockabilly, disco, indie, reggae, funk.... and I really don't have a favorite.  Sometimes it's all based on my mood.  Music has a way of lifting you up when you are really down, and it has a way of calming you when you are stressed.  It reminds of certain times, certain places, and certain people.  I thought I'd share with you some of the songs that hold high meaning for me.

Eight Days a Week - When I was in highschool I often picked up a couple of friends on my way to school and being a really small town, the traffic is a bit predictable.  During our senior year we listened to the same cd that I had mixed myself, you remember mixed cds, and the last song we heard every day we drove to school was the Beatles "Eight Days a Week".  Whatever we were gabbing about, once that song came on, we stopped and sang along at the top of our lungs.  Every time I hear that song I remember Shannon and Lezlie and driving in the car.  We had so much fun when we were young!  I we weren't bad singers, well Shannon and I weren't anyways, sorry Lezlie :)

On Eagle's Wings  - I was raised in a Catholic church because my Mom was Catholic and her Mom was Catholic.  I've waivered back and forth a bit with my religion, something I think most young people do.  The Catholic Church though has always just been the one I'm most comfortable in.  I know when to stand and sit and kneel and what the different elements of the mass are about, that helps.  I also am familiar with the music that is typically sung in the Catholic church.  But I think the biggest reason I am comfy in the Catholic church is because when I'm there, I feel like my Mom is there.  She has always been guide spiritually since I was little.  She taught me about charity, not judging people, being selfless.  I know one of her favorite songs is "On Eagle's Wings".  Now it's not the most cheerful song, but its beautiful and every time I hear I think of her.

My Girl  - Okay, so I told you what reminds me of my Mom, so now I have to tell you what reminds me of Dad.  When I was young dad listening to two things.  Motown and Honky Tonk.  Pretty much anything that fits in either category reminds me of Dad.  I LOVES his Conway Twitty.  The song that probably reminds me the most of him though is the Temptations "My Girl".  I have a memory, possibly one of my earliest at this point, of being really really small.  Possibly two or three.  Holding my dads hands, in the middle of the living room, bouncing and round, dancing to my girl on the hi-fi.  If I was ever to find the right guy and get married, it would be the song I'd want to dance with my Dad.

Bat Dance and Revolutionary Kind - Well of course I can't forget the last member of my immediate family, and certainly the one that knows me the best.  My Brother and I were good friends even when we were young kids.  We would fight like cats and dogs and as soon as Mom had enough and separated us, we'd be in our closets that shared a wall, try to communicate through the wall.  I remember when the movie Batman came out and we became obsessed with Prince's song Bat Dance.  In our garage with a tape player, Nathan owned the single, we'd dance to it.  Nathan was quite the dancer, me not so much, but boy did we have a hilarious time.  There are many songs that remind me of my brother because he's a bit of a musical expert.  He's introduced so many bands to me that I probably otherwise wouldn't have heard of including what has been for the last 5 years my absolutely favorite band Gomez.  What's that you say?  I know, I know.  The very first album he introduced me to of theirs was Liquid Skin and every time I hear "Revolutionary Kind" I think I have Nathan, its one of my favorites and the singer is his doppelganger.  No really.  See below.

  

Wig in a Box - Everyone probably has a mantra song.  Something that peps them up and gives them confidence and focus.  "Wig in a Box" is actually a song sung by a man who dresses as a woman and is celebrating his "womanhood".  For me the song just pumps me.  The phrase "I am woman, hear me roar" comes to mind.  It's overall empowering.  When I need some motivation I crank it up and shout along.  If you haven't seen Hedwig and the Angry Inch, I highly recommended it. 

Oh?  You were expecting a video of me dancing to Prince?  Well, better luck next time! ;)

one of my personal escapes

I have enjoyed reading ever since I was little and my mom handed down to me her Nancy Drew books.  I read a somewhat diversion selection of books, mostly fiction, but everything from fantasy, love, comedy, dark, suspenseful.  I love it all.  I wanted to share some of my favorite writing with everyone.  Maybe you will see what I love about language and expression. 

My absolutely favorite author is Stephen King.  He's the master of description.  I particularly like his short stories.  There is something really different with short stories.  Because you have such a lack of time, you spend less of it creating a back story and an ending and just get right to the meat of whatever you are telling.  But my favorite Stephen King book isn't a short story.  Misery is about a writer, Paul, who has a car accident and finds himself taken hostage by his "number one fan", Nurse Annie.  In the beginning of the book, Paul has been in his car accident, and is having trouble breathing.  Someone comes along to help him.

"Then there was a mouth clamped over his, a mouth which was unmistakably a woman's mouth in spite of its hard spitless lips, and the wind from this woman's mouth blew into his own mouth and down his throat, puffing his lungs, and when the lips were pulled back he smelled his warder for the first time, smelled her on the outhrush of the breath she had forced into him the way a man might force a part of himself into an unwilling woman, a dreadful mixed stench of vanilla cookies and chocolate ice cream and chicken gravy and peanut-butter fudge.  He heard a voice screaming, 'Breathe, goddammit! Breathe, Paul!'  The lips clamped down again.  The breath drew down his throat again.  Blew down it like the dank suck of wind which follows a fast subway train, pulling sheets of newspaper and candy-wrappers after it, and the lips were withdrawn, and he thought For Christ's sake don't let any of it out through your nose but he couldn't help it and oh that stink, that stink, that fucking STINK. 'Breathe, goddam you!' the unseen voice shrieked, and he thought I will, anything, please just don't do that anymore, don't infect me anymore, and he tried, but before he could really get started her lips were clamped over his again, lips as dry and dead as strips of salted leather, and she raped him full of her air again.  When she took her lips away this time he did not let her breath out but pushed it and whooped in a gigantic breath of his own.  Shoved it out.  Waited for his unseen chest to go up again on its own, as it had been doing his whole life without any help from him.  When it didn't, he gave another giant whooping gasp, and then he was breathing again on his own, and doing it as fast as he could to flush the smell and taste of her out of him.  Normal air had never tasted so fine."

The dilemma of facing death vs facing that horrid breath is priceless.  I can just imagine it.  I really love King's harsh and honest description.  Okay, back to short stories.  I own a small collection of books called "The Best American Short Stories".   It's an annual collection of some of the best short stories written that year.  They are wonderful to read before going to bed at night.  I can usually read one story in less than an hour.  It's also a great chance to get to know artists I haven't read before.  There's a short story by Peter Ho Davies called "The Ugliest House in the World".  It is actually lots of mini stories that make up one short story, about a welsh doctor and his hometown.

"100 yards is a sign on the road just before you reach my father's village.  The story of the ugliest house is that there was once a law in Wales that if you could build a house in a day and sleep a night in it, an acre of land around it was yours.  The house had to be stone just to make things a little harder.  That's why the ugliest house is so ugly.  It's little more than eight feet high, with higgledy-piggledy walls of granite and slate.  The walls were originally dry stone, which means they were built without cement.  Stones were just balanced one upon the other, with smaller rocks wedged between them to stop them rocking.
Six years ago, Mr. Watkins, the farmer who owns the ugliest house, decided to open it to the public in the hope that he could make some money from tourist.  The name came from his daughter, Kate.  She called it that when she was a little girl.....Farmer Watkins hoped that the ugliest house would provide an income for Kate when she came back from Liverpool, pregnant at the age of sixteen.  She learned the plaque off by heart and sat at the door with her child for a whole summer to charge admission, but the takings from that first season weren't even enough to pay for the roof.  The farmer made one last attempt to have HOME OF THE UGLIEST HOUSE IN THE WORLD added to the name signs at either end of the village, but the council refused to even put it to a vote.  Mr. Watkins stood up in the meeting and shouted 'Fascists! Communists! Tin-pot dictators!' But the leader of the council shouted him down: 'This meeting does not have time for frivolous notions and will eject any time-wasters from these proceedings.  Sit down, Arwyn, you bloody idiot.'"

The entire story is a joy to read.  I highly recommend checking it out.  One of the earliest books I remember reading and just obsessing over was "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle.  I believe it was my first true taste of sci-fiction.  

"The trees were lashed into a violent frenzy.  Meg screamed and clutched at Calvin, and Mrs. Which's authoritative voice called out "Qquiett chilldd!"  Did a shadow fall across the moon or did the moon simply go out, extinguished as abruptly and completely as a candle?  There was still the sound of leaves, a terrified, terrifying rushing.  All light was gone.  Darkness was complete.  Suddenly the wind was gone, and all sound.  Meg felt that Calvin was being torn from her.  When she reached for him her fingers touched nothing.  She screamed out, "Charles!"  and whether it was to help him or for him to help her, she did not know.  The word was flung back down her throat and she choked on it.  She was completely alone.  She had lost the protection of Calvin's hand.  Charles was nowhere, either to save or to turn to.  She was alone in a fragment of nothingness.  No light, no sound, no feeling.  Where was her body?  She tried to move in her panic, but there was nothing to move.  Just as light and sound had vanished, she was gone, too.  The corporeal Meg simply was not. Then she felt her limbs again.  Her legs and arms were tingling faintly, as though they had been asleep.  She blinked her eyes rapidly, but though she herself was somehow back, nothing else was.  It was not as simple as darkness, or absence of light.  Darkness has a tangible quality; it can be moved through and felt; in darkness you can bark your shins; the world of things still exists around you.  She was lost in a horrifying void."

After reading that, I was hooked.  I loved reading about fictional worlds and unnatural events.  To this day I think that is my favorite genre.  The feel of the book actually reminded me a lot of the most recent triology  of books I've read "The Hunter Games" series by Suzanne Collins.  Both have a bit of a futuristic feel to them.  Both feature a place that is void of feeling and life.  

Last but certainly not least, another thing I've always enjoyed, is reading poetry.  Poetry has never been very popular, which in some ways surprises me.  Reading poetry isn't all that different from listening to music.  Here is a snipet of one of my favorite poems by Emily Dickinson.

"During my education,
It was announced to me
That gravitation, stumbling,
Fell from an apple tree!

The earth upon an axis
Was once supposed to turn,
By way of a gymnastic
In honor of the sun!

It was the brave Columbus,
A sailing o'er the tide,
Who notified the nations
Of where I would reside!

Mortality is fatal --
Gentility is fine,
Rascality, heroic,
Insolvency, sublime!

Our Fathers being weary,
Laid down on Bunker Hill;
And tho' full many a morning,
Yet they are sleeping still, --

The trumpet, sir, shall wake them,
In dreams I see them rise,
Each with a solemn musket
A marching to the skies!"