So I dated this girl a while back who was in love with making, and receiving, mixes. It was kind of crazy how excited she would get about making one. She also attached a ton of memories to the ones that she received, and was devastated if some one didn’t like the one she made for them. For what ever reason she never managed to make one for me though. Which of course was a massive signal that I totally ignored, and things ended pretty poorly later on, and I have a sinking suspicion that she made a “I Broke Up With Mark” mix.
Now this of course is not why I hate making playlists. I have no idea why I don’t like assembling playlists, it’s just a chore to me. This of course was a chore I decided to do today. There’s only 2 reasons I ever make a new playlist a) I have a new computer and with it a new collection of music b) because I have a ton of music piling up that I haven’t listened to yet because it’s not on a handy dandy playlist.
Today’s playlist was put together because I realize I had a crap ton of music that I haven’t been listening to because it’s not on my ipod because I don’t listen to my old ‘umbrella’ playlist (the one that just holds a lot of random shit). Since this new playlist had to replace the old playlist filled with random shit, I aptly named the new one Random Shit. So I think the key reason ( I decided I know why I hate making playlists halfway through the last paragraph) I hate making playlists is because I never know what music should go on it. I mean of course the new music, in this case 2 Smith’s Albums, as well as a Strokes album. But what about the other tried and true music I still like. Should I arbitrarly go through and select each song because it’s special. Should I dump whole discographies into this play list, or just choose the albums, and even then which albums! As you can see I’m very indecisive when it comes to my music. That’s why I love services like Pandora and Last.fm, because they do all the picking for me I can just sit back and enjoy. But I digress, so my solution to this conundrum was to take the most played songs from artists I really like. Granted this really isn’t going to be condusive of opening me up to unheard gems from a Killers album, but really that’s not what the Random Shit playlist is for. Random Shit is for those tried and true songs that get me through the long ass commute I make. If I wanted to listen to new music from my personal library (which is rare) I’ll have the genius feature in iTunes choose something for me.
why does it need to be so difficult.
If things don’t turn out the way I want them to, let’s say I become a drifter, just spend the majority of my adult life living below the poverty line, riding trains like a 1920’s hobo, never really settle down until I hit my 50’s. And even then I’ll probably just be squatting on some abandoned roof. If all of those things manage to happen then I want to become a Pigeon Man. Yes you heard me right. A Pigeon Man. Why should crazy and lonely women get all the fun being Cat Ladies?
This decision of course is directly taken from an episode of “Hey Arnold!” that was aptly titled “Pigeon Man”. The basic idea is that there’s a man who lost his marbles a long time ago living amongst pigeons on an abandoned roof. While it may not be a very appealing life, I’d much rather live around a bunch of birds that poop in a cage, than cats that use my whole house as a litter box… Of course the cat lady DOES have a house. So that is a little better than just squatting on a roof.
An Image of myself in 27 years.
So I believe there are 2 types of people in this world, people who can have a photo taken of them and they always turn out looking great, no matter how ridicoulous the pose. And then there’s people like me. With me it doesn’t matter how I pose 9 out the 10 times, it’s going to be terrible. And I mean terrible. Other people will always lie as well, those are the people who take good photos, other bad photo takers will never lie, because we know how much it stings.
My dear friend Laura was recently in town, and that of course prompted photos at every corner. This is proof of what I’m trying to say. I’ve included 10 photos of myself from her trip. Only one of them looks decent.
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
Example 5 (This one is kind of alright)
Example 7
Example 8
Example 9
Example 10
So out of 10 photos, there’s one that I don’t look like a complete jackass in. Maybe I should amend my theory, make it every 15 photos there will be 1 good one.
Do you think super heroes use craigslist? I can only imagine there are a lot of Missed Connections for Heros, every time Superman flies down and pulls some woman out of a burning building, or rescues a puppy, or beats up an intergalactic being there’s probably someone who falls madly in love with him. I can only imagine that Clark Kent, spending another lonely night at the Daily Planet finishing up some third page expose on the Metropolis Annual Dog Show, the whole time he’s plotting out what his Missed Connection for Lois will look like today, maybe he’ll go with a Haiku expressing how beautiful she is. Or a sonnet about standing next to her at the water cooler, for 2.6 seconds. No doubt Lois never reads them though. She’s happy at home in her 1 bedroom 1 bath apartment and never reads craigslist. Unless she needs a new apartment. Then she’s all over that thing.
I understand memory. At least in theory. A system of Neurons firing around our brains. Chemicals being released and picked up. Everything flowing into perfect little boxes, and what doesn’t quite makes it gets picked up by other chemicals. It’s simple. What’s not so simple is the memories themselves. The problem with memories is that they’re our most prized possessions, but they’re still inconsistent. No matter how hard I may try, the details of a lover’s face will undoubtedly fade, given enough time. But for what ever reason I can’t forget the taste of my own blood.
As though not remembering what you want to remember wasn’t bad enough, there exists the whole problem of remembering or not remembering. I seem to find memories, long regressed, surfacing when I’m doing the most in opportune things. Case in point, I remembered this certain, rather graphic, moment from my youth, with some girl I was mildly interested in. Well just my luck, I remembered these escapades of youth, while I was ordering coffee today. Mid sentence I was interrupted by the flow of these thoughts. Things I’d managed to forget for years.
One other thing that always seems to bother me, is the way certain things get stored so easily, while other things, important things just never make it into my long term memory. Why is it that I can recite every member of the original fellowship when it left Rivendell (Gandalf, Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Meriadoc Brandybuck, Peregrin Took, Gimli son of Glóin, Legolas son of Thranduil, Boromir, and Aragorn). And I still don’t know the syntax for an update with mysql. I mean I write more updates than I do reciting the names of the Fellowship. I wish someone could defrag my brain for me.
Lately strange words will flutter into my conscious mind. I’m never sure of what they exactly mean, or how I should use them in a sentence. I’m not sure where they’re coming from, I have a few ideas: They’re being beamed into my mind every week on Tuesday when there’s that Air Siren at noon, All this music I’ve been listening to on Pandora is secretly being double encoded with subliminal messages, Sleeping on the thesaurus has finally payed of.
I digress though. The word that popped into my mind today is: Pejorative. Why? I have no idea. Though now that I know what it really means I feel like I need to use it in a sentence somewhere.
Google has been, and probably will proceed to be a lot of things for me, let’s run down the list:
My postal system. My notebook. My flash drive. My newspaper. My Map. My restaurant recommender (sorry yelp I’ve been cheating). My Classified ads. My bookstore. My video store.
Now I can add my therapist to that list. Usually my search queries are fairly innocuous and just boring in general. As of late though (the last 6 months or so) I’ve found myself googling things that google probably shouldn’t be answering. I think it all started when the girl I was seeing broke up with me. While breakups are terrible, and a part of life, I’m never sure how to get over them. So I googled it. And google gave me a few helpful recommendations on what to do. That was all fine and dandy then… That one time. Of course if you know me at all, you know that I’m a creature of habit. So I found myself googling bizarre things, like ‘How do you make friends?’, ‘My mother calls me too much’, ‘Why is everyone leaving?’, ‘Why don’t I like sushi?’, ‘Why do I have no confidence in myself?’, ‘How do you know when you’re in love?’, ‘How can you fall out of love?’, ‘Why am I googling this?’.
The sheer fact that anything pseudo-relevant pops up after I hit ‘Google Search’ is generally stunning. I kind of feel bad for the poor program that has to sort through my insanely introspective queries attempting to locate some sort of pattern that can used for monetary purposes. Though I’m sure the information it’s gathering would be good for a Therapist App.