men, and music

I don’t have time for men who don’t improve my music collection.

We were sitting back to back in the Admissions Office. He was preparing for an upcoming visit day and/or getting paid to do nothing – I was grading tour guide tests. We exausted friendly conversation and were left with nothing but the sound of the copy machine, and quickly he turned on some music. “This doesn’t bother you, does it?” he asked. “Not at all” I laughed, “It’s too quiet in here anyway”.

But as I listened to a string of sugary pop songs I began to reflect on the situation.

He’s a very specific type of guy. He’s nice. Quite nice. He’s relatively clean cut, and he’ll probably be a Doctor or a Lawyer or a Business Man one day. He’ll get married, have a pretty wife, and watch football. He’s a little bit of a “ho-bag”, and he’s had a bit more than his fair share of one night stands and drunken (pre-walk-of-shame) sexual encounters. He’s a seducer, but not a rapist. He cheated on his now ex-girlfriend, but he’s friendly and funny so you find yourself incapable of holding it against him. He is relatively unpretensious, reasonably attractive, and ridiculously charismatic in a sweet and silly boyish way. He belongs to a fraternity (how good are you? can you guess which one?)

But his musical tastes are horrendous.  They remeind me of the playlists on the favorite radio stations of 14-year-olds.  The music is simplistic, the lyrics aren’t even worth mentioning, and of course every person in America under the age of 25 knows every word to each of them.

Here and there I find myself liking a few of the songs, in that way that any normal human being enjoys something like oreos.  They’re shitty, they will probably give you cancer, and for some reason you just can’t get enough of them.  Like blue eyes and beautiful lakes.  But, given the choice between oreos and a warm flourless chocolate cake with fresh whipped cream and rasberry sauce, who in their right mind would be eating oreos?  We all have our oreos.  Kelly Clarkston.  Shitty rap music.  etc.   But I can forgive Dr. Dre as long as he comes with something else.

From the day I was born, almost every man worth knowing in my life has invested a good deal of time in introducing me to good music.  Whether fathers, lovers, friends, or simply  outstanding men I have known, I realized I can look back on each of the important males in my life and trace what they have given me.  From infancy I was raised on the DSO, Bob Segar, J Geiles, (CSX, my fellow Detoriters?) and the Blues on Saturday mornings.  and as I grew, I was given techno, music from the Detroit underground, and a smathering of other collections that play continiously in my life today.

… And he’s watching a Britney Spears video in YouTube.   None of us can help but glance at the trainwreck that was some award show performance from the former pop-queen, but he stays glued for longer than the rest.

something shitty come up on his playlist.  He’s tickling the girl next to him, smiling coyly.  and all I can do is chuckle a little bit inside.

“Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” -Berthold Auerbach

yours.Rachel

no time for brilliance

… sometimes life gets in the way.

As of late, a lot of things have been hitting me. On several occasions, I found myself sitting across from a sister going “now that’s blogworthy.” And then it never appears. In the last week I’ve had some profoundly wonderful experiences, some profoundly painfully realizations, and some utterly mundane moments. or hours. or days.

I’m finding myself caught between the extraordinary and the acutely ordinary. Lately I’ve come to realize the truly irreplacable nature of my friends; late nights and shared trials are teaching me the divine value of conversation and shared stories. of love – real love. like the elder in the robe preached to a young man and woman in white in front of the rolling New York mountains. not selfish, rude, childish, one-sided. not infatuation, and not vanity. the kind of love that love deserves. (and sometimes is lucky enough to recieve)

And as other things empower me to an almost unsettling point of power, they, and and other things, grab me and pull me back to a postion of utter unabashed humility. The seemingly moment by moment change between these two is startling and jolting – to say the least.

And then there’s all those truths. Is it funny because it’s true, or true because it’s funny? and what about when it’s not funny? Quickly, I’m realizing what I’m anxiously waiting for and what I’m nowhere near ready for. and those words; Words like forever. and death. And when realities begin to melt faster than dreams it gets really chilling.

…and right now I should be writing an astronomy lab…

the powerful – the poignant – stands pushed aside by pragmatism.

Today was health and saftey inspections. In a rush before class and meetings, I had no choice but to sweep Arthur (my new camera), my copy of the Qur’an, and the pieces of would-be cards I never got to make underneath my bed with the dustbunnies.

And then they confiscated my candles.

I opened up my Franklin-Covey to make my to do list and hour-by-hour schedule for the day. Just above my daily notes sections I read

“I think one of the problems of our culture is our obsession with ‘getting things done.’ People are much more concerned about doing than about being.” -Myra Jennyson

I spent the next 10 minutes pondering whether I should laugh or throw the damn pink thing against the wall.

yours.Rachel

relatively scattered thoughts

“This is interesting”, she said. “This is the Rachel I’d always heard about but that I hadn’t seen until now”. When I asked her what she meant, she responded “the fuck it I’m going to work out Rachel.”

I’ve always had fair degree of fuck it in me, especially when matters like my formal education are concerned. With two tests this afternoon, I’ve already worked out, gotten dressed up, and now I’m spewing writing as I sit with my feet upon my astronomy notes pondering the relative significance of this place.

I flip through my Franklin Covey – clad in Ralph, carrying Kate, and stillettos. I break fast far too early with a slice of cold pizza. Amused by duality and disgusted by this final admission of a fuck it. I don’t mind fucking my education, because I’ve spent my life setting up a game where the stakes were in the palm of my hand – I’ve learned to play the system such that even the point of “loss” is still a relative success. But the idea of fuck it to my spirituality is revolting.

And she laughs at me as she makes her door decs, remarking that fucking it for her academic success is an everyday routine. and I’m glad I’m never going to get a PH.D.

And I’m counting. days, and things that come in the frame of days. then months. and then years.

and, as is often the case, I am anywhere but here.

at the moment

I’m sitting crosslegged in an absurdly fuzzy fuschia bathrobe atop a fuschia and orange argyle fringe-fleece pillow. I like to call it my tuffet. On the other side of our well decorated sqaure, my roomate is speaking to three of those pseudo-lover-boy types that we seems to find ourselves entangled with, and I can help but chuckle as I notice the fuzzy feather halo that crowns her head. On the floor next to me are the remnants of the breaking of the fast – day three of Ramadan brings reflections and sentiments that will surely find themselves in such writings as these soon. Beside dinner is what was cleared from my shoe trunk/makeshift table for dinner – a stack a Wall Street Journals to be recycled, 603 pages of In Style October, and the Bible.

She hands me a gin and tonic, spilling half of hers before having even taken a sip, and as Amy Winehouse plays I know it’s going to be a good evening.

On Friendship

there’s the ones you live with. They have the unfortunate fate of having to see you when you wake up in the morning, and you both come to quicly accept the incoherent mumblings uttered before coffee and a shower. You take turns drenching yourselves while filling the Brita filter in the shower (because the sink is too small), you split the cost of accent pillows, and you strike a balance between fashion and/or love photography and neuroscience journal covers while drinking lady grey tea and eating organic food. You think it’s cute that they’re brilliant and that they mumble in different ways for different emotions, and they think it’s funny that you sing songs about trying to find things or that you can describe anything in ways more bizarre then they ever would have imagined. They clean your microwave and you promise to bake for them, and all the while you share fashion advice and bitch about boys.

then there’s the ones you might as well live with. You see them at least once every day, and, eventually you don’t even knock when you come into their room in your pajamas and plop down to tell them about your wierd discoveries and epic days. They’re the ones who fork watery lettuce calmly while matter-of-factly remarking “You’re really bad at maybes”; in you exchange remark on the fruitless and silly nature of their attempts to rationalize themselves out of something they then try to rationalize themselves back into because they know its true. You notice when they have “noddy days” or when they are processing and formulating words to say, and they can smell a monologue from a mile away. Together, you resolutley decide that the battle with the black/red/green dress necessitates your collective rising at 7:45am to go work out, and you trudge through the trenches together.

And there’s the ones you never see, but who there’s always a place for. You plan phonecalls or Baldwin dinners, and inevitably plans are thwarted by apocalyptic drama, general forgetfullnes, significant others (strangely enough, all of these types of friends seem to have them… but the good thing is that you like them), or other tidbits of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. BUT – when you do email “Dinner – Baldwin – 5o’clock, Bitch!” or when you exclaim “Damnit I’m getting on a plane and there’d better be somewhere for me to sleep”, you pick right up where you left off. From the moment you step out of the cab or sit down with a plate of make-shift-(shit)-meal you read eachother like that book you’ve read a thousand times but never get tired of. You play the catch-up game and remember how lovely it is to be able to grow up together even if you can’t do it side-by-side.

The tricky part comes with the ones who are inbetween. <and As I chomp into a sandwich I express my like for banana-peppers because without them my turkey-and-swiss sandwich would be terribly middle-of-the-road and ambigiuous, and she who I almost live with undestands> Usually they’re enigmas – like you in some respects, and completely impenetrable. But somehow, one of you found a back door and crept in to the other’s head, and though you’re never sure who got in first, some sort of right night came at the perfect time. But though you’re tied by music and writing and god-knows-what-else, you’re never quite sure how to articulate that look of “we know deeply personal things about eachother and yet I don’t know your brother or your mom’s name”… and you’re never quite sure how much you’re entitled to know. Creeping around the mansion of their mind, you’re not sure which doors or forbidden to open – which ones hide a closet full of private things, or which one is the bedroom door. You fear that inevitably you’ll stumble upon their bedroom while they’re in bed with someone, or even worse, while they are alone and naked or in their underwear looking you straight in the eyes and saying “what the fuck are you doing in my bedroom – get out.”

and last but not least… there are the ones you weren’t expecting. You never call them, you never see eachother at anything other than events, and your conversation is usually pleasant but surface-level. They don’t know about that one time that you and your ex-boyfried… or that you’re terrified of insanity and mental hospitals, or that you throw your hands out to the side when you’re proud or excited. Sometimes you even forget to think about them until an email appears in your Inbox titled “Hey Beautiful!” You wonder how they know so little about you, and yet they care enough to say the right things at the right times…

“No Love, no friendship can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.” -Francois Muriac

“Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.” – Elie Wiesle

yours.Rachel