Mish Mash

Yes, I can tell Heaven from Hell. Guess which this is.

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Here’s the problem with sharing an iTunes library with a spouse:  much like moving in together and commingling your CD’s, the lines of “yours, mine, and ours” become inexorably blurred.   As a result, you can be enjoying a lovely morning run, accompanied by a perfectly crafted playlist (“The Sweatiest Music”), when – BAM! – on comes your musical nemesis, Pink Floyd.  All momentum grinds to a halt as you  hurriedly skip it in order to right the ship.

After an initial accusation in my head, I now know that my husband didn’t do this to sabotage my workout.  He knows of my disdain towards Pink Floyd, but he likes them, and probably will think it’s funny that they ended up on my workout playlist (whether he did it intentionally or not).

It’s always been interesting to me how certain music can make the reject pile, just by its association with a certain person or situation.  It’s possible that under different circumstances I could have been a fan of Pink Floyd, but a college neighbor who played it at all hours of the night sealed that deal.   Jimmy Buffett and Hootie and the Blowfish have suffered similar fates, not that I am particularly mourning the loss of any of them.

Still, it’s apparent that my workout playlist needs some editing.  And I might as well throw in a little payback while I’m at it.  Someone should warn my husband that an extended fiddle jam from the Dave Matthews Band is coming his way soon.

Mark It Old, Dude

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I did it again this morning.  Given that this is the third time, I must sit up and take notice of the fact that it’s a pattern.  Not a pattern that I am proud of, but one that, as a music lover and a mother, I must acknowledge.

I could blame it on a frantic off-to-school morning of looking for socks and lost yoga mats, or rationalize by saying that it’s the end of a long week. 

But nothing can change the fact that, (not for the first time), I yelled these words at my daughter:  “Turn that music DOWN!  It is TOO LOUD!” 

It’s official:  January 2011, the month that I became old.  

My Running Buddy

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I don’t usually run with anyone.  I understand why people do, though – it helps to push you farther.  I once had an old guy wave me down while I was running.  He continued to chat me up, all the way around the lake, despite the fact that I was wearing headphones (which I thought was the universal signal for “don’t talk to me”, kind of like reading a magazine on an airplane).   Short of stopping, I didn’t know how to get away from him. And so I continued running with him, mainly because I did not want to be outpaced by an old guy.

Running with him wasn’t awful.  But for me, running is a solitary, mediative experience.  I far prefer my headphones to any idle chit chat.  I de-compress, I relax, and I figure out whatever problems are nagging at me.

The weather is hit and miss these days, so recently I had to run at the gym.  A few minutes in, a guy about my age got on the treadmill next to me.  I immediately noticed a tattoo on his forearm:  “without music, life would be a mistake”. (I have since learned that this is a Nietzsche quote.  I vaguely remember some Nietzsche from college, but I like him much more now that I know this quote.)

The dude was jamming out as he ran — he stopped short of playing an air guitar, but he drummed his hands on the treadmill, and punched the air a few times.   He was a kindred spirit, in his own private concert just like me.  (“The Sweatiest Music”).

I was dying to know what he was listening to.  Am I missing essential music on my workout playlist?  But, of course, treadmill etiquette dictates that you don’t really acknowledge the person on the treadmill next to you.  And asking to see someone’s iPod is akin to asking to read their journal.

So I didn’t.  But we ran on, side by side, each in our own world.    Kind of like running together, only better.

Namaste, Eddie

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I am not mature enough to be a yoga person.  I am too fidgety, and I can’t clear my mind, and, most of all, the trippy new age music either annoys me or makes me giggle.  

Lately though, I’ve been doing hot yoga, and I have to say that I really like it.  I think the stench of the sweaty guy next to me is distraction enough from the music, and the heat makes my non-flexible body feel stretchier.

I found my musical soulmate at a coffee house once.  The playlist was perfect, and this is not something that happens everyday.  But I took that poor barista for granted, and paid for it by sitting through hours of bad coffee house playlists later on.

Therefore, I intend to cherish the yoga teacher that I have found, who just might be my yoga music soulmate. I am loath to reveal her location for fear that the class will become too crowded.  Let’s just say — Jimi Hendrix, Radiohead, Eddie Vedder – now that is music I can Downward Dog to.

The Opposite of doing a Beer Bong

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Imagine that it’s 1989 and you are a freshman in college.  You’ve gotten a job at the athletic rec center on campus, and the only shift available is the worst time for any college student to be at work:  Friday night, 7pm to 11pm.

Your job involves sitting at a front desk and clicking a counter when patrons come in and show their ID.  There are not many people coming in to exercise at this time, except for professors and grad students.  Even worse, your two co-workers are dating each other, and are too busy playing grab-ass to talk to you.

Now imagine that, for some strange leftover disco-era reason, there is roller skating on Friday nights in one of the gyms.  It is attended by the aforementioned grad students, professors, and 70’s holdouts.  I’m talking full-on Skate King mode: disco lights, music pumping — and it’s so loud that it can be heard as far as the front desk.  Songs are recognizable by their bass line, thumping through the wall.    You sit every Friday, eavesdropping on this music, imagining your friends up the hill, who are most certainly having more fun than you are.   What stage of partying is going on up there?   What fun hijinks are occurring in your absence?

There is one song that is played every Friday, several times throughout the course of your shift.   It is unmistakable, as its distinctive “Woo!” comes through the wall, taunting you as the hours roll by:  none other than “It Takes Two”, by Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock.  Twenty years later, you still hear that song and are immediately transported back.

Welcome to my little slice of 1989 Friday night hell…. (and did I mention that it was accompanied by the pungent odor of funky B.O.?)

Pick a Shell, Any Shell

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The past two days, I’ve been digging the Smashing Pumpkins.  This really doesn’t make sense to me.  I like them just fine and have some of their old stuff, but it’s never been ‘go to’ music for me in any way.

Then yesterday while I was running, this lyric from “Tonight, Tonight” jumped up and hit me in the gut:

And you know you’re never sure
But you’re sure you could be right
If you held yourself up to the light.

I just love that.   It resonated with me, I think, because of an image that popped into my head recently while talking with a friend:  that each of us is basically a shell game.

We meet people throughout stages of our lives, we form relationships…people drift in and out and really only know a portion of us, or what we allow them to see. 

A constant shuffle, reminiscent of the law school “hide the ball” analogy…letting certain aspects of ourselves show, and cautiously guarding others.  Do we ever really lift up all the shells at once?

This seemed profound and deep at the time.  In print it seems more akin to late-night college drunk talk.  Twenty years too late, and I’m not drunk, but I still like it.

The Sweatiest Music

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I was thinking yesterday about what makes a good workout playlist.    What works on any given day is always up for grabs.  The lawyer in me, though, can distill it down into these essential elements:

1. VOLUME.  The music must be mind-numbingly loud, creating an audio cocoon that drowns out any peripheral noise.  I don’t want to be talked to when I have on headphones, so whether I can hear what anyone is saying is immaterial.

2. CONTENT.  Live recordings are best, but studio versions will do.  The perfect tempo is one that coincides with your running pace, resulting in a sweaty bliss as if you are dancing in the summer sun at The Gorge.   I have a recording of a really hot Pearl Jam show at The Gorge, and when those songs come on, it’s almost — almost — like being there again. And I’m usually just as sweaty, considering the temperature at that show was 110.

3.  TRANSPORT.  Creative visualization is a nice bonus.  If a song reminds me of a funny memory, it shifts my focus from thinking about how tired I am.  That being said, some songs have inexplicably made it onto my playlist, and I have no idea why.  Crosby, Stills and Nash only remind me of late nights in law school, and thus have no place on a workout playlist.  I can’t hit “skip” fast enough, yet I have been too lazy to remove them.

4.  CONTEXT.  And finally, of course, the music does not have to be music that you listen to at any other time.  Do I ever listen to Public Enemy or Soundgarden while I am making dinner?  No.  But are they a mainstay in my workout playlist?  Absolutely.

1979 Was a Great Year

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In honor of my youngest sister’s 31st birthday, and in an effort to forget how old that will soon make me, here are, in no particular order, my Top Five Favorite Musical Memories of her:

1.  “Sara Smile” by Hall & Oates. She hates this song. I mean really, really hates it. Which makes it all the more fun to sing it to her, or to call her and leave it on her answering machine. Or to play it at a wedding and dedicate it to her.

2.  “Pour Some Sugar on Me”, Def Leppard. My middle sister’s bachelorette party and a little place called the Grizzly Bar, she danced like nobody’s business, and I’ve got the pictures to prove it.

3.  “Best of What’s Around”, DMB.  A show at the Gorge in 2000, they opened with Don’t Drink the Water.  Towards the end of the song, I told her that I really hoped that they played Best of What’s Around.  Two seconds later, they launched into it.  I turned and punched her in the arm.  Hard.  And she’s never let me forget it.  Every time I hear the opening beats of that song, I think of throwing a right hook.

4.  “Are You Gonna Go My Way”, Lenny Kravitz.  A sister weekend at her apartment in Bellingham, and some cookies.  And that’s about all I can say.

5.  Theme song from Jurassic Park.  The summer that Jurassic Park came out, we had a blast together.  I was home from college, and we spent the summer doing crafty projects and being goofy.  We saw Jurassic Park and were genuinely scared in the middle of the afternoon, dissecting how we would handle it if a velociraptor appeared next to the car on the way home.  To this day, she does an awesome impersonation of a dilophosaur.

Happy Birthday, Janie.  I love you!

Book the Villa, it’s a Sign

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I feel it’s only fair that I fully disclose the Cheese Factor for this post…..it’s fairly significant.  Courtesy of, quite possibly, one of the all time cheesiest songs around: none other than the catchy “Mambo Number Five”.

We traveled last weekend to California for the wedding of a college friend of my husband’s.  Amongst observations of how officially “old” we all are getting,  I found myself feeling reflective of all the times we had shared over the past 20 years….football games, trips, parties, weddings, babies.

At the reception, discussion turned to a trip to France that six of us had taken eleven years ago — long enough to feel like a lifetime — two weddings and five kids ago, between all of us.  We mini-vanned through Paris, Provence, and the French Riviera, drinking wine and butchering the French language at every turn. 

Memories of that trip flooded back to all of us — Gary, the weird fellow American who seemed to be following us in Paris; getting a speeding ticket and having to pay it on the spot; the fabulous dinner in Beynac and the castle tour (in French) that none of us understood, yet we played along, laughing at the tour guide’s jokes when everyone else did.

I don’t remember who said it first:  We all need to go back!  Rent a villa, bring the kids, shop at the farmers market and cook meals in fields of lavender……wouldn’t it be great?   We could see some of the same old sights, drink some great wine, and the kids would have fun too.

The band finished and the inevitable DJ dance music had begun, and then it hit the airwaves:  Mambo Number Five.  This song had haunted us throughout France that fall (and really, where didn’t it haunt everyone that year?).  We heard it everywhere we went, and it has always reminded me of that trip.   The other song of that trip was a catchy little rap tune called “Tomber la Chemise” by the French group Zebda,  but it’s highly unlikely that any of us will hear that song again anytime soon.

I proclaimed it to everyone as a Sign…..a Sign that, YES, we all need to go back!!    Sure, it was a few glasses of wine into the evening, but come on, how often do you hear Mambo Number Five anymore?   And short of hearing the Zebda song, this has GOT to be the Sign!  

I am a big believer in Signs.  I love Signs.  Very rarely do I follow them, though.  Maybe that is part of my problem — it is, after all, about the follow-though.  Otherwise, the Sign loses its significance, and then you convince yourself that it wasn’t really a Sign anyway. 

Everyone (I think) agreed with me, and the coming weeks will determine whether there is any follow-through.   The evening ended with a late night trip to In-n-Out Burger.  What that is a Sign of, I don’t know, but I sure hope the France trip happens.

The Keg’s Around Back

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I’ve never had the experience of meeting someone and wondering where they had been all my life. But now I can say that I have had it with a band.

Holy crap, how did I not know about the Black Keys? I am completely hooked on them these days, thanks to my youngest, more musically hip, sister. I felt like a kid in a candy store when I realized that they have more albums than the one she initially gave me.

Gritty, grainy, stripped down – makes me feel like I should be watching them play in a party house with a beer-soaked floor, keg cup in hand. Which is a good thing…figuratively, anyway.