hmmmm.
LIST:
1.stop struggling.
2.let go.
3.stop fighting..
4.evolve!
(thanks, erica 
…)
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Archive for July, 2010
1. I am starting to feel a little paranoid. You know what Kurt Cobain said about being paranoid…
2. I’m actually doing really well today. I’m going through some old tracks of mine, and I just figured out that it would be a SUPREMELY ill advised idea to rename ALL of the files because then the program that used all those file-thingys to… uh… do stuff with (does this sentence even work anymore?!) … would get all… uh confused and I would want to hurl the computer into the sea. It wouldn’t be the macbook’s fault. But I would, nonetheless, blame it once again. So I was an ace of a coolkid, and took a PAUSE. Smart me!
3. I went to La Flor and saw a friend. He called me mi amor, and I felt all Austin-y. The tacos there are outstanding, and he is in a band. Being in a band is like breathing. We all can do this. It’s everywhere.
4. I can DO THIS!
5. Everytime I “get online” just to take a break, a little something upsets me for reasons of my own sensitivity. It’s gotten to where it’s even too difficult to explain. To explain would take too long a conversation, or be too embarassing. You know that Jewel song, the one about her being sensitive and wanting to stay that way? That’s kind of how I am feeling right now. I feel kind of bruised and weird.
6. It’s always different, unexpected stuff, coming out of nowhere. And it’s not like I’m not strong, or don’t have goals, or know what I want to do. It’s not like I don’t know who I am. I know exactly why I’m here. The stuff I expected and signed up for, that doesn’t upset me.
I will provide an example for illustration.
I was just in a song contest and got eliminated. It stung to get eliminated, but for me – it did not really sting for the reasons one might expect. The reasons I got upset about it were my own, and are complex.
The surface reasons: what were said about me in reviews, where I hit in rankings, the pure MATH of the situation … if it were *real business life* and an actual paying situation, and not a simulation … like a magazine or a rankings list, or for money or charts or something … I would have to accept these things. This is what people do. This is how it works. I have done this before, and I remember it. I remember doing it in school, other places. You take third, or worse, fourth. There’s reasons for it – good reasons. You take LAST after your FLAWLESS performance. It’s cutthroat.
I remember what it is like to Not Be Good Enough in a place where Not Being Good Enough is pretty damn ridiculous. I still have not quit. So I think at this point that’s saying something.
We are way beyond doing this for personal enjoyment. We are into phycosis.
I was reading an article that an interested and concerned reader tweeted. I think we’re gonna have to go for a combination of 2 and 1b.
Left brain doesn’t entertain the notion for a second that right brain doesn’t have plans.
1. Working. Working in Public is Good. I think I am Growing.
2. Using Capital letters for Important words makes them less Scary
3. I will beat this thing.
4. I have done all the responsible things that I am supposed to do, if not religiously, well then – at least half-assedly. That is Something.
5. It is impossible to be depressed whilst listening to elevator music in a diner-type enviornment eating FANTASTIC French toast.
6. I will return …
… again.
7. *sigh*
8. If I didn’t have lists, I don’t know what I’d do.
9. If I didn’t have y’all, I don’t know what I’d do. If you even hope I might be talking about you, even a little, you are correct
10. These things roll around. I just don’t enjoy them in the meantime.
1. she made a list.
2. she looked at her sitch
3. she counted her friends.
4. she smiled and sighed.
5. she moved some items around
6. she shut the lid.
7. she walked away.
8. thank god for syncing software 
1. I made a list. And I went. And I listened. Because it was PAINFUL. And necessary. And important.
2. I’m not going to talk about the list that I made that was painful. And necessary. And important. I will talk about the other list. The list of lies.
Here’s that list:
- You shouldn’t compare yourself to others.
- You should do exactly what you want to do
- You should go easy on yourself
- You shouldn’t work too hard
The litany goes on
It’s time to shut that off. If I really love myself, if I REALLY believe in myself, if I REALLY am as good as I say I am, and as I know that I am, and as I think that I am … I need to stop WHINING.
I need to get angry. It’s time to get angry. It’s time to stop screwing around. It’s time to decide what I want, and do it. If I’m not doing what I want, I need to make it be what I want, and do that.
I am thirty-six years old. oh, and more than a half on top of that. That’s more than to almost forty. Time’s a’wastin,’ sister.
No comments please, about being easy on myself, I have a lot of time, I can do it.
-I know I can do it. If I get off my ass and do it, it will get done.
-If I stop being distracted by bright shiny things, it might get done.
Look at me. I don’t really look like I want it… do I?
No. That’s not what I’m talking about. I look like I’m hungry for attention, sure. I didn’t used to. Ironically, I was much more attractive when I was a hermit chained to my piano. I wasn’t really even writing songs then. I was playing the same four bars. Over and over. I was playing the same phrase in four different modes through the circle of fifths. I was making up chord progressions to do things through. I was trying to write five new solos for rhythm changes and put them in major keys (and do rhythm changes inverted!).
I used to not give a rats ass. I don’t know if I could do those things anymore.
I used to do “useless” stuff too. Who needs to know more than four Chopin etudes when they aren’t concertizing? It’s good for your speed and technique, that’s why! No one wants to hear me play these things when they can go get a recording of someone else playing Bach fugues faster and cleaner. But it’s good for my brain. It’s good for me.
But no. I whine and cry and jerk around all day. I blog. I write REALLY insipid poetry. I wish I was a DIFFERENT PERSON.
That’s when I knew. When I started wishing I was a different person. When I started feeling inadequate. When I started thinking that I wasn’t creative.
The phrase that popped into my head… the very first phrase was something from my childhood. When you have snuck out the window in the middle of the night for the last time to smoke cigarettes, drink, have premarital sex, whatever. They’ve found the beer bottles in the creek, the butts in the flower bed … whatever else. You don’t clean up real nice.
There’s not much to say. You hang your head in shame.
“You’re grounded.”
You pout. You know it’s for your own good though. Because you want to graduate, and go to a good school. You don’t want to end up stuck in this one-horse town, just like the rest of them. Whining about your life.
So go. Be different.
For me, the idea of “drama free” began in a poem which I wrote back in 2006. I discarded it because I grew out of the reasons for writing it.
Later on it came back up and combined with a new reason for writing it. It became a song then, about leaving and coming into my own. It was about something I went through religiously.
I may someday make a ‘story of a song’ over it. I feel like Graham gets it, because he covered it. I feel like Joe gets it, because he is talking about it and remembering it, and it sticks in his mind as something that belonged to me. I feel sometimes like other people get me. Oftentimes, I feel like people … don’t.
EX: raise your hand if you knew that I had never heard of Sue Storm until AFTER the Round One listening party?
This means I should write a Round One story of a song, and I probably will. There’s some golden eggs in there – some intended specifically for Travis Langworthy, but it’s a little silly joke that I was telling. It’s also a very STUPID joke and a pretentious joke that is very much MY sense of humor!!!
Anyway, some people get my little “off” sense of humor and what I’m trying to do. And it’s nice to have any audience among my peers. some people that know that I’m always trying to do something transformative which is about what the lyrics are attempting to reveal about me. And that I’m trying to do it in this particular way. And that when I listen to people too much and try to change what I’m doing into what they think I should be, that it will never work for me.
I can’t really sacrifice what I have to say for audience, for money … for anything. I’m just going to have to find another way.
As a songwriter, I am a diarist. I can only write what I know. I only know – me.
Part of me has learned from these competitions that I’m not really cut out for them. I’m not like Edric, who writes a song that he is told to write, and does it brilliantly. I go through painful transformative cataclysms until it is done. I am not the master of the song, it is the master of me. I invited who I THOUGHT the judges were into the bedroom this time, and then hit on them in a tawdry and clumsy way … then I got REJECTED. Like in an embarassing way. Like I staged this whole cheezy scene. Thinking I was all… beautiful or something and … well … shoulda known better.
It’s a horrible metaphor and doesn’t really fit. But I feel dirty and gross. Nothing worse that raping your own self. That’s just dumb. And I realize that for a piece of something awful, my tune is actually pretty skilled, compared to a lot of things. But this is why everyone is always feeling very sorry for Brittney Spears. She’s not a bad performer, but she keeps shaving her head and gaining and losing weight and flashing her yow-yow every which way.
So my tune was an abberation in a lot of ways. Albiet classier. It’s hard for me to embarass myself. It’s something slutty that I did. And I think that I hate it. I’m ashamed of it. I’m glad that it put me out. Just like I’m glad that my first song in Song Fu six, ‘Rain’ did enough damage to my total score to knock me out of a shot into the Final Round. Because in THAT case, I listened to what someone else told me to do. They told me that my instincts weren’t good enough – and that I had to start all over and please someone else.
I know that I’ll be told that I’m being too hard on myself. I don’t care. This is all just rehearsal for me. I’m doing this now so that I won’t have to do it more painfully later. I don’t think for a second this is it for me. I’ve been saying this since I was 16.
Anyway, with these thoughts, I’ll show you the poem I wrote so long ago. It’s called Lucky Charm
LUCKY CHARM
I said I love you and you said it back
You’re the only one
who’d complicate
so simple a clean fact
You’re my lucky charm
pulled from the lion’s mouth
with tiny little hands
You made me look so obvious
infants could understand
You were the one who babysat
me through the evening
So now you’ll stay
alone with you
Because I have to
Leave in company with me
the only way you’ll be okay is
Drama free and naturally
you’ll rue the day
And I don’t know
what on earth we’d do
In this flimsy house of cards
without you!
******
I did like the phrase enough to use ‘drama free’ for a hook later in a song.
I don’t know that you can copyright a phrase for a hook. I’m not popular enough to really be remembered enough for doing something cool or clever. But I was at least memorable enough to get covered, and brought up in the memory of a judge when a really cool phrase which I also discovered long ago once got brought up once again.
I wonder if anyone else has also discovered it.
The world,
flushed with
entitlement
(an aspect of reality
that may not
even be considered
inappropriate!),
casts greedy eyes about
for its deceiver …
And this is true of all of us –
the offspring of a pattern
we believe in.
Send surreptitious glares
around the room
and pray that like an arrow
loosed true from the bolt
an easy mark is found …
a place to place the anger –
true feeling
in response to untruths spoken …
Yet when we search for culpability
to find the birth of fraud,
we see a line of lies
that stretch back ropelike
from father to daughter,
mother, son,
grandmother …
in some chain unbroken
since the dawn of time.
Who was the first to settle on
the status quo?
Who told you that your feelings
must be masked behind
a pair of limpid eyes
and countenance as smooth
and Unmarred
as some virgin snow?
And how to fire
that ire
at something more substantial
than some floating concept of denial?
Now that the virtual tower of Babel
looms to some false pinnacle,
we sift through sheaves of pretense
in search of one small document of real.
We cannot glean the origin of blame.
And where to put our centuries of hate?
… now that we have no place
is it too late
to blame the fourth estate?
I’m having a bad day. My mind feels like it has tiny bugs crawling around inside it. I’m going to speak in metaphors, because it’s the only thing I can do. It really is.
1. I am an ant farm.
2. I would like to scream, but I’m holding it in. It is as if I screamed, the megaphone wouldn’t reach over the walls of the insane asylum. If I screamed, the only effect it would have is to increase the dosage and make sure I was still safe and sound in ward 8. It’s for my own good, really. And I’m thankful I have the insurance.
3. The therapist that works in Metaphorical Ward 8 thinks there is something wrong with me. She thinks that my refusal to scream is indicitave of pathological behavior. She suggests upping the dosage.
4. I’m thinking of being non-compliant.
5. This is all really just a metaphor. I am not crazy. I desperately feel the need to not censor myself anymore. The preceeding sentence was not a metaphor. I don’t want to censor myself.
6. I am very secretive, with a lot of secrets. I’ve lost a lot.
7. I probably need to go out tonight, a LOT, but I probably; once again, can’t.
I am not sure whether or not to discuss this.
Flying WAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY below the radar, so much so that every force-ful act of being pointlessly and effortlessly ignored in a way that was so unintentional it feels like a calculated SLAP! actually has its perks … but it hurts. I’m too repulsed by schmearyness to discuss specific imagined slights or beg for attention. I imagine myself magnanimously and graciously extending the finger of kindness (it’s not even the middle one!), and only INTERNALLY thinking “where were you when” and “you didn’t even CARE about me during” and “yeah, you say this NOW…” and “sure, you’re putting me in this group of folks TODAY…” and “you like me now that I’ve …” because I know the specific reasons that I am here and others are… there. I can describe them in vivid, bitter sounding, boring detail. In a nasally whiny voice that no one is interested in. Least of all me. I don’t have time for that crap.
But I am THAT kind! I wouldn’t do the i-told-you-so. I was brought up THAT right! I sure would wear a pungent cloud o’ smug though. And that doesn’t make it any cleaner.
8. I do have my friends. Loved ones. People who take a bother. Who give a rat’s posterior. People who are surprising. It’s nice. I like to notice them on my own, a lot of the time. The best way is when I see these little gems poking out of the water and I can process them in my own time – rather than it being a “see! people DO like you!” type of thing. I know people should like me. It doesn’t surprise me when people do. It makes me happy when people are nice and it makes me feel warm to be so loved and it makes me feel connected to be thought of. But I know who I am.
I do dislike being misunderstood. And the thing that has been happening has been that I am no longer getting my point across in my music.
My next entry will be about my song that I wrote for the contest.
I don’t have much time, so here’s my little sumthin-sumthin …
STORY of a SONG, part one …
for now!!!
FLEX TIME
1. This song is about flirting with rule breaking.
2. I use two very “good citizens.” They are different from one another, but find each other very alluring. They are attracted to each other, because they both have the use of triplets in common, 6/8 and 4/4 … but Common and Compound handle that sexy little roll of notes differently. A 4/4 will contain it and hold it back, a 6/8 will be ruled by it in both its beats and if it splits the measure into duplets the whole character changes. It requires so much DISCIPLINE.
3. We are not specifically TOLD that we have to use TWO time signatures. We are told that nowhere in the rules. So I throw in an odd shift every now and again on the eighth note every now and again you will find a 5/8, or a 3/8.
4. Now I KNOW I got kinda frisky with this! Well..
5. Maybe it’s about time travel, maybe it’s about time signatures. Maybe it’s about other stuff.
6. And if it is, that’s okay!
It’s PERFECTLY OKAY … to write about recipes and lemonade.
