jingle lyrics contest

I am offering a handsome reward of $10 to anyone who can fill in the blank below. I've already tried to google it with no success. You'd probably have to be a serious Cape Cod radio listener to even know this song, the ubiquitous Zooquarium jingle that plays every 15 minutes from April to Septmeber. Enjoy:

(to the tune of ren and stimpy's "Log" song)

what are we gonna do today?
there's the beach or miniature golf to play
or we could go to the mall (NO!)
are you ready to say
let's all go to the zoo

we can have some fun while we learn about culture
just watch out for the ____ and the turkey vultures!

zooquarium
zooquarium
it just might be more fun than the beach
or anything else
it just might be more fun than the beach

and PS: Zooquarium is nowhere near as much fun as the beach (or anything else)

The best thing about this website is that I can spend hours on it at work, and nosy coworkers looking over my shoulder may assume I'm just making some work-related charts and graphs.
Except when I start laughing really really loud.

and another thing

the Police SUCKED when I was growing up, and they continue to SUCK now - at least as much, if not more than before. they don't suck as much as Sting does on his own, but seriously, they suck more than enough.



yes, that's a mesh shirt. I really, truly hate you Sting. But I digress.

WHY, radio station owners of the area, do you think that just because the Police are reunited, you should start playing their crappy music ad nauseum? the people who have paid money to go see them live are doing us all a favor, taking one for the team if you will. there's no need to subject the rest of us to extra Police music on the radio. STOP, please, or else I'm sending you a message in a bottle. and by 'message' I mean 'flesh-eating bacteria.'

and quit with the f-ing Bono-worship too, while you're at it. that is all.

"work"

so here I am, on a beautiful and sunny Friday afternoon, at "work," in my "office," wearing my "shoes." this BLOWS. there's good news though - when I got to work today no one tried to move me to a different location, plus I now have my very own PHONE and MAILBOX. yes, i have truly arrived. then my boss' assistant, who is quite possibly the only nice person in the entire place, showed me how to use the fax machine and the copier. believe it or not I was already familiar with those devices, but it was sweet of her anyways. everyone else in the office kind of looks at me like "who the fuck is that" but no one actually introduces themselves, so their loss, they'll never know who I am and why I'm the awesomest.

anyhow, having my own mailbox really gave me the sense of permanence I needed to feel comfortable at work. comfortable enough, anyways, to sit there for a few minutes, take off my sensible shoes under my desk, fill out my hours for the week, and leave. I'm in my other adopted office now, which belongs to Patty. her office is way nicer, it's painted in soothing tones and Homero is right next to me so I can pester him endlessly with translation issues. today we went over guinea pigs, which in case you were wondering, are NOT delicious.

in lieu of actually working, I have been messing around with pandora a lot today. in addition to being a good way to listen to music from anywhere, it's a really cool idea. it's based on something they call the Music Genome Project, which identifies "traits" of songs or artists you tell it you like. then it finds and plays other music that shares similar characteristics. for example, I'm currently listening to my 'Born Under Punches Station.' I told it I liked the Talking Heads song 'Born Under Punches,' and right now it's playing a song called 'Thieves Like Us' by New Order, according to them "because it features electronica influences, extensive vamping, groove-based composition, a dynamic male vocalist..." so when it picks a song you like (or don't like) you tell it, and it gradually modifies the content of the "station" according to what it thinks you're telling it. get it? i'm pretty obsessed with it as a way to discover new music. this thing always plays songs I otherwise wouldn't ever hear, and it's pretty fascinating to explore all the trait categories they use. apparently I'm a huge fan of 'vamping.' who knew?

april wasn't all that cruel this year

There are probably two or three people in the universe who I haven't [drunkenly] told about my plans to throw a Super Festive Post-Graduation Drunken Softball Extravaganza. If you're one of those people, I should let you know that I live right across the street from the best little league field in all of Lowell. I don't know what makes it 'the best,' probably just that I can see it from my porch, but whatever, it's the best. Anyhow, I was at school all day pretending to work but not really doing anything, so I decided to come home and pretend to work on the porch. That didn't really work out very well because there was an awesome game going on and also, somehow I get wireless internet out here. I've been totally unproductive, surprise, surprise.

But blogging is kind of like work, at least in the sense that it's something I haven't done in forever. I have an excuse though - I was really sick! OK, I was only sick for like 12 hours, but it was horrible timing. I literally haven't gotten sick since the first summer after I graduated from college, so I don't handle it very well. I missed an entire day of this conference that I was supposed to present a paper at, a paper that I've been working on for months with my boss/professor. So that sucked. But I made a full recovery and went to the conference all day on Friday.

Since I am mentally unable to sit in one place and listen for more than 15 minutes, I volunteered to photograph, which gave me justification to do what I do best - wandering around aimlessly for 7 hours talking to people and occasionally taking some pictures. As far as academic conferences go, it was actually a really cool one; people came from all around the world to present about community-university partnerships (in the past I've referred to them as 'stupid f-ing community-university partnerships, but once we finished our paper they seemed a lot less aggravating).

On Friday night we went to see Robert Randolph and the Family Band at the Avalon. Their music itself was along the lines of Medeski Martin and Wood, but they reminded me more of the North Mississippi All-Stars, a very Southern sound, long jams but with a lot of bass and a lot of energy. It was by far one of the best live shows I've seen in a while - possibly the best since the legendary New Deal extravaganza at the more-infamous-than-legendary Palladium. Palladium horror story #374: I briefly dated a guy who left a bouquet of dead sunflowers on the hood of my car. I should have known better - he had a Palladium "Gold Card."

Speaking of the North Mississippi All-Stars, the Beachcomber opens in just a few weeks! The first few Friday nights they have a special deal where the $10 cover gets you a free season pass. For anyone who hasn't been there, it's uh-mazing. It's a Cape Cod institution: a big shack-like thing with sand and sawdust all over the floor, overlooking the most gorgeous beach on the Cape, with incredible live music almost every night and a ridiculous raw bar. Opening night is May 24th - who's coming with me?

My yearning for home-cooked food struck again yesterday, and I spent pretty much the entire day cooking Syrian food. My ancestors did not mess around: the food is almost impossibly labor-intensive and time-consuming to make, and there are almost no shortcuts. There are definitely times when, although you end up with an equally "home-cooked" meal, you will have used the microwave, a store-bought sauce, or even spices from a jar. I'll admit I didn't make my own yogurt or grind my own lamb, but other than that I was faithful to the way I saw this stuff made when I was growing up.

I got home from the store around 2pm and started making tabbouli - by the time 6pm rolled around I hadn't even finished drying the parsley yet. This is as much a function of my procrastinating and puttering around as anything else, but still... I brought some of the food to a potluck at school today and a friend asked for the recipe, so here it is. Keep in mind this is one of my Not Recipes, and if you enjoy the tabbouli you get at the supermarket, or Lebanese tabbouli for that matter, you might be surprised at how this comes out. So feel free to omit ingredients you don't like, add other stuff, or change the amounts according to your tastes:

Rinse a cup of medium bulghur wheat and get most of the water out, then put it in a big bowl. Add 5 or 6 big tablespoons of olive oil, the juice of two lemons, about a teaspoon of salt, and a tablespoon of Syrian pepper (which I will explain below). Mix it up and let it sit and marinate while you deal with the vegetables.

Wash and drain 2 bunches of flat (sometimes called Italian) parsley. Spread out a bath towel and put the leaves on it as you pick them off the stems; let it dry out for a while then pick up the ends of the towel and shake it around to get more of the water off (you don't want to bruise and wilt the parsley by patting it dry - if you do pat it dry to save time, be gentle.)

Put about half the parsley in the big bowl on top of the wheat. Then add in the other vegetables, which are all chopped: three seeded tomatoes (or use beefsteak tomatoes and don't worry about seeding them), half a large peeled cucumber or a whole small one, a bunch of scallions, and bunch of fresh mint. Add the rest of the parsley, mix it all up, cover it tightly, and put it in the fridge for at least an hour. Then taste it and adjust the seasonings, adding more lemon juice, oil, salt, Syrian pepper, or whatever else you want. It gets better the longer it sits in the fridge.

Syrian pepper, or da'a, is what makes Syrian food taste like Syrian food, so don't skimp on it, and whatever you do, do NOT try to use plain black pepper instead! Over the years I've realized that everyone makes this a little differently, even within a single family, which is kind of weird. I prefer this formulation; it's a little heavier on the cinnamon than most, and easier to remember because it goes 3-3-2-2-1-1:

3 parts allspice
3 parts cinnamon
2 parts black pepper
2 parts white pepper
1 part nutmeg
1 part ground cloves

ode

you may recall that while I was working on my thesis proposal in the fall, I procrastinated for a few hours one night by blogging a lengthy list of songs that I've adopted as anthems of school-related stress. if you don't recall (and honestly, why would you?) and don't feel like procrastinating yourself/reading that whole thing, here's a summary:

5. Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen): thesis proposal
4. Only Living Boy in New York (Simon and Garfunkel): quantitative research methods
3. Wooden Ships (CSNY): "What is Psychedelia?" paper
2. Trouble (Ray LaMontagne): Honduras Incident
1. Naive Melody (Talking Heads): undergrad thesis

I've been sitting here for hours working on a stupid f-ing column about stupid f-ing community university partnerships for a really stupid f-ing newspaper. today was a beautiful day and there were certainly more fun things I could have been doing. Craig and Lydia went hiking, Roo Roo et al went to a St. Patrick's Day festival at the Harpoon brewery, but I'm not bitter. much.

But I digress. I've been listening to The Arcade Fire a bit obsessively lately, in the car, in the house, at school. I've even found myself wearing my iPod while I wander around aimlessly from place to place, which I something I never do (let me clarify: I almost never listen to my iPod while wandering, but I wander all the time. I also enjoy puttering, meandering, idling, lazing, and putzing.) This one song "Wake Up" has been really speaking to me during my most recent existential crises. A few choice lines:

someone told me not to cry
but now that I'm older
and my heart's colder
I can see that it's a lie.

children wake up
hold your mistake up

good stuff, I think this song is well on its way to acheiving a top spot in the list of songs of painful significance. I don't know if it will stand the test of time and become my master's thesis song... There's a lot of time left until it's due, and surely a lot of new and painful experiences that will happen between now and then, a lot of new songs that could potentially overtake this one. so I don't really know what they "meant" to say in this song, but I've been assigning it my own meaning, as I like to do, in order to assign meaning to my own existence, whose meaning I'm always doubting. I have now said the word "meaning" so many times that it's beginning to lose its, uh, meaning.

again, I digress. so I'm currently working on holding my own mistakes up, as in recognizing them and trying to learn from them. For example, should I be writing this right now, or should I be transcribing interviews? Past experiences would indicate that I'll be a lot happier tomorrow if I can go to the beach and wiggle my toes around in the sand. However, if I continue blogging and not working, I'll be forced to spend tomorrow wiggling my toes around in my slippers while I do schoolwork at home and look out the window, all bitter like I am now. So I have held my past mistakes up, and now I'm holding my current mistake up and recognizing that I totally suck? and doing something about it?

I wish it were that simple, but I think there's some other variable beyond holding up my mistakes. I know pretty much exactly what they are, and exactly how to act so I don't repeat the same mistakes over and over, but something is missing. It's not that I don't have the motivation to do anything, because there are certain things I can finish right away. But when it comes to the things that are most important to my future happiness, like finishing my thesis on time to graduate, I'll find any distraction to avoid it.

In college I had a very similar issue with my undergrad thesis. It got to the point where I went to see the school psychologist, who theorized that I couldn't seem to finish, or really even start, my thesis because I didn't "really want to graduate." I liked my life in college so much that I was subconsciously trying to prolong it, not understanding that in the end it was a self-destuctive plan. That explanation would have seemed pretty sensible, had he not followed it up with the recommendation that I get laid more often. F-ing creep.

In the end, I didn't get laid, but I did finish my thesis. And it SUCKED. ASS. I shudder to think that it's printed and bound, available to any human being who walks into the Trinity library. I thank the Lord every day that I wrote it in Spanish, thus reducing the number of people that would be able to read it if they tried. While I only spent a few months really invested in that thesis, however, I've been obsessed with my master's thesis topic for well over a year now, and up until now, it's the biggest and most important project I've undertaken on any topic.

Beyond the time I've already invested in researching, talking about, and practicing green cleaning, it's something that I'm fairly certain I could devote the rest of my life to. This is going to sound extraordinarily lame, but I care about green cleaning too much to let my first published writing about it to be crap. Yes, I actually think that my weird-ass love for green cleaning is what's holding me back. I'm reminded of an awesome but little-known Talking Heads song called "Sax and Violins" (yes, they could have made the title's allusion a little less flagrant, but whatever, they're the Talking Heads and they don't subscribe to 'subtle'. Plus, there really is a saxophone playing in the song. Kind of. Anyways...)

wooden heads
furniture with legs
for sale

love keeps us together
love will drive us insane

So yeah, the jist of it is that I love green cleaning too much to ever let it go, to ever 'finish' writing about it. And this love is, as it were, driving me insane. The funny thing is, there are people in my program with the exact opposite problem: they are so disillusioned with their topic that they also find themselves unable to finish writing, whether because they think the topic is a problem with no solution or because they have come to think it's something that just doesn't matter.

While I'm certainly disillusioned with the process, with having to write and prove myself and all that, and I'm certainly not getting anywhere by writing about it instead of writing about IT, the essence of my problem is that I'm too obsessed with my thesis and too optimistic about my topic, not too indifferent. In the end, while it might be self-destructive or psychotic or just plain weird, I think I'd much rather keep it that way.

a quick top five to avoid thesis-writing

I just heard the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album, "Some Loud Thunder," which is pretty f-ing sweet, and the first new and awesome album I've heard in quite a few months. 2007 just started, so I'll give it some more time, but 2006 was just such an incredible year for weird/delightful new music discovery. So here are my top five albums of the past year or so, which I highly recommend you check out if you haven't already:

5. Gimme Fiction - Spoon
4. Come on Feel the Illiniose - Sufjan Stevens
3. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
2. Funeral - The Arcade Fire
1. Apologies to the Queen Mary - Wolf Parade

hi, my name is anne

...and I like Jack Johnson.
don't tell anyone! this deep dark music secret, this confession of questionable taste, could utterly destroy my already-waning street cred. I just can't help it. I listened to a few Jack Johnson songs last night, in a state of mind where I may well have been able to get into absolutely anything. why didn't I just put on some poetic Leonard Cohen, some freaky King Crimson, even some damned Phish??? Why, Jack Johnson, why? why am I so tempted by your quasi-bullshit guitar, your trite lyrics, your trustafarian charisma?

a desalambrar

"It is better to remain quiet and to forget. That is the only thing we must do. We must forget. And that won't happen if we continue opening up lawsuits, sending people to jail. FOR-GET: That's the word. And for that to happen, both sides must forget and continue with their work."
~Pinochet


So Pinochet is dead at the ripe old age of 91. He will have never known suffering like that he inflicted on others. He was never punished for the crimes he committed, he may never be held responsible.

En la Villa Grimaldi cayó un septiembre amargo
Un grupo de hombres lobos sentó allí sus reales
Se les unió la muerte con su fría guadaña
Y el horror con su corte de atroces materiales

En la Villa Grimaldi se callaron los pájaros
El silencio del bosque se hizo duro y tullido
En su lugar crecieron sórdidos estertores
Agónicas plegarias e inhumanos aullidos

I'm working on scanning my pictures from Chile, so you'll be able to see what Villa Grimaldi looks like. It was a concentration camp that was active in the late 1970s and early 1980s in he hills on the outskirts of Santiago. While I was there I visited Villa Grimaldi twice, with a man who had been interned and tortured there. More about that later, I'm tired now.

la memoria obstinada

Pinochet is dying, just a few days after he admitted responsibility for all the atrocities of his dicatorship:

PINOCHET’S CONDITION STABLE, BUT CHILE FORCED TO DEBATE DICTATOR’S LEGACY

Doctors Reject Second Intervention After General Suffers Heart Attack

(December 4, 2006) Former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet suffered a severe heart attack early Sunday morning and was rushed to a military hospital where doctors preformed a life-saving angioplasty on the 91-year-old former general.

Dr. Juan Ignacio Vergara reported that Pinochet is conscious and is breathing without assistance. He added, however, that the heart attack left Pinochet in serious condition because of his advanced age.

Pinochet’s youngest son confirmed that the former dictator had received his last rites from a Catholic priest and said doctors literally had brought Pinochet back from death. “He’s no longer in the hands of the doctors, but in the hands of God,” said the young Pinochet.
more...

And Chavez won in a landslide.

Simón Bolívar, Simón,
caraqueño americano,
el suelo venezolano
le dio la fuerza a tu voz.
Simón Bolívar, Simón,
nació de tu Venezuela
y por todo el tiempo vuela
como candela tu voz.
Como candela que va
señalando un rumbo cierto
en este suelo cubierto
de muertos con dignidad.

Thanksgiving

"That was horrible.  If you want to end war and stuff you got
to sing loud.  I've been singing this song now for twenty five
minutes. I could sing it for another twenty five minutes.  I'm
not proud... or tired.

So we'll wait till it comes around again, and this time with
four part harmony and feeling.

We're just waitin' for it to come around is what we're doing.

All right now.

You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
(Excepting Alice)
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant"

I have no idea why, but hearing this song on Thanksgiving
always makes me cry like a freakin' baby.  Seriously, I don't
know what comes over me.  I wish I had the kind of family that
sat down and listened to it all together, because there are
families that do that.  My family, on the other hand, went to
a restaurant for Thanksgiving, which I consider to be the
gravest possible Thanksgiving sin.  So I was forced to hear my
Alice's Restaurant in the car on the way to the restaurant. 
Then I got lucky and heard it twice on the way home.  Then
I got home and made the mistake of turning on NPR, and now
I'm seriously depressed.

I was all aggravated that I had to go to Worcester to spend
Thanksgiving with my family.  This is the first year since
college that I have been home for Thanksgiving, and I would
have much preferred to spend the holiday working at the
restaurant as I've done in past years.  I would bust my ass
all day from 11am to 11pm or later, never stopping for more
than thirty seconds to stuff a roll in my mouth, gulp down
some gingerale and bitters (Thanksgiving Eve what what) or
smoke half a cigarette in a single drag.

At the end of the marathon we were all sweaty, filthy, and
so beyond tired that our arms and legs felt more tingly than
achy when they finally stopped moving.  We had mint jelly in
our hair, gravy in our shoes, and pecan pie encrusted our
shirt cuffs.  But at the end of it all, after we all served
our last seated parties, the chefs started to dole out the
little styrofoam boxes - turkey, ham, or lamb with creamed
peas and onions, mashed potatoes, squash, and all the rest. 
They always ran out of ham before the restaurant closed, but
the chefs always managed to pull one out of some mystery
location for me. 

We were like people who had been stranded in the desert
getting our first taste of water in a year.  We all ate
standing up in the kitchen, styrofoam boxes spread out on
every available surface, bread board, salad bar, ice chest,
cardboard box.  We barely talked, but looked at each other
as if sharing the happiest secret - it was almost over.
Even though we inhaled our food in a matter of minutes,
having to go back to check on tables or give checks or
whatever, that was the closest thing to a family Thanksgiving
I ever felt. 

Earlier in the day we had fought with each other tooth and
nail for forks, and screamed that someone had taken the
wrong drinks or bumped into someone.  Some of us cracked
under all the pressure, some of us broke down because of evil
customers, some of us cried because we got boiling water
dumped on us.  In fact, one waiter organized a trifecta bet
every holiday, in which people picked the three waitstaff
most likely to break down first.  At the end of it all,
though, we were all on the same team and knew that none of
us would make it through the day without everyone else.

I missed those little styrofoam box Thanksgiving dinners
this year, and the people I used to stand around eating
them with.

get your patchouli stink out of my store!

There are certain songs that always conjure memories of my most horrible experiences at school and work. It seems like every time I get myself into one of these situations where I procrastinate to the point where I have to stay awake for 72 hours at a time staring at a computer screen, I inadvertently adopt some anthem and listen to it over and over because it somehow soothes or motivates me.

Right now I'm in precisely such a situation, trying to whip my crap-ass thesis proposal into shape and "send it by Thursday". It's officially 2am, so now I'm just aiming for 6am Friday morning. And I'm miserable. And no one can fix this except for ME. And yet "ME" is writing a blog right now instead of doing the proposal. And "ME" keeps listening to "Hallelujah" and feeling sorry for MEself. "ME" is a dumbass, or perhaps, as some have suggested, a masochist. But not in the sexy way. And by sexy I mean "relating to sex", not as in appealing or whatever. God knows there's nothing less appealing than unwashed overtired dehydrated me who seeeeeeriously needs to get going on that freakin proposal.

So anyways, this is a list of my Top 5 "time of incredible school-related stress" songs EVER. There are way more than five songs I could write about - I have an incredibly long history as a crappy, stressed, procrastinating-to-the-point-of-absurdity student. As sad as it is to leave out some really good ones, my boyfriend John Cusack taught me that five is a magical number.

5. Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen, but I hate to admit the Rufus Wainwright version is kinda better).
This is my song of the moment, the Thesis Proposal song. When I listen to it I kind of insert "thesis proposal" where nouns such as "she" and "love" are supposed to go. Example: "Maybe there's a THESIS PROPOSAL (God) above/ And all I ever learned from THESIS PROPOSAL (love)/Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you". Yeahhhhhhh...

4. Only Living Boy in New York (Simon & Garfunkel)
"Hey, I've got nothing to do today but smile". Even though most days I have a laundry list of things to do that would not include "smile" in the first fifty or so, hearing Paul Simon say it somehow makes me believe it. Happiness on a stick, except it's not "on a stick", but rather "in a song". Or something. This song was especially dear to my heart about eleven months ago during my first finals week of grad school.

"Half of the time we're gone but we don't know where" was especially inspiring, in that funny way that really depressing things can be inspiring, as I tried to figure out how to use Excel the night before my Research Methods final was due. Needless to say, we were supposed to be using it all semester, but I somehow slipped through the cracks and managed to do everything by hand until we got to multiple regressions. My economist friends Alexis and Bill Jenkins III got many a 3am T-Stat-related phone call that week.

Hearing that song also makes me think of eating this totally nasty Chunky Soup that was the only food item in the house at the time of that particular schoolwork spree. It was so horrifically gravy-like, my arteries probably aren't fully recovered yet.

3. Wooden Ships (Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young)
"There's just one thing I got to know, can you tell me please, who won? Say, can I have some of your purple berries? Yes, I've been eating them for six or seven weeks now, haven't got sick once." I literally wrote a five-page section of a term paper about this song. It was during my year of school in Chile, when I wrote all of my papers with a pen and paper (well, pencil first of course. and graph paper - that was the thing down there.)

I was sitting at the dining room table of my Chilean family's house in the middle of the night, trying to write a paper; the assignment was "What is Psychedelia"? Yes, I took a class in which the final paper was about Psychedelia - it was called History of the Underground, and it was quite possibly the best college course I've ever experienced. Anyhow, I started writing about this song and other stuff I was listening to at the time, Talking Heads and King Crimson, etc.

I ended up making the argument that "true psychedelia" was what happened after Psychedelia, i.e. some kind of post-modern absurdist surrealist rejection of what had come to be considered the "movement" (and a rejection that denied its own existence, to boot). I threw in the craziest lyrics I could come up with (thank you Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno) and upon re-reading it in the morning though to myself "whoa, this is the craziest and possibly most questionable paper I've ever written" but I didn't really have a plan B. Amazingly, the professor fucking LOVED it. I kid you not, he gave me the paper back with a perfect score and said it was the best paper written for that class. He also threw in "gringo or otherwise" which really warmed my little heart since he was a major gringo-hater (as all good Chilean revolutionaries are).

2. Trouble (Ray LaMontagne)
"Feels like every time I get back on my feet she come around and knock me down again". In this case, "she" was the personification of my collective final papers from this past spring semester. There was the draft thesis proposal that got rejected and I had to rewrite (long story, see my MySpace blog if you really want to know), the infamous Honduras Incident (too painful to go into), and my first foray into writing about green cleaning, a paper which took every fiber of my being to complete.

I kept hearing this song on the radio and bought the CD, listening to it repeatedly one night while I was up late editing the Honduras disaster, feeling like the world was about to end. Miraculously, the world did end, kind of. That was when the whole flood thing happened, giving us a two-day extension on our final papers. When that week was all over, after much stressing and crying and adderall-borrowing, I left for a roadtrip to DC with Amanda, which is an apocalyptic tale all its own (again, see MySpace blog if you really want to know). I subjected her to endless Ray LaMontagne for the duration of the 12 hour trip. I know what you're thinking, and no, it definitely should not take that long to get to DC from Massachusetts. But it did, and after returning from that trip, "Trouble" became a much more cathartic and happy song that gives me all kinds of sappy "you can overcome any obstacle" thoughts. I didn't mean to end this one on such a lame note, but I just can't be fascinating and edgy all the time - just ask anyone who knows me in person...


1. Naive Melody (Talking Heads - who deserve, and will soon have - their own category)
"I'm just an animal looking for a home, share the same space for a minute or two. And you love me till my heart stops, love me till i'm dead". In addition to being quite possibly the sweetest love song ever, this song went along with my undergraduate thesis, quite possibly the hugest disaster of my life (so far). While I'm confident that I'll soon look back on that time longingly (while I try to do my master's thesis), at the time it was quite an ordeal. A 100-page document, en espanol, which I wrote in record-shattering time (three weeks, tops) and with a record-shattering lack of actual research to back up anything I wrote.

That thing was ridiculous - I clearly remember the day a week before the due date when my adviser Gustavo called me into his office, sat me down, and said gravely "Tu tesis esta en crisis. Tu tesis ES una crisis." Yeah, there was crying and stressing and adderall-borrowing then too, but on a much larger scale. I even went to the Wesleyan library during Spring Weekend in order to avoid the potential distractions posed by my friends having "fun", something with which I was unfamiliar for almost all of May 2003.

Anyhow, I would always play Naive Melody during my many many many all-nighters. I was always alone in MCEC, feeling very isolated and depressed and hopeless, especially when the sun started to rise as if to mock my night of non-productivity. I would go outside and smoke a cigarette and consider how it was a new day, the air felt different and people were starting to emerge from various corners, I would only be alone with my thesis for another hour or so.

The line "Home - is where I want to be, but I guess I'm already there" made me so sad - I always imagined that I might really be sleeping and dreaming, and I might wake up and magically be in my bed at my parents' house, where I would be safe and secure and happy and not have a thesis to write. But like the song says, I was already there - college and MCEC and the sunrise and my unfinished thesis were "home", and I had to accept that painful reality. Much like the previous song and its story, I did eventually finish, and then the song took on a much happier meaning as far as school is concerned, and also resumed its position as one of the most understatedly beautiful love songs I've ever heard.


So that said, I need to get on back to the proposal... I hope my procrastination is indicative of some kind of serious, but treatable, mental illness - because if not, it means I'm just an unambitious dumbass. I'll let you know when I figure it out.