a song odyssey

Once upon a time, I was listening to my Walkman (that's right) on the school bus on my way home from middle school, when a glorious, epic song came on the radio. After the station played it, they didn't say the title or artist. So, typical of my adolescent obsessiveness, I listened to my Walkman every day on the way home from school for the next two months, hoping they would play that song again so I could find out the artist. (This was before the internet, guys. I remember listening to the radio in my bedroom with a blank tape at the ready, just in case one of my favorite songs came on so I could hit the "record" button.) I never heard that song on the radio again.

Over fifteen years later and that song still bothered me from time to time. I wanted to hear it again. The internet was around now, but I was 12 or 13 when I first heard that song and I couldn't remember any lyrics or even key words anymore. All I remembered was that there was a part about a space shuttle launch. I actually found lists on the internet like "top ten songs about space travel" and "space music playlist for astronauts." I still could not find it. I even brought up my dilemma to my boyfriend once. He was convinced I was talking about David Bowie's Space Oddity. I was sure I was not. But, really, what did I know anymore? Like I said, I couldn't remember any lyrics and I had only heard the song once in my life. Maybe it was Space Oddity. Or maybe it wasn't. Or maybe the song that sounded awesome to 12 year old me would sound awful to present day me. So, I gave up on my search about a year ago.

Then, yesterday while I was making up the bed, I heard the chorus to that song playing in the other room. I recognized it instantly and remembered all of the lyrics in the chorus "Earth below us, drifting, falling..." And it was still awesome! But it was a woman singing, not a man like I remembered. My boyfriend was listening to his Shiny Toy Guns station on Pandora and apparently they had done a cover of it.

 I would like to present to you: Major Tom by Peter Schilling

thanksgiving break: part two

I thought I should finish up my food and movie marathon week. Also, I can give my review of Cloud Atlas now since I've seen it. I liked it. Bam. That's my review. The awkward makeup when they tried to make the same actors different ages or races took you out of the movie a few times. All of the story lines were very different, from humorous to horrific, but they all carried on the theme of corruption and oppression and making a break for freedom from said corruption and oppression. Like I said: I liked it.

Monday

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We had lunch at Kobe Steak and Sushi, which apparently isn't cool enough to have a logo online, so I just added a generic picture of nigiri sushi, since that's what I always get when we eat there. My boyfriend loves sushi rolls: the more ingredients and more complicated, the better. I like plain simple nigiri: seafood and rice and delicious.

We saw Lincoln afterwards. When we got out of the theater and were walking back to the car, Perry asked how I liked the movie. I said I was disappointed. He shrugged and said that it was what he expected it would be: an overly romanticized look at Lincoln's presidency. It was. This movie wasn't bad, it just had no soul. Which is pretty bad, actually.

Tuesday

Okay. After day four days of going out to eat and the theater, what we most wanted to do was not go anywhere. So that's what we did.

Wednesday

No restaurant on Wednesday either. We were still living off of the mountains of to-go containers we had in the fridge from the previous places we had eaten. However, we did see a movie.

I didn't see Life of Pi in 3D since I think 3D is by and large a gimmick, but I think this one would have been worthwhile to see in 3D. It's a very beautiful movie. I have never read the book, so the ending really caught me off guard, which I like in movies. I felt like they explained too much to the viewer at the end, which I felt was unnecessary since most viewers were probably already connecting the dots between animal and human. However, one of the last lines of the film stuck with me "And so it goes with God." I didn't really understand that line until the next morning when I was brushing my teeth before work. It was Pan's Labyrinth kind of good and easily the best movie of the week.

thanksgiving

I had to work this Thanksgiving. Actually, I've had to work every Christmas and Thanksgiving for the past seven years. I work in a hospital laboratory so working holidays is standard. I see my parents fairly regularly anyway (they only live 30 minutes away) so missing out on a holiday has never been that big of a deal. I work my ten hours, and if I'm not too tired, I visit my family afterwards. This Thanksgiving I was feeling pretty alert when my shift ended, so I drove out to my parent's house.

When I walked up to their back porch, this is what I saw.

I suppose if my brother was going to torture himself by watching the Cowboys lose again, at least he was doing it with style. I imagined him getting ready for the game to start: putting his jersey on and my father and him carrying that big television outside. So much optimism.

My parents had three of their children and one grandchild visit them for Thanksgiving this year. My parents had five kids. Those kids obtained significant others and (some) had kids. Getting us all together at the same time is a mess. There are obligations to the families of the respective significant other, work, and just plain old conflict. My oldest sister has recently separated from her husband. My middle sister is dealing with having to split her child's first holidays with three sets of grandparents. My youngest sister is currently not on speaking terms with my middle sister. My brother is still upset that I am dating his ex-friend.

And then there's my parents. They greeted me and gave me my annual ornament, just like they have every Christmas for the past 8 years, even though they know I don't put up a tree. They shoveled piles of stuffing and cranberry sauce and turkey into tupperware containers when I said I had to go. My parents are really what keeps our family together. This family started with them and I worry that it will end with them too. Without my parents around, would my siblings and I still find the time to visit each other? All of them? My father hardly ever sees his family, and my mother broke off contact with hers a long time ago. Maybe this slow drifting apart is just the natural way of things as we all start our "own" families.

You're Old: Target Women

There's no real reason for this post; I just love this entire series of "target women" videos and I found myself watching some of them again today.

leggings or: how I learned to stop worrying and love dresses

Oh, hi. I'm not a fashion blogger. I'm not even fashionable. But I am a girl and I think almost every female in modernized countries has had a fashion epiphany at some point, so I'm going to share mine. To start off, I'm going to admit that my epiphany is something that's probably common sense to most other people of my sex, but it was pretty revolutionary to me, so that's all that matters.

I love dresses. I hate dresses. I have since I was in middle school. The right dress is comfortable and makes you look good with no effort on your part. The wrong dress is terribly uncomfortable and makes you look awful no matter what kind of figure you have. A t-shirt and jeans was just a lot easier, so why would I even bother with the more difficult dress option? As a result, I gave up on wearing dresses a long time ago.

I think it was last year that I started to feel dress envy. I would see girls at the store wearing dresses that were cute and casual and they looked effortless. I wanted that. Wearing jeans every day had finally started to feel limiting. It would be nice to throw a dress into the mix once in a while, so I decided to give dresses another shot.

It didn't go that well at first. I didn't want to wear floor length dresses, but I felt really exposed wearing what I thought was the most flattering length of dress on me (a few inches above the knee). I knew I wasn't really "exposed" so I thought  I was just going to have to get used to it. Instead, I just shoved the few dresses I had bought in the back of the closet rather than feel awkward and uncomfortable wearing one. I thought wearing tights might help, but I quickly realized that I can't wear tights over a hour without getting a run in them or snagging them on something. Plus, I still felt naked with them on and wearing tights in the Texas summer just seemed silly.

I think I saw a girl in the gorcery store wearing a dress with leggings when it finally clicked. I'm sure I had seen tons of girls wearing dresses with leggings before that, but these wheels turn slow, guys. Leggings. They're a lot thicker than tights, so I wouldn't feel naked and they're cotton so they won't snag like tights. 

I bought capri length ones for the summer and ankle length ones for the winter. And now my wardrobe options have completely opened up. There were still other problems I had with dresses, but they seemed a lot easier to solve than the "naked feeling" one. Dress a bit too baggy and shapeless? Put a belt on it.

Don't feel like showing your arms with a sleeveless dress?  Put on a cardigan, dummy.

It really did take too much time and effort to figure all of this out. Sometimes I feel really bad at being a girl. But still, I'm kind of proud of myself for persevering since I was pretty close to giving up and trying again in another 30 years.

thanksgiving break

Friday evening marked the beginning of my boyfriend's Thanksgiving week break. Normal university students only get a four day weekend for the holiday but, since Perry is student teaching middle-schoolers this semester, their breaks are his breaks and their break is a week long for Thanksgiving. His plans for his week of leisure are to go out to a restaurant and the movie theater every day until Thursday when I have to go back to work. Three days in, and we're still on track to realizing our goal.


Friday

 










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Well I guess Jack in the Box isn't exactly fine dining or anything, but neither of us were very hungry and some fake tacos sounded pretty good as a fast snack before the movie. I liked Skyfall alright. The last act was a bit odd since it seemed like the tone of the movie really changed, but ultimately it was as expected: a fun action film that didn't insult your intelligence too much.


Saturday

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I guess Jack in the Box's fake tacos got us in the mood for real tacos because Perry suggested this new taco place the following day. I've never even heard of Torchy's Tacos before but he'd been there once on his lunch break at school. It was amazing. Really. I had the Mr. Orange and we're going back soon.

Flight was an alright movie also. The bottom line was "Drugs are bad, okay... and alcohol's a drug too, guys." I thought it was going to be more about a plane crashing but it was really about the pilot's life crash and burning due to addiction.

Sunday

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I am in love with this Greek restaurant. The dolmas, the octopus, the soup, the hummus. I have a hard time narrowing down my selection whenever I go there.

I can't exactly give a review about Cloud Atlas since we haven't seen it yet. There's only one showing at the local theater and it's still an hour away. I've see a preview for it and it seems like they're trying to tell a lot of stories, so I'm a bit skeptical about if they can tell them all well.

Whenever I get to do something wasteful and silly and fun like a week-long movie marathon I can't help but feel a bit guilty. I feel guilty about having the free time, the extra money, and someone else to do it with.  But since this is Thanksgiving week I think I'll just replace "guilty" with "thankful" and that will set everything right.

a gift

I was doing some pretty intense vacuuming the other day (that's right, intense) and I came upon this pretty thing under my bed and decided it deserved it's own post.

It's a book that was printed in 1885. It is one of my favorite things that I own and I keep it hidden under my bed and covered with a towel. This book is well over 100 years old now and I am terrified to even open it. The binding is so fragile I wonder how many more times it can be opened before it falls apart. Every page has oil and ink smudges left by past readers and I'm afraid to add more to it. But, I still can't help but look through it from time to time.

 There are about 12 summaries of Shakespeare plays in this book, each with an illustration.

Every one is like a work of art and the colors are still very bright. The pictures really are the star of the show, which makes sense since this book was supposed to be for children. What strikes me as odd for a children's book is exactly which scenes they chose to illustrate from each play.

Bloody ghosts of murder victims.

 Insanity. Don't worry kids she'll drown in the next scene.

I somehow made it through high school without reading Othello, but I'm pretty sure this sad, pretty lady ends up being smothered with a pillow shortly after this accusatory point.

Shakespeare definitely dealt with a lot of dark themes and they didn't candy coat if for the kids reading this book. I'm not complaining or anything. Most original fairy tales are rather dark. When I was a kid my two favorite animated movies to watch were The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and The Little Mermaid. And not the Disney The Little Mermaid. It was an anime version where the heroine creeps into the prince's bedroom at night to murder him and when she can't bring herself to do it, dies and turns into sea foam.

I feel like I'm getting off track here. Back to the book. I received it as a high school graduation gift from a friend of my family's. I was a bit embarrassed to receive a gift like this since I felt it was too much and I didn't even really know the person that gave it to me very well. Every family member I had was writing me a check for $20 and a man I hardly knew was giving me a beautiful antique. All I knew about him was that to 17 year old me, he was the most fascinating man alive. He was an author who designed his own house. He grew up in the Netherlands and lived there during the Nazi invasion. He played an accordion at our Christmas party. He was amazing and this book just punctuated that amazingness. He passed away five years ago. Whenever I see this book, it reminds me of him and I can remember only great things about him. That's a pretty good epitaph.

Trash pickup

My parents "adopted" a stretch of highway that runs in front of their house about four years ago. All this entails is picking up trash on the side of the road twice a year. Since my parents have five kids (two of which live at home) it's normally not that hard for them to find a few volunteers to help them out. This Sunday, my middle sister and I were the volunteers. I remember that the first time we did trash pickup it was awful. There was a total of six people helping but it still took all afternoon. It was hot, sweaty, stinky work. Since that first time we've gotten a bit smarter about it. We only do trash pickups in the spring or fall when the weather's nice, we wear tall rubber boots, and we bought trash grabber sticks so we didn't have to bend down every few feet.

I think we got this trash pickup day done in two hours. It helped that my dad had to be done by noon so he could watch the Green Bay Packers game. We picked up a total of 12 bags of trash and a kitchen chair. Not bad.

from left to right- trash, sister, father

Every time we do trash day, there is at least one really strange thing we find on the side of the road. This outing was pretty tame. However, we did find our first dead dog. And dead rooster. And skunk tail. Now that I think about it, it was a big day for dead things.

tsunami

I made the mistake of watching this four days ago
and I've had dreams of swirling vortexes every night since. They're not exactly malicious. One night, from a safe and high vantage point I watched as an ice and snow vortex gently carried away a ship. Last night it was a pretty vortex in a pond at night filled with flowers and magical colored lights. I'm sure this is just my unconscious mind trying to cope with and soften terrifying images that I should have never willingly exposed myself to.

But this is real life stuff. This was something a lot of people had to live through and will deal with for the rest of their lives. As an atheist, when bad things happen to me or ones I love, I see it as random bad luck or one of those things that just happens from time to time in everyone's life since no one can completely be free from sadness or loss. I think it takes much more determination to be a theist and experience something like the 2004 tsunami. Most theists try to take into account a loving God when something bad or even terrible happens to them and they end up viewing it as a trial of sorts. But to lose everything you own and everyone you love in a matter of hours seems like too much to bear.

The Blood Brothers - Laser Life

I've given up on trying not to force my musical taste upon strangers. Music is a big part of what makes me happy, so I've decided to finally succumb to the urge on my blog. You've been warned.

The band The Blood Brothers does not fit the genre of music I tend to listen to. When I first heard this song almost six years ago, I didn't like it. I didn't like the high pitched vocals of the one singer and what sounded like total chaos towards the end of the song complete with unintelligible screaming.

However, a day later I found myself listening to it again. Two weeks later I had bought the album and I was in love. I still am.

It's hard for me to pinpoint what it is about any band that I like. With The Blood Brothers I would try to explain it as their controlled chaos and how dense their songs are. Most of their tracks have a beat or a shift that they could probably make into a whole other song, to the point where what could have been half an album for some bands becomes a three minute song for The Blood Brothers.