music

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Wednesday Randomosity: Only In Dreams Edition

I woke up crying this morning, the dream I’d been immersed in was so awful. It involved my husband being horrible to me, which is not in any way true to life, and yet which felt so incredibly real in the dream I am carrying it with me into the day. Stupid dreams and their stupid tendency to hang like a fog of despair around my head.rea Let’s try some Randomosity to see if we can shake the bad feelings loose.

  • For me, bad dreams come from stress, I think; I am stressed about the upcoming volunteer event I am chairing. Back when I worked full time, I had stress dreams much more frequently. And the stress took really horrific and violent forms in the dreams – car chases, people running after me, gun violence, driving off high bridges, gruesome death. My brain is a super fun place. So I suppose it’s an improvement, that now my dreams have turned toward making me feel like my husband no longer loves me? I don’t know. Neither type of dream is enjoyable, and they always stick with me. I feel shaky and sullen and hurt. I’m sure my husband wondered why I was being kind of cold to him this morning. I know it’s a dream, and yet it was so REAL, I cannot help but feel a little unkindly toward Waking World Husband. 
  • Perhaps even worse – or, at least, terrible in their own way – are dreams that involve casual acquaintances. Especially when they are of an erotic nature. There is nothing more embarrassing than seeing a coworker/friend’s spouse/boss/teacher in person after they have graced your dreams. 
  • Why must our brains DO this to us?! I have read some theories that dreams are our brains trying to make sense of the day. But why must they do so in the way that they do? Why can’t they translate stresses and worries and encounters into soothing images that float in gentle rhythm to the calming sounds of babbling brooks and soft harp music?
  • Speaking of music and dreams, I have “Only in Dreams” by Weezer stuck in my head. There are far worse songs to have stuck in one’s head. I love that song, and the entire album from which it comes. Probably one of my favorite albums of all time, the Blue Album. 
  • My husband was playing Weezer songs this weekend. I was sitting on the couch, reading an Agatha Christie novel on my Kindle, and he was sitting next to me, idly scrolling through Weezer songs on his phone and picking them out on his guitar. It was quite pleasant, that gentle serenade of some of my favorite songs. 
  • When I was growing up, and learning how to play the piano, I was very skeptical when my mother said she liked listening to me practice. But now that my husband is teaching himself guitar, and Carla is learning both guitar and clarinet, I have discovered that she wasn’t lying. Even when they make mistakes, even when they play certain measures over and over to get them right, I really enjoy the sound of the two of them practicing. I thought I would HATE the squawk of a poorly played clarinet, but there is much less squawking than I anticipated, and it has a really pleasant sound. Especially, perhaps, when Carla is practicing upstairs and the products of her work are floating down to me through a closed door and a stairwell. 
  • Stephany posted a link to an Ask Me Anything form the other day, and so I blatantly copied it. If you have any burning questions for me, fill out the form and I would love to try to answer them. 
  • Copying Stephany’s idea was not only a chance to engage in a little light plagiarism, but also an opportunity for me to learn a new skill. I had no idea you could use Google to create forms! Best of all, it was very easy (that is, unless you are unable to USE the form, in which case I am a hopeless Luddite). I think I forget that it’s often fun, if a little scary, to try new things. 
  • The desire to keep myself sharp and engaged by trying new things is part of the reason that I volunteered for this event in the first place. This is my second time doing it, and it will be my last. The juice, as they say, isn’t worth the squeeze. The squeeze being the stress and the resulting bad dreams. 
  • Sometimes I contemplate volunteering elsewhere. My paying work is fairly minimal and easy to manage, so I feel as though I could devote more regular time to a volunteer position. But it is so hard to find The Right Thing. Probably what it is, is that I’m scared. Do you volunteer for anything, or have you volunteered for anything in the past? I would love to know about your experiences. 
  • It’s only the second day of November, but I feel like I’m already putting in a covert effort to be part of NaBloPoMo (see San’s post if you want to learn more or join). I have every expectation of failing spectacularly; November just isn’t my month. But it’s fun to read everyone’s posts and to try, even a little, to join in. 
  • NGS is doing NaBloPoMo, but she is also doing a daily noun challenge with her good friend, and I think that’s so fun. I can’t wait to see how she addresses each noun on her list. I imagine that if I run into a post block this month, I may sneak on over to her blog to find that day’s noun and join in. 
  • How do you decide when and what to post? Some of the bloggers I read have an editorial calendar. Some seem to post regular features. I have always been what they refer to in the writing world as a “pantser.” I just… write. Posts either occur to me, or I have a compulsion to sit down and blather a bunch of nonsense into the ether, or I am curious to discuss a certain topic. But there’s really no rhyme or reason about anything I write. I write to write. To get things off my chest. To distract myself from stress. I suppose the only “regular” feature is my weekly (sometimes) Dinners This Week post, but even that falls off a cliff now and again.

Well, today writing has done the trick. The dream sadness has lifted. The sun is shining, the world is covered with a layer of leaves, and I have work to do. I hope you have a wonderful day, Internet. Thank you for reading, and in doing so, dispelling the stress.

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Soundtrack

Last night, I was half-watching something benign on TV – otherwise known as looking at recipe posts on Instagram – when an ad for… something? something to do with photos, I think? popped up on the television, backed by “We Only Come Out at Night” by The Smashing Pumpkins.

Instantly, I was transported back to freshman year of high school. The sole lasting positive from my boyfriend at the time (shudder) is that he introduced me to some music that I truly loved – Joan Osborne and The Cranberries and The Smashing Pumpkins. My parents got me a copy of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness for Christmas and I listened to every song on repeat until the notes wove themselves into the fabric of that part of my history. Even now, the few notes of “We Only Come Out at Night,” with their forlorn whimsy, wrap me in the memories of that year. Fragments I haven’t considered for decades: the purple suede coat I felt so grown up wearing, the vague, looming threat of “hazing” by fearsome high school girls, how horrible I was at debate team, the violet contact lenses that made me feel cool and mysterious, my unsettling attraction to this boyfriend who turned out to be cruel in the astonishing number of ways that high school boys can be cruel.

The Smashing Pumpkins provided the soundtrack to my sophomore year, too. Unbeknownst to one another, my boyfriend at the time (a different, much less threatening guy) and I each got each other the Smashing Pumpkins box set – our identical taste in music a sure sign (I thought) of our True Love Forever (no). I listened to every single song on every single CD in the five-album set. When he broke up with me, out of the blue, later that spring, I listened to “The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right)” at ear-shattering volumes in my pickup and on my boombox in my bedroom as I sobbed with betrayal and grief.

The boombox, I received as a Christmas gift in sixth grade, alongside two CDs, both which became my soundtrack for early middle school: Bonnie Raitt’s Luck of the Draw and Sammy Kershaw’s Don’t Go Near the Water. They were the first CDs I had ever owned, and I felt so grown up singing “Something to Talk About” from the comfort of my own bedroom! I used that boombox to record Top 40 songs off the country music countdown on the radio every Sunday, lying on my stomach in front of it, ready at a second’s notice to hit record as soon as the first notes of the song I wanted started to play.

Before that, “Walk Like an Egyptian” by the Bangles rings through my memory. My childhood best friend and I would choreograph elaborate roller skating routines in my basement. She would provide the music – she had Tiffany and Bangles cassette tapes! – and we would pretend to be sophisticated women with wild 80s hair (her name was always Samantha Fox in these scenarios, and she was married to Michael J.) as we skated around to “Manic Monday.” We invited my brother and his nanny down to watch one of our performances, only to stop short during practice, shocked, when Susanna Hoffs sang, “Come on honey, let’s go make some noise.” I had no idea what that meant, but my friend understood the implications enough to know we couldn’t skate to it  in front of a grown up, and we cancelled the show.

My friend – and roommate, at the time – made me a mix CD that I listened to on repeat every day during the summer before my junior year of college. I was living in Atlanta, interning at a ministry and I ran for miles and miles on the weekends, DiscMan in hand, trying to outrun my loneliness with only her CD for company. To this day, Coldplay’s “Yellow” and “Hit ’Em Up Style (Oops!)” by Blu Cantrell and “Drive” by Incubus and Melanie’s “Brand New Key” remind me of that summer, running endless, aching circles around a high school track in the thick Georgia heat, and, always, of my friend.

My husband is always listening to and finding new songs for us to enjoy. There are so many songs representing our time together, no single song stands out as About Him. He put “The Trouble with Poets” on the first mix CD he made me. We listened to Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” on our first trip to Europe. Every time I see the HBO logo, I hear the beginning strains of the intro to The Sopranos, which was the first real series he and I watched together. There’s the Jack Johnson song he played for me on my desktop in our grad school apartment. For some reason, “Sober” is always the song that autoplays when he connects his phone to the sound system in his car. We danced to “I Only Have Eyes for You” at our wedding. We have so many years together, this period of life spans decades (already!), that nearly every song reminds me of him.

“Cruise” by Florida Georgia Line and “Wagon Wheel” by Darius Rucker and, especially, Chopin’s “Berceuse” were the sonic backdrop to my pregnancy. I often listened to the country music station as I drove to work, and these two songs stand out to me as being both oft-played and joyful in a way that cut through the anxiety and anticipation of waiting for Carla to arrive. And the Chopin. Well. I played that on repeat for the entirety of many, many commutes, sobbing along the way at the beauty of the music and the impossibility that I was – God willing – about to become a mother.

Lorde’s “The Royals” is a song I listened to over and over during the first few weeks (months?) of my daughter’s life. It’s a song that is now forever infused by the confusion and panic and dread of those early postpartum days. Just hearing the first few bars of snaps bring it all rushing back – the fear, the fear, the fear. The desire to get in my car and keep driving, forever and ever, away from the fear.

As Carla has gotten older, the soundtrack has been ever-changing. It’s rotated through all the songs from Frozens1 and 2 and the Descendantsmovies to “Be Nice” by the Black Eyed Peas and the entire Jonas Brothers oeuvre, especially Happiness Begins, and then through every songfrom the LEGO Movie 2. (Right before the pandemic started, we would listen to “Queen of Mean” and “Gotham City Guys” on repeat for literal HOURS.) The tracks of Carla’s life so far would also include “Moon River” and instructional ditties from Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhoodand “The Letter of the Day” and the entire 1989 album.

My daughter still, at nearly-seven, wakes up singing, always has a song on her lips. (Carla is so into the music that she told my husband, one night, that she couldn’t fall asleep because she kept “bursting into song” – her words.) I wonder which music, when heard as nostalgic snippets as commercial backgrounds in twenty years, will bring the early days of 2020 crushing back into focus? I wonder which will stand out as representative of six- and seven-year-old Carla? Will I refer to Carla’s early elementary years as the Jonas Brothers years? The Frozen years?

And what of now, during the pandemic?

I have, I admit, been kind of avoiding music. I don’t WANT to hear a snippet of Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now” (which is a BOP) in thirty years and feel the panic and stress of the pandemic wash over me. That is seems deeply unfair to the music and the artists.

When I need something musical these days, I’ve been asking our Echo to play classical piano music and Golden Oldies – “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” and “My Girl” and the like; for me, they’re already timeless, untethered to any particular segment of my life. So I’m trusting that “Sugar Pie Honeybunch” or Chopin’s Waltz No. 1 in E Flat won’t somehow become the soundtrack to the pandemic in my brain.

 

What songs take you back to specific moments in your life? Are you listening to any specific music these days? Do you have a Pandemic Theme Song?