happy

Worldly Wednesday: “The Woodpile,” Frightened Rabbit

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It’s been a long time coming, but I finally feel settled in some sort of groove these days.  This is in no way synonymous with phrases like, “of course I know what I’m doing,” “please ask me for directions and/or advice,” or “I’d love to tell you where I’m going to be in five years.”  Rather, what I mean is, I know what to do when catastrophe strikes, when I don’t know how to cook a squash, when my faucet is leaking, when I need to go to the E.R., when I’ve had a terrible day, and when things upset me.  I call one of my people.  That’s what I do.

You spend most of your 20s constructing yourself.  Somewhere around age 29 or 30 you have a sense of deep satisfaction that comes from having a fuller grasp of who you are and what you’re about.  And then you spend a good part of your 30s realizing that, to paraphrase President Obama, you didn’t build yourself alone.  You had a lot of help.  I know how to deal with the E.R. on a rainy Tuesday because a friend came with me when I hurt my knee.  I know how to process my terrible thoughts because I have friends who listen to them.  I know how to deal with the vagaries of my job because I have peers who can relate and tell me stories that remind me of my own issues.  Creating your own family is the very best part of growing up.

—

Far from the electric floor
Removed from the red meat market
I look for a fire door
An escape from the drums and barking
Bereft of all social charms
Struck dumb by the hand of fear
I fall into the corner’s arms
The same way that I’ve done for years
I’m trapped in a collapsing building


Come find me now, we’ll hide and
We’ll speak in our secret tongues
Will you come back to my corner?
Spent too long alone tonight
Would you come brighten my corner?
A lit torch to the woodpile (aye)


Dead wood needs to ignite
There’s no spark on a dampened floor
A snapped limb in an unlit pyre
Won’t you come and break down this door?
I’m trapped in an abandoned building


Come find me now, we’ll hide and
We’ll speak in our secret tongues
Will you come back to my corner?
Spent too long alone tonight
Would you come brighten my corner?
A lit torch to the woodpile (aye)
Come find me now, we’ll hide and
We’ll speak in our secret tongues

 

Modernism Monday: “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” Ray McKinley

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8GKsMM67x4

 

I was going to hesitate to assert that this is the finest song one could listen to on Memorial Day, since it embodies the stereotypical Memorial Day activities of barbecuing and playing the clarinet, and then I realized that this my blog and I can assert whatever I damn well please.  So: this is the finest song one can listen to on Memorial Day – barbecue, clarinet, etc.  I will also assert that this is the finest version of this finest song.  I do love Jim Cullum and his Happy Jazz Band, but you have to love Ray McKinley’s panache.

Termagant Tuesday: “Pennies From Heaven,” Louis Prima

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To follow up on yesterday’s super-inspiring Peruvian llamas post, about which a number of you wrote me to suggest perhaps I needed a vacation (thanks, genius), here’s a song that will make you feel like you just won one for free.  And because you got lippy with me, I’m going to tell you, in the longest, wordiest possible way, how it was I came to find this song.  Aren’t you excited?  …Say you’re excited.

Long before there were iPods and MP3 players (aside: I love how we still say “MP3 players” even though the market for Apple alternatives only existed for about 20 minutes), there were discmen and CDs.  And poor students have existed since the beginning of time, or at least since the beginning of the $800 college textbook (hi, Dad!).  So it was a big deal when my university’s student union would have CD sales.  This being a student union at a small university in the middle of nowhere that nevertheless attracted a healthy international student body, the selections were really weird.

This one particular afternoon, after I’d slept off my hangover (sorry, Dad…), I padded down the street to the union to get a cheap late lunch before gently installing myself in the library. And when I walked through the front doors, what hit my senses first?  Well, yes, stale beer on the floor, but – a huge rack of CDs.  Hot damn!  I got three: a Meatloaf album, a classical thing of some kind, and our pal Louis Prima.

Whenever I have a hard day that still allows some room for bucking up, unlike those days that are so frustrating you just want to hide in a dark closet, I put this on.

Now aren’t you glad I took you on that stroll down Memory Lane?  …Say you’re glad.

Modernism Monday: “My Brain is Hanging Upside Down,” The Ramones

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Ever wake up and think, “oh, the hell with it?”  No?  Well you’re probably hiding a deep sadness so go see someone.  I’ll wait.

 

…Ever wake up and think, “oh, the hell with it?”  Yes?  Yeah, it’s a gross, hands-in-the-air, “I’m moving to Paraguay to raise llamas at this rate” kind of feeling.  So put this song on.  I recommend very, very loud.

Sacred Sunday: “Om Namah Shivay Dhun,” Jagit Singh

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This is one of the most popular mantras in Hinduism, and the most important in Shaivism, the sect of Hinduism that reveres the god Shiva.

Shaiva temple in Sibsagar, Assam, India.

Shaiva temple in Sibsagar, Assam, India.

These words are known in Shaivism as the panychAkshara mantra, or the Holy Five Syllables.   Its loose translation is, “Adoration to Shiva,” but its essence is much more closely associated with the sublimation of the ego along with complete devotion.  The mantra has been set to countless melodies but this is one of my favorites.

Today is the Sunday in church we read the gospel lesson in which Jesus tells his followers, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”  As Bishop Mariann Budde, the head of the Diocese of Washington, preached this morning, it’s a deceptively difficult statement to wrestle with because it seems to imply exclusion – i.e., the only way towards the divine is through Jesus, and therefore through the Christian faith.  Bishop Budde said that, to her, this is much more of a statement of love between Jesus and his disciples than it is a commandment that those who are not followers are condemned.  The Holy Five Syllables is another such love song.  What a wonderful thing that humans evolved so many ways of approaching the divine, and that each of them begins with love.

Throwback Thursday: “Die Forelle,” Franz Schubert

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I’d like to learn how to fish.  I don’t really know why.  I guess it just seems like something a normal, calm, reasonably happy person would do in their spare time.  I don’t know whether I’d classify my hobbies as such, given I don’t classify myself as normal or calm.  Come to think of it, I don’t really know what my hobbies are.

The dictionary defines a hobby as “an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure.”  By that logic, the following things could be hobbies of mine:

  • Sleeping
  • Holding a wedge of cheese and eating it like an apple with the fridge door open, at night, with the lights off
  • Avoiding Swiffering my floors
  • Noodling aimlessly on my piano
  • Walking aimlessly around D.C.
  • Staring off into space
  • Taking a Buzzfeed quiz when I should be [fill in anything remotely more useful than taking a Buzzfeed quiz]
  • Reading a New Yorker profile of someone interesting, regretting my degrees and career choices, frantically opening my computer, and searching for jobs in the profile-ee’s field
  • Daydreaming of how great life would be as a [insert profession of New Yorker profile-ee]
  • Looking at real estate I’ll never be able to afford unless I abandon reason, ethics, and hope

Anyway.  Here’s a song about a trout.

Termagant Tuesday: “Jeeves and Wooster,” Annie Dudley

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I’ve lived in D.C. for ten years now.  Before that, I lived in the U.K.  Both places have the same arresting, and misunderstood, quirk, which is this: everyone spends the first five minutes of each new interaction trying to size the stranger up.  This manifests itself in different ways in both places.  In the U.K., I was asked questions about what school I attended, where in New England precisely I had lived, and – delightfully – what my family was “in.”  (That one in particular made me feel like I was at Epcot Center and the British person to whom I was speaking was actually an acting student from Gays Mills, Wisconsin.)  The obvious purpose behind all this was to assess where in the crusty social strata I fell.  Here is where the misunderstanding kicks in.  I learned over the course of many years that it doesn’t stop there, that there was a further point beyond that one, which was to ascertain how much of their own life were they now going to feel comfortable divulging.  It really didn’t have much to do at all with stereotypical snootiness, beyond the tacit acknowledgement of the existence of a social strata in the first place.  They just wanted to know who they were talking to so they didn’t do anything stupid.

The exact same principle exists in D.C.  Washington also has social strata, layered on top of which is the fascinating reality that no one just sort of ends up here: people come to D.C. by choice.  Therefore, where you work can speak immeasurable volumes about who you are, and everything that means: your politics, your background, your values, your level of cultivation, your drive, your everything.  So, the very first question you get asked in D.C. is, “So where do you work?”  Again, like the U.K, this isn’t only a yardstick of how you stack up against this stranger as much as it’s a gauge of how much you can relax around them.  Say you and your work friends from the E.P.A are out at a bar blowing off steam after a terrible day, and you run into an old college acquaintance who’s got some friends of her own in tow.  You’re not going to ask people where they work so you can pat yourself on the back again for going to Bennington.  You’re going to ask them where they work so that you know whether you can sound off about that coal country Senator who is still deciding whether or not to block the passage of muscular clean water legislation, or whether that new guy in the madras shirt is his legislative aide.

This is one of the many reasons I felt so at home in the U.K., and why I feel equally – if ironically – at ease in D.C.  I like living a life that cautions me against gum-flapping about Russia because I might be sitting next to the new President of the German Marshall Fund at the symphony.  True story.  (It was so awesome OMG.)  Puts me mind of my favorite Wodehouse quote, whose hilarious “Jeeves and Wooster” stories were turned into one of the best TV shows ever made:

“I’m not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.”  — P.G. Wodehouse, “Carry On, Jeeves”

Sacred Sunday: “Give Good Gifts,” Anon.

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Among the many lessons my mother taught me, “don’t be mean, don’t be stupid” (I’m paraphrasing) ranks pretty highly. Equal with this was the other lesson that life is hard for everyone for some reason. Everyone you meet has a story and is probably having a hard time in some aspect of their lives, do why not be kind? (She also taught me about beat poetry, sterling silver hallmarks, the stock market, and how to use a power drill, but those are less germane to this Shaker hymn.) These were two wonderfully important lessons for any kid to learn and this Mother’s Day I’m reminded, as I usually am, that all checks and money orders should be sent to her, not me, if you find me to be an agreeable person.

Salubrious Saturday: “Takin’ Pills,” Pistol Annies

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So, I have this friend.  I’m going to call her Alice.  Alice is a pediatrician.  Alice is a respectable, honorable, upright citizen of her community.  She helps little kids stay healthy.  Alice was my partner in crime in college.  Alice was my go-to trouble buddy.  One time I interrupted her studying for some “important” medical thing (like clinical exam or whatever, psh) because some disgusting sea slug had been dropped on the sidewalk by an over-zealous bird outside our dorm.  Did she get shirty with me for interrupting her study time?  Calumny!  She ran down four flights of stairs, without her shoes on, to go outside and see said disgusting sea slug.  And then she said we should put it in a certain person’s bed.  And then she went back to studying.  This other time?  She helped steal all the traffic cones in town (it was a really small town), and the next day, the town council pasted a letter on almost every telephone pole issuing an amnesty for said missing traffic cones.  I should have kept the letter.

My friend Lily?  She biked through a blizzard to meet at a bar during finals in grad school.  We had many rounds.  Then she biked home.  …In a blizzard.  Charlotte?  She and I had Manhattans on the roof of our graduate program’s central building the day before we graduated.  Were we supposed to be up there?  Are you kidding?  Grace picked me up from work at 10:30pm at night, drove me to her house, set me up on her sofa in front of a roaring fire, woke me up the next morning at 7am, and drove me back to work.  All so I wouldn’t have to spend the night at the office.

The older you get, the more the list of “Friends who will bail me out of jail,” and “Friends who will be in jail with me” blurs.  I’m a (more) responsible adult now, and, for a whole variety of reasons, the likelihood of serious hijinks has seriously diminished.  But knowing I have a group of women who I can call and say, “hey, you remember that time…” is the thing that will keep me young and happy forever.

 

Funk Friday: “Tukka Yoot’s Riddim,” Us3

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So here’s something twisted: kids who were born in 1993, when this record came out, are old enough to drink now.  They’re gonna be hitting the bars tonight buying drinks with real IDs.  Curse you, relentless passage of time.

I remember buying my first legal drink.  I ordered a glass of red wine in a Legal Seafood restaurant in a mall.  I didn’t get carded, the wine was a bit blech, it felt very anti-climactic.  Ordering a drink at a bar, of course, was very different.  I really did feel like I was getting away with something.  I kept waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and give me a condescending “Okay, honey, let’s go.”  But no one did.  So, bars were no longer mythic – less Mists of Avalon, more Terminal B Airport Lounge.

So, a bar is a bar is a bar.  (You of course are a bar, but were always a bar.  (Robert Frost, up top!))  The best bar I have ever been to is basically an enormous living room, filled with squashy sofas and arm chairs.  The drinks are reasonably priced, the food is delicious, and the service just desultory enough to allow you ample time to wonder if you’ll die in the chair you selected, and then realize you won’t really mind because it’s so very comfortable.  In fact, the bar in “Tukka Yoot’s Riddim” slightly resembles this Elysium of bars.  So, while drinking tends to cram a half-hour of loose amusement into three hours of unpleasantness, you might as well do it sitting in a blue velveteen low-rider sofa listening to an upright bass player.  Word to the wise, newly-minted 21-year olds.

Oh and one more thing: shots are the Devil’s plaything.  Shots are how the Saxons fell.  Don’t do shots.  Promise me.  Ok?  Look me in the eye.  Ok.  Now be home by 11.  And would it kill you to wear pants that fit?