mixtapes = love.
So this post will basically out me and my inner 15 year old, but whatever.
I love mixtapes and informally trading songs. I love listening to what makes peoples’ souls tick and stir. And when someone (un)intentionally sends you something so perfect for your mood, you’re just like, “Yes. Exactly.”?
Best. Ever.
b always sends me amazing indie music (and I think it’s part of the reason I have a girlcrush on her, but shh). I thought I had let that genre/musical crush of mine rot away with a past relationship, but the fact of the matter is, pretentious, calming indie/folk/acoustic music is totally my shindig sometimes.
And yes, I squeal over Sam Beam’s voice & guitar. Judge me.
Played 56 times
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Last March I found myself sitting in SFO late at night, waiting for the umpteenth hour for a flight home to BOS after a business trip in LA…
Ben had shown me around the Bay Area only a week prior, and I’d flown in through SFO. The airport marked the beginning (and eventual end) of a wonderful vacation and first non-business related trip to Northern California.
So, naturally, I was actually excited to stop at SFO at first - It seemed like the perfect cushion between the shock of Los Angeles and all that it once meant, and my life as it is now here in Boston. I thought all the warm memories from vacationing with Ben would be enough to give me some good vibes on my way back. Same coast, same state, same airport, same terminal… Failproof, right?
This time however, I was on business, it was cold and dark, I didn’t know a soul there, and Ben wasn’t there to pick me up and take me home. Yes, I was at his homebase, but the fact of the matter was, he was asleep on the East Coast a good 2,700 miles away. Suddenly I wanted nothing more to be back in Boston, back on EST.
It’s strange how strongly I associate places with people, yet, without Ben there, San Francisco was just as faraway and foreign as it had been before he’d ever shown me around. And I’m not sure why, but I chose this song to listen to while sitting outside the International Terminal thinking all of this through. This song has become one of my favorite late-night contemplative songs ever since.
(People, songs, places…They’re all irrevocably intertwined in my mind. Ben, SFO: This one’s yours.)
Chapter 34 of High Fidelity.
Warning you in advance: This will only make sense if you’re A) a music nerd, and B) have read High Fidelity (by Nick Hornby) and ever gone, “Oh Jesus, this is going to be my life, isn’t it?”
That said, I would like to live the Chapter 34 of my life already. Even if that means getting my marriage proposal rejected (seriously, the horror!); To know that I’d found my archetypal Laura-in-male-form, to have expressed that much, to have gotten that much wiser and that much farther in my life to have kept her/him even up to Chapter 35… That would be enough.
I’m not even twenty-something yet, but I already agree with Rob in this passage, and I’m just plain sick of the transience of everything (meaning, people):
(Read and replace the concept of “marriage” with that of “commitment” and “got married to” with “committed to a long-term relationship”)
“See, I’ve always been afraid of marriage because of, you know, ball and chain, I want my freedom, all that. But when I was thinking about that stupid girl I suddenly saw it was the opposite: That if you got married to someone you know you love, and you sort yourself out, it frees you up for other things. I know you don’t know how you feel about me, but I do know how I feel about you. I know I want to stay with you and I keep pretending otherwise, to myself and you, and we just limp on and on. It’s like we sign a new contract every few weeks or so, and I don’t want that anymore. And I know that if we got married I’d take it seriously, and I wouldn’t want to mess about.” - Rob.
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Admittedly, I can’t get myself to read through the middle of High Fidelity sometimes. I only really love the beginning and end. The middle is…well. The middle. (see also, that Jimmy Eat World song)
Sometimes, I feel like I’m doing the same thing with my life - Reading, but only barely, flying past pages/moments/years that seem “unimportant” just so I can get to where it gets juicy, where there’s that final peak of tension before it resolves.
I’m not asking for a Plagal (haha) or a Perfect-Authentic Cadence. In fact, I’ll even take a Deceptive. Just no more non-chord tones or dominant chords.
…And no Half Cadences either.
