1995-2000 (MY BIRTHDAY).

Today is a day; a day I arrived at once a while ago (my mom was there, ask her if it happened the way I don't remember).

Here are some words, most of them real, reminiscing an important six-year stretch of my life and the going-ons, 1995-2000, as these events were on my radar.

Love like a good human. Learn to build a robot. Breathe in, Peace out.
- Joseph

95 THE BENDS, STRETCH DAILY!
Celebrity attorney-ed OJ trial.
Cameras whir; system defile.
Biggest news my brain could recall
since '86 Challenger tragic skyfall.
Wondering what made one deed News and other deeds not.
Through news feed I skimmed; stories hot and ones of human rot.
USA Today swiped off vacated coffee table.
Filled with narratives wicked as Cain did Abel.
Oklahoma City bombing downtown; homegrown rage,
Rwanda and Packwood and Balkans and Million Man March of all age.
Latter an October event to which I unfortunately did not went.
But a sign of hope and love and possibility of making a dent.
The Chemical Brothers, Radiohead, and J. Buckley scored
and Pitt, Leonardo, J. Depp young and abhorred.
By chest-thumping dudes anyway.

96 IF YOU TOLERATE THIS OUR CHILDREN WILL BE NEXT, OR MAYBE NOT.
Mad cow a Denny Crane-ish fear;
Atlanta Olympics, Unabomber in cuffs, no more Chechnya riot gear
Clinton vs. Dole,
Russian FBI mole,
An education's the goal,
Bank account a big hole,
Baby sister born, Fugee love to my soul
Freeway a misnomer when collecting a toll
Classmates smoke a bowl.
Wheaties or oatmeal in my bowl, s'il vous plait
The Preachers of Manic Streets
screaming politics loud; antonym of sheeps' bleats,
fleets of foots I once was, now I swiftly read Keats.

97 OK, SLEEP THE CLOCK AROUND.
An unethical Newt in the House,
Monstrously quiet like a monstrously loud mouse.
A Tiger roars, Clinton a second term soars, Russian prez Boris signs cease-fire for us with force.
Or rather, Chechnya, duh,
Duh duh duh dum, Di dies
Sound of millions of cries;
Spy satellites in the sky for cash and commerce,
Remembering not so much the verse:
love your enemy
with hugs and non-venomy anemone-
like transparency and glasnost
no longer a thing from sea to coast.
Okay, computers now the evolution
of long-coming revolution.
Radio dead,
Head, ahead is the future with un-fired lead, steroidless bread, Grandaddy’s Humanoid Jed.

98 XO, DESERTERS. 
Euro coins made,
Four million slayed
in Second Congo War;
a war scale we swore would happen no more.
Clones banned,
Lewinsky’s name canned
Oval Office on sinking wet sand.
Rushdie’s fatwah removed,
but may want to stay off Iranian land.
Iraq nuke inspector get the boot,
Kate get Leonardo Titanic steamy in birthday suit
Nagano Winter gold,
Windows 98 sold
bad blood Kosovo
Big Blue beats Garry, new low.
Chilean Pinochet caught too,
extradited, charged, crimes never paid, judicial process a zoo.
Matthew Shepard’s life stolen, sad but true,
humanity’s soul, makes my heart blue.
Mercury, rev, rev, vroom,
sweep the sadness off the universe with a
giant justice broom,
and a bottomless wastebucket for the bigots and vermin to meet their doom.

99 PLAY, SURRENDER, MAN-MULE.
Gretzky says quits
Menacing Phantom with lightsabers Jar Jar and other odd bits
Musharraf coup d’état,
Mandela au revoir,
Boris says ta-ta.
Vlad the Impaler, Vlad the new leader
Putin in power, not what I call a super good-deeder.
Family Guy starts, SpongeBob begins,
College students plus Napster make more deadly sins.
AOL, dial-up jam-up,
Bill out of a jam, no Dow logjam;
hits ten K, bam! Merci, Ma’am,
I’m still no millionaire,
or thousandaire, just
lover of fresh air, messy hair, Icelandic maidens so fair.
WTO protesters Seattle,
WTF global financiers soulless prattle,
Enron megawatt Nevada re-rerouting sociopathic addle.
Balkans trying for peace,
Columbine shooters easy access to piece,
Yugoslavian treaties hard to long-term lease
when wars pit brother against brother and niece against niece;
not nice.
I am Moby, Melville’s descendant might boast,
a vegan techno-electro-punko geek who the Chemical Brothers might roast,
but a fine album of digital analog smashup, to that a thousand commercials did toast.

00 CHARTSENGRAFS.
Y2K deal, computer coding,
too many numbers loading?
Type of hype we like to gripe
Jobs pitches $30 OSX beta,
Yugoslav Milošević told bye-bye, see ya lata, hata.
Politics hot,
Al and George W. friends?
Sort of, but…not.
First female Prez of Finland
Hillary to Senate, plans with no end;
India at a thousand million,
AOL Time Warner cozy up for a hundred sixty-two billion.
Sydney Olympics in summer,
Elián González custody raid bummer,
Playstation 2 release,
Nintendo plays too with GameCube piece
Bombing of USS Cole,
collective hurt of country’s soul
G.W. selected
Later elected,
court trauma with Gore
Story often a bore
Fifty percent country sore
No liars, no more
International Space Station
first crew; dedicated to investigation
Universal elation,
or earthly happiness of most every nation.
Sophtware won’t save us,
numbers minus and plus
don’t trump;
digital technologies
hubristically rise and inevitably slump;
the abstractions of a good conversation top
the binary dimensions of a
one, zero, or two.
We are the real hero.
Until the robots.
Happy future, universe. I’m still around.

SUPER BOWL XLVIII: Seahawks vs. Broncos.

MY FIRST FIVE SUPER BOWL REMEMBRANCES.
1. First one. 1985. 49ers vs. Dolphins. Or, Montana vs. Marino. Joe got my allegiance then and I never looked back, though I did later meet Miami coach Don Shula, who was a fine and articulate gentleman.

Final: S.F. 38-16

2. At a 1990 pizza parlor in Bend, Oregon, watching San Francisco thump Denver 55-10. Went to the bathroom, came back two minutes later, and Jerry Rice had scored yet again. Pyrotechnics. Poor mile high.

2b. 2004. Janet Jackson's malfunction. There was a game, but I remember almost nothing about it, except that it was a very good one.

3. The 1991 heartache of Buffalo kicker Scott Norwood's wide right 47-yard field goal attempt with eight seconds left to dash the Bills hopes against Jeff Hostetler's Giants as they lost the closest Super Bowl ever. 20-19. The first of Buffalo's four consecutive S.B. losses. Whitney Houson National Anthem; New Kids on the Block halftime show. 

4. The 2000 heartache of Tennessee Titan wide receiver Kevin Dyson lunging for the goal line and coming up a yard short with no time left in a play that would have tied the game. Final: Rams 23-16. Greatest S.B. ending ever.

5. The calm and resolute three-minute march of the 49ers as the clock ran down and Montana hit John Taylor with 34 seconds left to top the Bengals 20-16. Jerry Rice: 215 yards receiving.

5b. 2003's Buccaneers vs. Raiders, in which I attend a massively fun party with a bunch of fellow film geeks and aficionados for a Super Bowl Commercial party; during which we discuss Sergio Leone westerns during the game, and wait for the commercials to actually tune in. I do remember that Oakland's Rich Gannon threw five interceptions, which is not generally helpful to your team when you're the quarterback.

Happy Bowling, all!

ELEVEN MINUTES BEFORE GAMETIME.
Anybody up for some afternoon Scrabble in the park? Meet up in about ten minutes or so?


#sportsismylife

THIS IS LOVE.
"I can never truly accept you or love you for who you are until you have a commercial in the Super Bowl."


- my wife

MY DAD: FOOTBALL ANALYST.
"What he needs to do is go around. He should have run AROUND them. Look! He would have had a first down if he had gone AROUND."


I agree.

FAIL.
Funny Volkswagen ad with the wings...but where are the female engineers? Seriously?!


Biggest sports event of the year, running a national spot, bunch of dudes only in lab coats. Don't get it. Little deal? Uhh, what am I not getting?

Alternate Super Bowl halftime show.

THREE MINUTES LEFT IN THE FOURTH QUARTER; POINT SPREAD ABOUT A BILLION: THE CRYING GAME (SPOILER).
I am watching on a 30-second time delay, so please delay any posts about who won until an hour after it ends, just to be safe. I like to be surprised.

Final of the Nailbiting Match.
Seattle Seahawks 43, Denver (not very bucking) Broncos 8

THE GRASS IS GREENER IN TURKEY...BUT WHAT IF YOU'RE COLORBLIND?

Some people's lives seem easy. And perfect. You know realistically that they're not. But you can't escape the feeling that everything has just sort of worked out easy for them.

My little sister brought me coffee this morning.

I've loved Modest Mouse's music for many reasons, not least of which is that frontman Isaac Brock often writes songs that feel like an old automobile lumbering down the road; last legs, staggering along and leaking oil and just trying to keep going, and the horn is stuck and there's people yelling, but then it turns out it's just Isaac, because he gets irritated easily.

I was chatting recently with this guy who speaks four languages, grew up in Berlin, and is moving to Dubai to work in international business. He told me a really great place close to Troy to check out when I visit Turkey, someday. He drew me a map.

"Other People's Lives" is about a protagonist trying to get away from his seemingly-humdrum life, and the ensuing conversation he has with a 25-year old.

"Other people's lives seem more interesting /
Because they ain't mine"

It's a very narrative song and has lots to think about, but what's actually my favourite portion is where his voice devolves into mumbling, and a variety of atonal-ish guitars and screeching farm equipment start chugging into each other and it's one big pretty mess of grating sound that would make Stravinsky gleeful and it is the perfect emotive accompaniment to the story, which is by now wordless.

SPOILER: he heads home.

I ate a doughnut this morning, and haven't confessed to my wide yet.

I'm going home, and I think we'll check out that Turkey map. And listen to some Modest Mouse, in all their cantankerous clunking open road glory.

I love that my wife loves music too. She has been to London.

Happy Thorsday, all.

Modest Mouse
Other People's Lives
Building Something Out of Nothing
2000

COMMENTS ON FACEBOOK

• Joseph Long *wife.
  
  WIFE! Not wide. Wife.
  Wow.
  
  #worstautocorrectever

  Yesterday at 2:59pm via mobile · Like · 5
• 

  Cherilyn Clough · 13 mutual friends
  

  LOL Good thing your countess is young and slim! You are a lucky man!

  Yesterday at 3:07pm · Unlike · 3
• 

  Becca Nutter Long Wide. 
  Don't know if that's my absolute favorite, but it could grow on me 
  Love, 
  Wide

  Yesterday at 3:08pm via mobile · Unlike · 5
• 

  Jeremy Long It's also fun to take a really high pitched metronome and just let it run wild during this song whilst trying to emulate the sounds with your own voice. I dig it.

  Yesterday at 3:17pm · Unlike · 3
• 

  Jeremy Long P.S. Josef, that was the worst spelling mistake you've ever made.

  Yesterday at 3:18pm · Unlike · 4
• 

  Joseph Long I completely agree, Jeremy. And Cherilyn. Thank goodness I caught it myself.
  
  You are a good sport, W.

  Yesterday at 3:20pm via mobile · Like · 4
• 

  Becca Nutter Long Let's go to London. September would work for me.
  
  I love that you love that I love music, and I love that you love music, Love.

  Yesterday at 5:04pm via mobile · Unlike · 3
• 

  Kathie Huffman GREAT description~~ "atonal-ish guitars and screeching farm equipment start chugging into each other and it's one big pretty mess of grating sound that would make Stravinsky gleeful" 

  Yesterday at 5:28pm · Unlike · 1
• 

  Janetta Byrd The grass is definitely not greener in Turkey but there are some amazing places there none the less.

  Yesterday at 6:35pm · Like

IS THIS IT : TWO SISTERS AND THREE OTHER PIECES OF ADVICE BY ME AND THE STROKES.

Couple weeks ago, my sister called me up. She said: wanna go to a movie? On me?

I said: Uhh, yeah.

So we went to see Skyfall, the newest Bond, in which 007 again performs incredible feats of daring and romance while keeping intact his Tom Ford suit and dark wit.

Also (this was at Cinetopia, the most luxurious movie theater in the galaxy), she got us popcorn, fries, and Caesar salad, and we watched some really good trailers, including one for a Tom Cruise film that looks as if there will be many broken bones, yet apparently is squeaking by with a PG13. Anyway. Skyfall was a magnificent experience, and it was not my birthday. It was just another ordinary day made extra.


Leanna, early- to mid-1980s

Walked into my classroom last Monday and a student brought a latte up to me: "Your sister left this for you."


Lanessa, June 2000 (4.5 years old)

This is the amazing part: this was a different sister. A totally different one. And it was the third time this year that she has pulled a stunt like that. Brought me coffee at school, and it has happened on the most perfect mornings when my eyes were bleary from being a semi-successful media mogul working many late nights and getting up too early to also help educate young minds.

If you have done the math, you may have counted two. Two sisters. Not one. Two. Which leads me to a few pieces of life advice:

1. Drink a lot of water every day. Try adding some lemon.
2. Listen to a lot of music every day. Work in some Rachmaninov and Mates of State.
3. Give people your attention when they're talking to you.
4. Try to get two sisters like the ones above (these ones are not available as sisters).

As a rule, I find the pursuit of perfection better left to folks like Michelangelo and Usain Bolt. It's more challenging to find adventure when you're doggedly on a single path with horsey flaps over your eyes. Probably a good thing sometimes. I have so much more fun though pursuing the ecstatic messiness of falling and failing.

So perfection is like a casual perk that falls into your lap once in a while, like a couple sisters who are perfect - not perfect in an absolute sense as human beings, because, for example, one of my sisters forgets to charge her phone every night - but perfect for me, in a relative sense, with their role as my siblings, in which they treat me to pleasant treats and hug big.

Also, other bits of perfection that I have accidentally discovered are the enchiladas of Micael Serrano, the cardamom bread of Matt Westermeyer, and the drumming of Fabrizio Moretti, the Strokes percussionist. On the title track of their 2001 debut Is This It, his robot-with-a-heart drumming lugs the droll song along like a split cupcake of Anthem and Ballad. Perfection. Greatest Song Ever. Definitely.


November 2006

I wonder what today would be like if I had a third sister?

The Strokes
Is This It
Is This It
2001

THIS IS A CAUTIONARY TALE, PART I : FOR MOMS.

I watched quietly as my arterial blood centrifuged in the blender, having just exited my body through the tip of my left middle finger, wandering what the dying thought of Robespierre, inventor of the guillotine, might have been in the googasecond before the blade descended upon his own neck.

I also (in a dull flash) realised that a future life of fighting and battling Evil could be too painful for me, given that it was currently just fragments of my favourite finger now swirling around with chunks of chopped apple, and also we might have to toss out the pie.

My Mom, after the fact, as I held my throbbing, stitched-up finger mummified in gauze: I just wish it could have been me instead.

Me, at seven, agreeing completely.

In between sobs: I forgive you, Mom.

She squeezed me tight: It was my fault. I should have been right there with you while you were chopping apples.

I just wanted to help you make pie! I choked between hacking coughs as the pain refused to numb. Why did you let me help? Why did you let me do something dangerous?

I'm so sorry Joey, she said again quietly. Were you pushing the apples down into the chute using the safety attachment like I showed you?

Of course I was! I screamed respectfully. I know you told me to use the safety attachment, but you only told me five times…WHY DIDN'T YOU REMIND ME AGAIN! This didn't have to happen! Why did you let it happen, Mom, why did you let me help you when you knew that if I didn't listen to you then I could get injured badly?"

I'm so sorry, she said over and over, and kept holding me tight, probably to lessen her own guilt.

I was thinking today that it would make a great little film, with seven-year old Me as the protagonist and the villain being…well, it's obvious. There's a great scene of redemption at the end, when she begs forgiveness over and over, and I finally grant it. I don't know who would play me, but if Martin Short has any grandkids than I think one of them could be perfect, regardless of gender. And I think Kate Beckinsale would play my Mom at 30, because she has a good amount of fierceness, scowling, and a little kindness that comes out here and there.

And then I was thinking about one of my guilty pleasures, Kate's 2001 rom-com with John Cusack, Serendipity, which is a lovely story, although filled with questionable relational advice, and I remembered the wonderful ice skating scenes in Central Park, and how effectively they used St. Germaine's stunning, acid-y jazz electronic track Rose Rouge,

I want you to get together /
put your hands together one time

(over and over and over and over)

I am really glad my Mom wasn't playing that song on the way to the hospital, because then my enjoyment of the Greatest Song Ever would be associated with a horrific event, instead of being tied into a beautiful fairy tale romance of strangers falling in love during a New York City winter.

So I guess a couple things I learned:

1) don't invent things that could someday be turned on you,2) milk an injury for all you can,3) try to forgive people, even when they don't prevent you from hurting yourself, and4) even though my Mom didn't protect me, or effectively teach me how to obey one-hundred percent of the time, we made it through those failures and are friends, and now, I am the parent who is teaching my own young children how to bake…and this time I will do it the right way, and make sure that no one ever, EVER gets hurt on my watch, thus blaming me for unsafe parenting.
5) if something really bad starts to happen, then make sure you're not listening to something you like a lot, otherwise your memory of that song could forever be tarnished. It's true. No more Bryan Adams for me, but that's another story.

My scarred finger is beginning to throb, which it does when the weather gets very cold, which reminds me that the roof could be getting icy, so it's probably not safe for the kids to be building forts up there anymore as it approaches nightfall. See? Effective parenting is about pre-emptive safety measures. Good-bye.

****
St. Germaine
Rose Rouge
Tourist
2000

MR. KUBRICK AND THE INACCESSIBILITY OF GREEN OLIVES AMIDST THE COMING ICE AGE.

Every Thanksgiving, my sister Leanna and I eat one green olive. One. We both detest them. Just the green ones. It has become a ritual: we each try one. There is a point in the future at which I will like green olives. I am slowly approaching that actuality. Every year, they become a little less loathsome; marginally more palatable. I hesitate to say this out of loyalty to her, but this year might be the first that I have detected a semblance of my taste buds evolving and perhaps experiencing a fleeting sensation of pleasure.


Thanksgiving 2010

Kid A, Radiohead's 2000 cannonball of an entrance into electronic music, has been a longtime puzzle for me. I am a dedicated fan of other albums (preceding magnum opus OK Computer, as well as The Bends and Hail to the Thief :) Kid A is a relentless swirl of alien bucketdrumming and sterile droning; an android's heartless dystopia that toys with end-of-world angst and may or may not have some type of linear narrative about approaching apocalypse. Also, melody exists, but as residue rather than beating heart. It feels like they tried to lobotomize melody from most of the tracks; keeping enough to still call them 'songs.'

Ice age coming
Ice age coming
Throw it in the fire

At one extreme you have Top 40 radio, that gives you what you know you like.

I don't need to decide "I like peanut butter cookies." There's no need to think about it. My taste preferences are programmed to enjoy peanut butter cookies. Some are better than others: peanut butter cookies are not created equally, yet, if you give me a peanut butter cookie, chances are that you're going to have to screw it up badly for me not to like it. Premade recipe for success.

The other extreme is where you have bands like Radiohead making albums like Kid A (or, continuing the food analogy, Raw Enchiladas, with no cooked ingredients :)

(As soon as I make this statement, there will be a heated minority who will rise up in affront and have a thousand examples of music that is truly inaccessible; that is really challenging to learn. That has been the critiques of all manner of music through the years, from Dave Brubeck's academic jazz, to John Cage's experimental compositions, to many other examples of musicians challenging people's expectations.


joseph ivan long / magdelana long (2011)
I think music is perhaps the truest art form in its ability to transcend symbolism; although it can be analyzed and dissected, it is also pure in terms of not needing interpretation. It can be interpreted, but it doesn't require the audience to do so. It can simply be experienced at a sensory, emotional level.

We're not scaremongering
This is really happening
Happening

So I suppose one of the questions is:
how much do you work at trying to like something?

You start reading a book. How long do you wait to be sucked in? If you're reading a James Patterson thriller, then you expect to be grabbed in the first chapter, if not the first page and a half. If he's not holding your attention early on, you're going to drop it.

If you're reading, say, William Faulkner, then you're probably not really reading for enjoyment of narrative to begin with. You're not expecting to race through The Sound and the Fury. Good chance you're reading it out of obligation, not desire :) Often, you gotta work at reading literature, for example, versus reading a hardboiled detective thriller.

{QUICK TANGENT: of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle successfully merged the two with his masterful tales of Sherlock Holmes...}



I used to start a book and finish it, always. I needed to know not only how it was going to end, but to ensure that there wasn't something I was missing out on. I felt I owed it to myself to try and understand it. There are all kinds of analogies: even as a teacher: there's a finite amount of energy, attention, and time to give. You have to prioritize how you use your time. There's no equitable sharing of it: some students will simply make themselves more accessible and easier to communicate with and take a small portion of your resources. Others will be more challenging to work with; to understand and assist; who will require more dedicated time and attention. In the meantime, you have a chunk in the middle who are learning at a 'normal pace.' If there is such a thing.

So I don't really have a great answer as to how much effort to devote to less-accessible events, or people, or art, or music. Or food. How much time do you spend trying to understand something before saying I put everything into this and it isn't worth it anymore? E.g. I'm going to give it my best shot up to this point, and then I'm going to quit.


November 2012

There is certainly a time to quit. Sometimes, simply persevering may seem like a heroic thing to do, but sometimes quitting can also be just as noble an endeavor. Quitting is like the ultimate version of changing your mind, and I'm certainly a fan of changing your mind, as opposed to bullheadedly pursuing a path which you realize is wrong, or not ideal, yet you continue on it just for the sake of completing a linear experience; for the purpose of saying 'I'm not a quitter.' I'm not afraid to say that I've quit things.

So how do you decide when to quit, when to stop trying to like something you don't like right away? Why should I spend any more time listening to Kid A when I don't get it?

Here I'm alive
Everything all of the time
Here I'm alive
Everything all of the time

I am not strictly trained as a Scientist, per se. I do not have a Ph.D in a scientific discipline. Or technically speaking, in any discipline. I am hoping for an honorary doctorate at some point, the kind you get without going through any rigorous academic research. That being said, I believe in the role of environment and nurture; in people's ability to change and to evolve their thought processes, their habits, their patterns;

I believe in people's ability to change.

I believe in people's ability to change, not just at a behavioral level, but at a neurological level; that our brains can re-program and create something new (this portion I am yanking from the excellent Jonas Lehrer book Proust Was a Neuroscientist).






The idea that when we hear music that's not in the same tonal scale we're used to hearing, or when we hear a piece resolved in a way that our minds have not anticipated, then we find it jarring. And uncomfortable. But yet, when you repeatedly experience something, whether it's music, or art, or food, or a person, and you become familiar with those patterns, then you begin to appreciate, in a way that previously might have seemed challenging (or impossible). I suppose Kid A has been that process for me. Intermittently, I play it, and I realize over the last 12 years, that track by track, I am becoming a fan of the album, and in particular, there is a song called Idioteque that has this glitchy blurble drone of a melody finding its way out from binary code; this strange pre-apocalyptic musical language that, a dozen years on, has started to sound comfortable, yet oddly futuristic. Futuristic in a Kubrick way: an historical quality that is both timeless of the distant past and timeless of the distant future. This song, Idioteque, has a suspense that I finally feel starting to pay off. I don't know if the Radiohead boys created it with the idea that people were meant to enjoy it; I'm not sure how they envisioned people experiencing it, or if they even realised at the time that they were creating the Greatest Song Ever.


A Kid / November 2011 

At the time, I think a lot of people, a lot of critics jumped on board to hail it as a masterpiece, even when they didn't understand it. That's often what happens when you have something that's new and different: it polarizes people. You have many people who don't understand, and want nothing to do with it; you have other people who may not understand it any more than the others, but they respect it and cheerlead, not in spite of not understanding, but because they don't understand it.

I find myself in both places. There's books I don't finish. Films I don't complete. Music I walk away from. I'm not leaving my mind open to any and all. There's people I might have one good conversation with, and that's the extent of the time I'm willing to invest with them (e.g. there's only so much time in my life for conversations with white supremacists and with aggressive techies trying to aggressively talk me into using Windows-based computers - no connection between the two groups, of course).


Jeremy M. Long / November 2012

My priorities with people will likely always have a nucleus, but spreading out from that nucleus will be a sense of adventure; an Openness to Inaccessibility. I want to find time, to create time, to plan holes in my schedule and my life to letting the Inaccessible become a new pattern, to having the patience to let fresh grooves get worn into my record. I also know, in the spirit of prioritization, that I will spend plenty of time with things that I am already comfortable with. I'll never lose my love of the Beatles or Nina Simone; of Amélie or Dumb and Dumber and the comfortable elements around me. They bring joy because of their familiarity. That balance between strangers and family. The bulk of my time I will spend with the people I love the most; the experiences I love the most. But I will also create time for those things that don't make sense right away. Like A Kid, I will try to experience life with Eyes Wide Open.

Green olives, I will love you. Someday. Soon.

Radiohead
Idioteque
Kid A
2000

A BIRD TOLD ME (I'M LIKE ONE TOO).

I was trying so hard to be in a cranky mood, and I was driving and stuck in a compact disc, and an old compilation I had carefully assembled so very long ago began playing. It was awful when, sandwiched between Leonard Cohen and Dropkick Murphys, my foul spirits were assaulted by the lilting optimism of Nelly Furtado's I'm Like a Bird.

I had totally forgotten it was the Greatest Song Ever, but then a little birdie reminded me,

and the sun broke through.


****

Nelly Furtado
I'm Like a Bird
Whoa Nelly!
2000