Leap

A cursor blinking on a blank page, waiting to be filled with words, thoughts, the ramblings of a person who doesn’t know where to begin.

I haven’t forgotten you. In fact, you’re all I’ve been thinking about. Anecdotes, topics, things to discuss, constantly rolling through my brain. I’ve been scared to open Pandora’s Box, concerned as to what may fall out.

I’ve been guarded, defensive and protective of what runs through my head, but now it’s time to take a leap.

I was made to write. That may sound arrogant, but it’s true. And I’ve been pushing it aside, trudging through long workdays, finding solace in my bed at night when the day is finally over. I’ve been tired and sluggish. Life still goes on. I’m surrounded by great people, who have helped and encouraged me.

I haven’t forgotten you.

Here is my leap, my jump off of a cliff.

I put in my two weeks without another job lined up. It wasn’t the essence of the job, it was my unhappiness with my place in the world. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t where I was meant to be. I wanted more, but was scared to take the first step, teetering securely with a paycheck that barely covered my bills, allowed me to take moderate adventures, but it still wasn’t enough.

I crave this, my friends. Tapping at keys and forcing myself to negotiate over my next words. Will they be too harsh? Should I be funnier? Less serious? More serious? A million topics and opinions in my brain and I still struggle with what to put here on digital paper for public consumption.

A slim part is based on what you’ll think of me after reading what I write. A bigger part is having the courage to take a proverbial first step and just fucking do it already, man.

This turned out way shorter than I thought it would be, but it’s been churning in my head for days.

The cursor blinking on a blank page is more intimidating than I remembered, perhaps because I’m so out of practice.

So, here we go. Read it or not. If nothing else, it’s only for me because here I am, taking my scary, liberating and, probably in retrospect, melodramatic, leap.

An Introduction to my Music Obsession, or Wednesday.

I'm sick of talking about feelings and reflecting.

Let's get down to some nitty, gritty music talk.

Here's the deal: I am a music whore. I need it to survive, I have a soundtrack going all day long and it often times reflects, helps me cope and sets my mood for the day. I would completely die with out it and that's not an exaggeration. I'm pretty sure I would go completely insane.

I don't have many addictions, but this is a serious addiction that has manifested over the years into a ridiculous obsession to the point where it greatly defines my person. Kinda like Gollum when he had The Ring (Lord of the Rings, reference, watch out!). Music is My Precious. I've spent a lot of hard-earned cash and my time (and probably other peoples' time) over the years amassing my collection and I love each and every piece of musical medium that I own. Books, CDs, MP3s, Mixed CDs from the 90s, Memorabilia, Concert Stubs. I crave it, I collect it, I hoard it, I analyze and over analyze it, I obsess, I retain random facts, I study, I read constantly about it, I quiz people about what they listen to and why, I talk about it, I write about it. So, if that doesn't spell out my relationship with music pretty clearly, I don't know what else will for you.

Let's talk genres for a minute. If I were a character in an RPG, this is what I would look like (with respect to Music only):

Faction: Neutral

I would be approximately a Level 62 Rock History Scholar with a subset of skills in Musicology (this hypothetical comparison is ranked out of 100 Levels, duh).


Attributes
Indie/Hipster Cred: +75
90s Music Icon Knowledge: +85
Classic Rock (approximately from1955-1972) History: +85
Blues Spirit: +65
Punk Rebel: +55
Legit Hip-Hop/Rap Enthusiast: +50
Old School Hillbilly: +35
Generic Pop Queen: +65
Motown & Soul Sista: +50
Hair Metal Thrasher: +35
Funky White Girl: +35
Goth/Hardcore: +40

Weaknesses
Current Pop Shit: -45
Country, 1970 - Present: -75
Jam Bands: -65
Easy Listening: -90
Electronica/Dance: -75
One-Hit Wonders (all eras): -70
Emo: -1000000

You're welcome

So now that you're all caught up on my Music stats, generally speaking, let's talk about a few musical points that I have floating around in my brain that you may or may not get some use out of:

• I'm running low on new music to obsess over. The last thing I got was Flogging Molly's new album, "Speed of Darkness," which is okay but it's not striking me like I need to listen to it and absorb it. Previous to that was Lykke Li and, again, I liked it, but I'm not fawning all over her. I think one of the last albums I fell all over myself about was Iron & Wine, "Kiss Each Other Clean." I don't know what it is about that album, but I totally fucking loved it and listened to it on repeat a million times when they were streaming it prior to the album being released. I think I'm being a musical schizophrenic at the moment and nothing is seriously striking my fancy because I don't know what I'm looking for. Hopefully something awesome comes along soon because I'm going a little mad. I feel like if I don't have something new to wrap my greasy little paws around every few weeks or so I start to get a little twitchy about it.
• Turntable.fm. This shit is awesome. Two of my lovely friends, Zach and Kirk, that own and run wndr (they do a myriad of things, mostly interactive development, branding and advertising. Also, shameless plug, they're legit. Among a bunch of other stuff, check out the site they did for David Lynch, which just happens to be a music site. Don't you love the tie-in?!) told me about it after I was bitching about Pandora deleting one of my radio stations and it's super fun. Being a nosy music bitch, it's a way to essentially DJ, either with a few friends or in the public music rooms, and see what other people are listening to and playing. I had a great afternoon at work listening to picks from myself, Zach and Kirk and can't wait to see what they play tomorrow. They're fellow music junkies like me, so it's nice to be in the same company and have someone else entertain you with their selections during the day when you get frustrated with trying to pick everything yourself.
• I need to get some sort of digital music system happening in my car. My CD situation is out of control. If I had thought about it earlier, I would have taken a photo of the inside of my car with my shitload of cds and showed you this problem. I'm thinking that getting an auxiliary jack installed will be the easiest way to remedy this problem because then I can plug my iPod right into it and have everything at my fingertips without the CD issue. Don't even suggest the radio transmitter situation, I need something hardwired. I wasted $100 a couple of years ago on a Monster transmitter, thinking that it would be awesome and it totally fucking sucked out my will to live. So I don't want another one of those. A head unit would be awesome, but I'm not made out of money here, people.
• U2 is playing Raven Stadium tonight. My mom is there, about half of my friends are there. You couldn't pay me enough to see that fucking tour. Not only do I dislike U2, although I can respect them for their role in music history and development, I think that being stuck in a crowd of 80,000 at a stadium and then having to deal with the subsequent clusterfuck that ensues when you try to corral 80,000 people into doing something is totally not worth it to see a giant 360 crab stage and Bono fucking yelling about how awesome he is. No thanks. I genuinely hope that any of my friends that saw/are currently seeing them have a great time and it's everything they want it to be, though. 
• UPDATE: Our friend Frank has confirmed that Virgin Mobile Fest is happening at Merriweather again this year. We had such a fucking blast last year, I can't wait to go again this year!! Merriweather's shows have been sucking lately and/or I haven't been available to go to the ones I wanted to attend (see example: Mumford and Sons, who played the night before my best friend's wedding of which I was the Maid of Honor). We had a 2010 Merriweather crew that went together to see MGMT, Vampire Weekend, Virgin Fest and had a blast. We were a fearsome foursome and haven't had a chance to reignite that awesome yet this year. Even though it's probably in September, I can't wait to hang out with my people all day seeing awesome bands. HUZZAH!

Okay, so now that you've had the 101 lesson, we have pretty good groundwork for when I nerd out in the future and I don't have to explain my living situation between myself and my tunes. It goes a lot deeper than all the bullshit rambled off above, but those semantics can wait for other posts. Believe me, I'll nerd out about music enough for y'all.

Senses: June 22, 2011

Sounds: Today, I had to turn the Goddamn radio off because, the 45 minutes I was in the car this morning, I must've heard six U2 songs spread across various stations because those bitches fall into just about every genre and station that I listen to on a regular basis and I wanted to throw myself into oncoming traffic. When I got into work, it was random iPod shuffle for a while, then Warren Zevon, a little bit of the Velvet Underground (I also heard two different Lou Reed songs on two different stations this morning, which was weird. Maybe it was his birthday or something). Then, I got involved in turntable.fm (as mentioned above) and it was all over. I capped the day off after Zach and Kirk had left work (and the fun DJ room) with some Nerdist (#51: Comedians You Should Know!). Eagles of Death Metal on my evening commute and Mike Doughty, who Anna was listening to, when I actually got home. Now, as I type this, I'm in the "Indie While You Work" public room on turntable.fm listening to a bunch of random shit, including the White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, !!! and some weird Indie remixes. All in all, it's not bad. It's nice to hear things that I haven't heard a million times already from my library.

Sights: I had to go to Camden Yards first thing this morning when their box office opened to exchange tickets for a baseball game for our crew of friends (long story short - I bought cheap tickets through Towson U as an alumni, which was a game against the Yankees, and it got rained out so I was exchanging that group of tickets for this Friday's game against the Reds, who haven't been to town since like, 1975 or something). It was a little past 9am and the Yard looked lovely. If I hadn't been on a time crunch to get to work, I might've explored it a little more, but this is a quick picture that I snapped while I was there, using the Instagr.am program for iPhone:

Taste: I had kind of a weird lunch today that consisted of lettuce from our CSA (we have a ton of lettuce and mixed greens), cucumber, red pepper, grapes, leftover chicken (shredded) from two chickens I baked a while ago (don't worry, the chicken wasn't gross, we froze portions of it) and leftover squash and zucchini from dinner last night, with a honey Mister Mustard (another obsession) vinaigrette that I made. Overall, it was okay, but it was pretty random. Dinner was much better: grilled, BBQ thick-cut pork chop topped with mango, grilled zucchini and couscous with dried cherries, a ton of pepper and a smattering of good parm for some saltiness. I, of course, snapped a pic of that as well because I love grill marks (using Hipstamatic):

Touch: I didn't take note of any interesting touch today. Right now my hands are really dry and I've officially gone through four boxes of Kleenex since I contracted the Black Plague a week and a half ago. So, other than that, I haven't really been touching much stuff. I did see Gidget (my mom's blind Jack Russell terrier) today and she was fun to pet.

Smell: No particular smells, either. My face still sucks. I'll pick the smell of dinner cooking on the grill tonight. That was pretty rad.

Recap: Today was super fun because of the turntable.fm discovery. Otherwise, I accomplished just about everything I set out to do today, including writing this Blog because I'm tired and now dragging. So I'm just gonna end it.

I hope you all have a lovely evening, even if you are forced to hear all about U2 and Bono for the rest of the week.
-A-