music video monday #5.

this video is what ignited my love for jay-z… the cinematography is fantastically beautiful. and i love that jay-z is just hanging out with rick rubin throughout the video… what an odd couple.

i want to move to iceland. or new york.

i keep having experiences with some form of media that make me want to relocate to a new place.

first, i read the geography of bliss, in which a grumpy npr correspondent globe-trots for a year to visit some of the happiest (and unhappiest) places in the world and try to glean some secrets to leading a happy life. (as a sidenote, i think it’s amazing that there are social scientists who actually study the nature of happiness, which seems to me such an elusive and situational phenomenon. awesome.) he visits iceland, which, apparently, is consistently in the top ten happiest countries each year. for that entire chapter of the book, i was thinking how much it sounded like a place i wanted to live: it’s eclectic and everyone is a recreational artist, if not a professional one; it is small and quaint and everyone knows everyone; most people believe in ghosts/spirits/magic as a matter of fact; people change jobs all the time with fluidity because failure is seen as a great try that didn’t quite work out, and trying is admired; it is in an almost perpetual state of night, even in the afternoon; instead of binge-drinking because they’re miserable, icelanders binge-drink because they’re happy. it just sounds like such a pleasant place to live. i’m hoping to make a trip there during the summer.

and when i first jay-z’s song “empire state of mind,” and heard alicia keys belt out the chorus, i started crying because her voice was so beautiful and what she was singing was so inspiring. new york is the epitome of the american city, and is essentially a microcosm of the u.s. as a whole. all the good stuff that happens, happens in new york. i’ve never been there, but hearing that song made me want to pick up and move there immediately. alicia sings that new york is “what dreams are made of! there’s nothing you can’t do!” and i think to myself, “yeah! i can do anything!” and then she sings “these streets will make you feel brand new! big lights will inspire you!” and i think “yeah! i want to feel renovated! i could go for some inspiration, too!” the song just leaves me with a good feeling, and with the feeling that new york is the place to be. i’m going to apply to a few graduate schools in new york next year, so it could be a reality (maybe/hopefully).

i think i must just be restless. i’ve been in seattle for four years, which isn’t really that long, but i’ve experienced the equivalent of a lifetime here. i’m ready for a change of scenery, with the possibility of return.

black friday = hell.

last night, i made a terrible mistake: i convinced josh that we should accompany his mom to a doorbuster sale at toys ‘r’ us at midnight, to find a christmas present for his little sister. i just thought it would be a nice thing to do so that his mom didn’t have to endure the madness on her own. my good intentions were repaid with extreme physical discomfort and a good deal of rage. we got there at 12:15am. we got home at 3am.

it took us about a half hour to find the three items we were looking for, solely because the mass amounts of people there made it impossible to maneuver. once we had everything, we entered the line, the end of which began right before the checkout lines and wrapped around the entire perimeter of the store and came back to the checkout lines. we had barely gone fifty feet when we saw that the end of the line had been pushed back even further, so that the people in line next to us who were moving the opposite direction were looping around and up to where we had started. a lady with a cart full of toys tried to go under the rope that separated our line from the checkout because her “friend” was already in line, blocking both lanes in the process. a toys ‘r’ us employee stopped her, and she just stepped in line behind us instead of looping around like she was supposed to; about ten people behind her followed suit until they closed the gap between the two lines, and everything went on as it had before.

we stood in line for two hours. the first hour wasn’t that bad because we were still in decent spirits; we made jokes about the people around us and the dumb slogans on the front of board games, and we pushed buttons to make toys light up and to activate their automated voices. it was when my heels and back and shoulders started cramping up and sleep started making my lids heavy that my good attitude dissipated.

once we had made it into the home stretch and were about one hundred feet from the check out lines, we realized that there was a line of about thirty people that was perpendicular to us, and a toys ‘r’ us employee was letting in one person from that line into our line for every three people in our line. people that were still looking around for toys while we were in line on the other side of the store were let into our line in front of us. that’s when i lost my shit. someone behind us in line yelled at the employee that they had been in line for an hour and gone all the way around the store, and the employee said that he was just trying to do his job and get rid of the line that was perpendicular to us. i, and a group of people around me, jumped in and said that was asinine because our line wasn’t even that long anymore and that it would be that long for them to wait if they went to the end of our line. and when i started to ask the employee how his system was fair or even logical, josh started pulling me back and saying “it’s not worth it, it’s not worth it.” i was so livid. and to make it even worse, we got up to the checkout lanes and realized that our line was only being split between two checkout lanes, and a completely separate third line was being funneled straight into the third lane. it had all gone to hell.

standing in line wasn’t upsetting to me, because we were doing it to get josh’s sister a present that she would love, and that made it worth it. what was so infuriating was how machiavellian the entire scenario was, how the people who did the right thing and followed the rules got screwed by the people who deviated from the system and happily took on mild social chastisement in exchange for their own personal benefit, and really did not care that they were screwing anyone else over. while we were in line, josh and i were talking about how black friday sales would be the perfect setting for sociological observation, and what a disturbing documentary it would make. black friday is aptly named, i think, because it shows the blackest, basest, most vile characteristics of humanity in a neat, ostensibly moral consumerist package. i hate it.

winter break reading list.

heart of darkness by joseph conrad
to siberia by per petterson
teaching a stone to talk by annie dillard
1984 by george orwell
’tis by frank mccourt
bird by bird: some instructions on writing and life by anne lamott

how much is our world structured around language?

“try to think a thought without using language.”

emotion—> language—> thought.

i talk to myself a lot. most of the time it’s inside my own head, but sometimes i speak out loud to myself when no one else is around. ostensibly there’s no purpose for it, because i’m saying things that i already know and there’s no one around to absorb what i’m saying. even within my head, there is a constant monologue happening that i can’t turn off. i guess this is how humans process reality, and because thinking is so inextricably linked with language, there is no way to experience the reality of living without the words to name it.

and yet, there is so much that language can’t name. there have been so many times in my brief life that i’ve failed to accurately express my feelings because i simply didn’t have the words. the feeling is always there, so strongly, but sometimes the language just doesn’t follow. sometimes “angry” is the only word you can use to characterize the amalgamation of your irritation, melancholy, loneliness, disappointment and fear, even if “angry” doesn’t come close enough to describing it.

if only language was as boundless as emotion.

music video monday #4

since i haven’t posted any music videos for a while, i decided to make this monday a double-whammy. and though these two videos are from two different generations, the artists are equally outrageous in their own right: i give you peter gabriel and lady gaga.

i love this video. i love that this video is older than i am and a hundred times more brilliant. seriously, such innovation for an 80’s music video.

and gaga. oh, gaga. this video is beautifully shot and her clothes are to die for, and i love how she satirizes the relationship between media and celebrity. go, girl.

were/are awesome.

[i feel so lame that i only manage to blog on the weekends, ie. sunday night when i've finished all my shtuff.]

anecdote: during the last ten minutes of work on thursday as i was trying to look busy whilst not actually doing anything, i noticed that one of my co-workers was listening to npr and that they were discussing a blog, so immediately my ears perked. this fellow that runs a blog called my parents were awesome was being interviewed and just talking about why he decided to start this blog. the interviewer asked a really excellent question when she pointed out that the title of the blog implies that these parents are no longer awesome, but the blog man (whose name i didn’t catch) said that nearly every submission he gets has “my parents were and still are awesome” in the subject line.

i really like this blog. there’s always something so magical about seeing your parents as something other than what you know them as. they were once our age, they were once stupid and reckless and adventurous and carefree, and i think that when we acknowledge that, we honor them: as they were and as they are now. because usually they change for us. it’s kind of amazing.

my favorite teenage morons: romeo & juliet.

reading romeo and juliet apparently makes some people very defensive. in a class discussion the other day, i piped up for the first time this quarter and said that i didn’t think romeo and juliet were actually in love, because they didn’t exercise any degree of reason in their 3-day love affair and because they were adolescents who had no conception of love beyond what their libidos were telling them. and out came the claws!

it was the general consensus of the class that romeo and juliet’s brand of immediate, uncontrollable, dangerous passionate love was an elevated form of love, that their love was somehow more pure than the long-lasting, mundane love that most people experience. someone even went as far as to quote neil young and say “it’s better to burn out than to fade away.” how poetic.

call me square, but i just fail to see the appeal of this kind of love, if you can even call it that. i feel forced to bear my post-romantic teeth at the thought of such awesome recklessness/immaturity/selfishness falling under the category of love. i just try to imagine what their lives would be like if everything didn’t go tragically awry for them: they would have lots of passionate sex for a while, but then romeo would develop a roving eye, juliet would cuckold him, and there would always be that underlying tension of their families hating each other. there is no way they could maintain that intense level of passion for any longer than they did, so i guess there was no choice but for their story to end tragically; maybe that’s why people like it. in my mind, passion is kind of like caffeine: you can only run on it for so long before you get burned out, and either start looking for something else to get you going or allow what was once a high to become a routine. and everyone knows that teenagers are incapable of knowing what love is because a) they’re self-centered (and self-centered is the opposite of love) and b) because they don’t know themselves. you would think that if romeo really loved juliet, he could have restrained himself from killing her kinsman and getting himself banished and generally mucking up all their plans, but no. hrmph. fortune’s fool, indeed.

conclusion: i just can’t bring myself to romanticize their relationship (or any relationship that resembles theirs, for that matter). they were not great lovers, they were idiot kids who lived in the moment and died as a result of their inability to exercise restraint and plan ahead. and as dr. amorose said, this is the last shakespeare play that should ever be taught in high school english classes… it’s too great of an encouragement for moronic teenage lovers to be more reckless and moronic than they already are.

money is a gas.

i am poor. this is not news.

i get nervous about money sometimes/a lot of the time. i went to buy groceries today after class, spent $47 and felt physically ill afterward. little pieces of green paper shouldn’t have such a violent bodily effect on me, right?