soundtrack to my life - part 4) focus on the songs edition

There are the songs we love and then there are the songs that have stories behind them. Songs that, if someone (Dear God, please not Michael Bay) makes a movie about you one day, will be on the soundtrack. These are some of my songs and some of my stories.

Sly & the Family Stone – Everyday People
Have you ever had the perfect day? And then you wanted the perfect song to go with it? The song that, no matter what, you could end your day with this song and go to sleep smiling (I mean from something other than your girlfriends obvious fake chest Jeff. Seriously dude. No. Seriously.) This is the song. This is the song that, I don’t give a shit who you are, you can be a guy behind the counter and the Dunkin’ Donuts or the guy sitting in the corporate office who keeps fucking sitting on my budget requests for gear that we actually do need to fucking buy. I don’t care who you are. This is the song. I was coming home one day from a particularly mediocre day. Nothing important happened, nothing exciting was going on, I had no plans for the rest of the day, I had no memory of anything that I really did, but this song on the MP3 player, on the walk home completely reset my mood. All I remember from the rest of that evening was getting a call from a couple of friends and drinking way too much red wine. And had it been a normal day, I probably would have turned them down. But this song totally got me in the right frame of mind. The perfect song for a perfect day.

Fisher - Wheel
So I’m watching PBS one afternoon back, oh at least a good 5+ years ago because Ryen was still little, and at the end of one of the shows, this song plays, and I need to know, I just really need to know, what the hell song is that. It’s got this little odd tune that you just can’t get out of your head, but it’s not really long enough to get any seriously identifying parts from. I mean the guitar solo’s from Stairway to Heaven this is not, but still, it’s driving me nuts. But I let it pass. A few weeks go by and again PBS, watching This Old House in the afternoon wishing they could come fix up this old apartment. And again, the song comes on and it’s stuck in my head. Again. FUCK. Alright, so now I just have to know. And I go and pull up Google and damn near draw a blank. But Google leads me to a group called Fisher (http://www.fishertheband.com/ by the way in case you’re wondering) and I find out that the song is called Wheel. So I end up buying the damn song because I figure that much like Vanilla Ice, if you get it stuck in your head, eventually you listen to it enough that it repulses you like a diseased plague rat. But no, I still, to this very fucking day, have the song Wheel sitting in a prime spot in my MP3 player and every time I hear it, it’s just as good. Much like the Beatles song I Will it’s the kind of song you can see yourself nodding your head to and smiling like a fucking idiot. Which in my case would be just about accurate.

Natasha Beddingfield – Put Your Arms around Me
There are two brief, very brief, so brief that you would need the fucking large hadron collider to detect them, periods of my life during which I considered getting married. One would have been an utter and total fucking disaster of GW Bush’s second term proportions, but the other….I like to think that might have had some promise. The nice thing, as I write this is that I know she won’t read it anyway so unless her friends point it out…and Erica, I will find out if you mention so much as a word, Di can’t keep secrets worth a damn and you know it. But I digress. Back to the song. So off of the Pocketful of Sunshine album, and I hated that goddamn song once ABC’s ad department co-opted it and I heard it every 12 minutes during primetime…first track on the album was this song. It was, for the briefest of seconds, one of the songs we considered when we talked about “the future” and. I’m not going to go much beyond that. Suffice it to say I did end up actually listening to the track until I could figure out the guitar part by ear which took some time and eventually I learned to kind of hate this song too, but in the same way that I imagine hating any song that you have to listen to over and over and over an over and goddammit ABC, how hart it is to put a little variety into your ad rotation. Right so the song. There was a point there. If you’ve ever heard the Wallflower’s cover of Into the Mystic (and it’s one of the few times I prefer a cover to the original Van Morrison) you’ll know that there are a few modern pop songs that would do well as wedding songs. This is one of them and it came up in conversation…and in proper Forrest Gump fashion, that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

odd dreams

I just had two very weird dreams...probably more but two that I remember.

In the first one I was living back in Kona and Ryen was with me. My brother was in his last year of Med school and soon to graduate. The part that I remember in particular about this was the internal sense of uneasyness with regards to Ryen, like there was something I was missing. I don't remember too much of the actual plot of the dream, I remember the punchline really strongly as it had caused me to wake up in shock for a few seconds. The punchline was that somehow I had only now figured out that because Ryen (in the dream, not real life) was the product of my former step mother, technically his uncle (my brother) was also his half brother and his grandfather was his former step-uncle of whatever the fuck. Trying to figure out the titles made my head explode (figuratively) in the deam an I woke up. That was weird but the second was weirder:

the second one I was living in Southern California but working at a theme park. I don't know which exactly but it wasn't a Disneyland or Knot's Berry. Maybe a six flags. In the begining of the dream I thought it was a vacation, but as it turns out I was there because I had decided to start a new job, but hand't told the company I currently work for.

So the friend I was staying with, who carpools to the same theme park with a group of people of vaguely african, asian and/or latin descent, myself and her carpool gang go to the park onw what is my first day of work. Only I don't where the hell I'm going of what I'm supposed to be doing.

In particular, I remember when we got to the employee parking lot in the van there was something ont he radio that was still playing, an interview with someone, that we all wanted to listen to the end of, so we all continued to sit in the car util it was done. When it was over we got out and the rest of the carpool went off to work. I followed people around for a few minutes until someone saw me and recognizes me and tells me to come on. So I played along and acted like I knew what the hell was going on. Apparently they knew I was new and there was this kind, homely blonde lady who got me my orientation packet and led me to a big group meeting.

At this meeting, things were just starting when the guy I knew, who was apparently my boss, was giving out assignments for the day. Without knowing what other possible assignments there were, I heard him talking about "I know none of you like to work the call center and we usually only have two stations running, but I've added five today so we need some people to work the call center stations." since that was sort of a job I had done and figured I would wing it through a day at a call center and figure out what the hell was going on later, I asked if I could work the calling and was given one of the stations.

Only a couple other people had volunteered to work in the call center and basically it was a couple of computers and phones setup in the front of the meeting room we were already in. I explained that I wasn't entirely comfortable with this, if for no other reason than I didn't even know what the hell this call center was for, but I didn't go into much detail about the fact that I didn't know what the fuck was going on.

The guy I saw, who ended up being my new boss, was vaguely asian and kinda reminded me of Harold from Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, but not really. More assertive, he just looked kinda like Harold. He said that since it was my first day he would have a little patience and go through calls with me the first few times. I still don't remember if we were calling people, or people were calling us.

I somehow edned up on the phone with a guy in a bank that was being robbed. Since I was using a headset and didn't want to disconnect the call to dial 911, I pulled out my cell phone, dialed 911 and when the operator answered, asked to be connected to a PSAP in southern california, again I don't remember exactly where. Once I got the PSAP, I was the relay between the person in the bank and the operator. and it worked, flash forward a bit and I get the word from the guy in the bank that he's okay, the cops rescued them and I put down my headset with shaking hands then tripped a few times and knocked into tables and things on my way out the door to take a few minutes to collect myself.

The other people in the call center, once they heard me acting as the relay between the person in the bank and the operator sort of knew what was going on and got really, really interested, I had started to draw a crowd and when I got up and walked outside without saying an additional word to anyone, I got a bunch of wide eye'd looks as I walked outside, whole body in tremors. I still don't remember whether we called people or people called in to the call center to talk to us. I'd guess the former, except that 6 is right above 9 on the phone keypad and phone companies use 611 to designate the repair/service lines that go to call centers so it would have been easy for a person trying to dialing 911 to get 611 instead.

Because of the 911 call I still had not logged any "sucessful", per whatever the business was, calls, the Harold figure said to me. And so I was asked if rather than work in the call center for the rest of the day, I might want to work somewhere else like running some of the network and security monitoring systems for the park.

odd but weird, nto sure what to make of the whole thing other than that I have a decent imagination that is apparently easy to mess with since earlier in the evening I had been reading Steve Martin's book about his life in which he describes working in various jobs at Disneyland while a teenager.

thought of the day project

I've got this one blog for all my random thoughts. Some things on there are awesome, some things on there are pretty lame. Most of those things are inappropriate but still, I'm usually happy with what makes it there, just not happy about the consistency with which I put stuff up there.

So as inspired by JoCo's "thing a week" I'm going to try through the next few months to post one random though a day. Sometimes I have more than one in a day and I'll probably try to queue them up, but I want to consistently put stuff up there.

Jerry Ssinfeld has this thing about "don't break the chain" as a productivity method. Each day you cross off on the calendar and keep it someplace easy to see. So as yo build up days of consistently posting things, the further you go the more you want to not "break the chain" on your calender. I'm hoping that after a few weeks I'll be motivated enough to actually get into that habit. For now though, it's just sort of a neat idea I want to try.