(Self-Titled)

Ah, Melissa, take me back....

So, I had a bit of a thing for Melissa Etheridge. It didn't last forever, but I loved her hard.

I know you girls who knew me in college know what I am talking about....

Yes, I am talking about Melissa, and specifically, That CD. Yes, that one....

Melissa Etheridge, Self-Titled.

Her debut album.

The same one I listened to not just once every night, but three times....three times a night for over three hundred nights....

I had it bad.

My roommates would not come in my room when that CD was on. Mostly because they learned fairly quickly that album made my clothes fall off....especially that ONE song...

Like The Way I Do....it would so be my stripper song, if I ever was one...

In fact, I've recommended it to several strippers, but curiously they never take me up on it...

One night, as sort of a great inside joke, Jennifer and I watched a strip tease given to this song...by our men at the time, dressed in drag....that was extremely hilarious....

At any rate, I had put aside Melissa. I kind of gave up on Melissa when seeing her live the second time, and the last time. It was a night with strange emotional context, which probably didn't help things, but Melissa did nothing to me.

Nothing, especially in comparison with what she did to me the first time.

Yes, it was the only time "that" ever happened just listening to music, and it happened during that song. Seeing her perform it live was just that thrilling to me....

So, I am reading this book right now, an autobiography of Melissa, and it talks about that song, and I realized it effected others the same way.

Here's what it says, in "Melissa Etheridge: Our Little Secret", by Joyce Luck, about that song:

"When Etheridge does "Like the Way I do" in concert (often drawing it out to last ten minutes or more), the effect on the crowd is dynamic: the responsive energy she creates down on the floor snaps and crackles. There's always a point when she and the audience reach a plateau, and the performance becomes almost an out-of-body experience for her. She has described the effect many times to interviewers. She has to take a deep breath to ground herself again."

Ha! I find this hilarious.

That year in college, I wore this album out, but the funny thing was that it was actually Jennifer's CD. When we moved out of the house we shared together, (the old "Pink House"), I tried to give her the disc back. She gave me the funniest look. She was thoroughly disgusted. She knew what I had been up to in my room with that particular disc.

"Uhm, no...you keep that one..."

So, I had to buy her a new copy....

;)

ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART

So, I haven't been doing much blogging lately. Kid has been claiming the computer a lot, and I've been going through something, maybe I'll be able to explain later. However, I was listening to my Ipod while working on my computer at work, and this song came on. I wanted to share the lyrics with you, my few friends who read this thing now and then. This is the most beautiful love song I have ever heard, I think that every time I hear it, but I mean that as a contemporary love song, a modern love song. It reminds me of someone really special to me who is not a part of my life anymore. Once, this song was his song, and now I can listen to it and smile thinking about that time when this song said everything I wanted to say, even with the knowing that sometimes you find out that love was just a wish an empty heart makes. Sometimes you meet people later in life and realize the two of you have come too far away from the people you used to be when you loved each other. That's okay. The person I loved was a person who no longer exists, and that makes it easier to let him go, anyway. When I hear this song, though, I remember the feelings I had once, and it's not a bad thing. It makes me smile with the remembering.

Collecting You (by the Indigo Girls...of course)

I could paint you in the dark
Cause I've studied you with hunger like a work of art
These are very secret days
I collect my information then I stowe it all away
Call me when you breeze through to your appointments
The work you do
Call me, I'm collecting you
The pleading prayer and hairshirt sting
My hair-trigger love and faulty spring
Motivation smokes a name, but I don't like that smell applied to me so
Blindly just the same call me
When you breeze through to your appointments the work you do
Call me I'm collecting you
Turning up my collar to an unseasonal chill you ask a favor, you know I will
The rain comes a surprise we fly across the railroad ties
I feel the danger the foolish thrill oh yes I will
What it will or won't be then
The shutter pre development the ink full in the pen
Mind the mind's eye's trickery
You might picture killer beautiful much more than it might be
Call me tell me what you're up to what you'll do
Call me I'm collecting you
I would be foolish to think that I could turn it off and stay alive
The way I live when you switch on hand on the dimmer, give me just a glimmer
Give me just a shadow hope around the edges, agony and rapture forever uncaptured
Take these secrets to your grave
Drug across your landscape and buried in your cave
You're piling up and out of sight
But trying to add it up just feels like counting shades of light
Call me when you breeze through to your appointments what you must do
Call me I'm collecting you
Hang it in my window let it complicate my view
The separation the glass of you
But I can paint this picture any way that I see fit
The art of pain the subject sits unmoved

IPOD Journeys

Three weeks ago (has it been that long?): noticed the new Ipod caused me to be more excited to get up early in the morning to exercise before my husband leaves for work.

Two weeks ago: realized I could tuck it into my shirt at work and have my own soundtrack for my day, which was handy since the overhead music went out that week.

Last week: I loaded a "hurricane" mix of songs that we listened to in the kitchen while entertaining our friends, while I baked up goodies, and in the bedroom while the adults played

Today: my youngest sister came over with her birthday gift for me, an I-Tunes card for more music for the new Ipod.

So I changed up the playlist a bit.

Here's what I'm listening to now:

Alternative jams: Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sublime, Green Day, The Offspring, Metallica, Matchbox Twenty, Stone Temple Pilots, Linkin Park

Classic Rock: Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Aerosmith, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen (more), Lenny Kravitz, Fleetwood Mac, Jimi Hendrix

Old School New Wave: The Cure, Depeche Mode

Rap: Beastie Boys (more), Eminem, Snoop Dog (less)

Chick Rock/Dance Music: Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, Pussycat Dolls, Fergie, Nelly Furtado, Justin, Britney, Shakira, Colbie Callait, 10000 Maniacs,

Folk: Gypsy Soul, Jacob Johnson, Joe Cassady & West End Sound, Rusted Root. Kerouac reading excerpts of his writings.

Classic Country: Waylon Jennings, David Allan Coe, Hank Williams Jr., Willie Nelson

Go ahead. Put me in a box, give me a label. Give it a try, I dare ya!

GUESS WHO....

....is no longer the only girl without an Ipod?

Early birthday present from my parents - an Ipod Shuffle. I desperately needed this item for getting my groove on.

So this evening I had been loading it up. Curious about what's on it?

The expected - Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge. No I am not a lesbian, I just listen like one.

The unexpected - Fergie, Shakira, Nelly Furtado, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Pussycat Dolls, Colbie Calliat. Shania Twain. Snoop Dogg. AC/DC.

Old school - Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Lenny Kravitz, Eric Caplton, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bob Marley, Pink Floyd, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Green Day, Aerosmith, Sublime, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Jimi Hendrix, The Cure.

Past decade additions: Matchbox Twenty, Eminem, AudioSlave, Linkin Park, The Offspring

New music: Gypsy Soul

Forgot to add: The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, the Beastie Boys.

Guess I'll be back to make another playlist soon...after I check out how this one works for me.

GUESS WHO is back, rearranging music.

Once I played with it a week or two, here is what the Ipod shuffles:

Same, maybe different albums: Indigo Girls, Tom Petty, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Aerosmith, Johnny Cash, Lenny Kravitz. Linkin Park, Matchbox Twenty, Nelly Furtado, The Offspring, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley, Gypsy Soul, Melissa Etheridge, Willie Nelson, The Cure, Fergie, Shakira, Britney, Justin, Gypsy Soul, the Pussycat Dolls, Stone Temple Pilots, Sublime, Eminem, Snoop Dog

Added: Beethoven, Hank Williams Jr, Waylon Jennings, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN how did I forget him, The Silver Beatles (I was tricked) and various Beatles/Lennon covers, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Rolling Stones, The Beastie Boys

Best Western Adventures

Series 11

VICTORIOUS AT VITREOUS

The day started badly. I was woken early by whining children. Between my children and the children of my sister-in-law, there were five kids under the age of nine at my in-laws house, and this day, they all wanted breakfast and no one else was up. A couple hours into tending kids, I was cranky and fed up wth my husband who had been drinking late and sleeping in every night. When I went to ask him why he was still sleeping, he looked at me like I was crazy and said,
"I'm on vacation".

That was a fuse that lit my fire. Apparently, my vacation was meaningless, because it didn't relieve me of any responsibilities or allow me any perks like sleeping in on a summer day. I wanted him to get up and help me out, and he just wanted me to be quiet. Finally, he urged me to get gone, go for a drive and calm down, while he tended kids for a while.

I wasn't even sure I wanted to go. I really just wanted some help, or to be able to relax and watch TV for a while. I needed to unwind. Finally, though, it reached critical mass and I took myself and my GPS unit and went out the door.

My plan was to go after a geocache called Above the Needles. The information page said it was a bumpy road but most vehicles could make it. I found this Fremont Highway 48 that was taking me closer, so I guessed I was on the right road.

I was playing around with the radio and began listening to NPR. They were debuting a new album by a band called Gypsy Soul, from the Pacific Northwest. It was the perfect music for my drive. Primarily driven by a female lead vocalist, the songs were all about universal experiences of love, of troubadors and the seeking inside our souls. I have trouble expanding my music choices in the right direction and stumbling on this band during this drive was a sparkling gem to brighten my day.

It was a beautiful drive, but as I drew closer to where the compass on my GPS was leading, there were choices, side roads that may or may not lead me closer to my destination. Some of them I went down, only to have to turn around when the road became impassable for my little vehicle, and turned a direction that lead me further away. There was a spot to park in front of that stream in the picture at the top that seemed to be the absolute closest I could drive, but the road ended there. The GPS showed that I was still 0.90 miles from the cache site, and would have to cross the stream and hike. I hadn't brought enough water for that hike, nor was I prepared to defend myself against any large predators.

I had been on the road now for at least an hour, aimlessly driving around, and I didn't want to just give up and call it a day. I decided to look through the waypoints loaded in my GPS unit and see what other geocaches might be nearby.

To my excitement, the closest one was a cache called Vitreous. I had been trying to find the road to Vitreous over and over during the visits to my in-laws, since it was a very special geocache. It was hidden in December of 2000, in the early days of this game, geocaching, that we who play love so much. It is on the list of the oldest active caches in the world (although if someone has a recent updated list, I would love to see it).

I had never been able to find the road to Vitreous, but apparently now I was on it. I kept driving, following the arrow on my compass, as the distance shown on the unit got smaller and smaller. For many geocachers, this is the most exciting part - watching the countdown as you get closer and closer. As the distance grows closer, your heart begins to beat faster, and the excitement builds higher. I was still driving when the compass read 200 feet from the road, which was awesome because that meant I didn't have to hike far before reaching the prize.

In this case, it was a medium white PVC pipe container with what appeared to be bear claw marks all around it. I guess a curious bear wanted to know what was in there, too! There really wasn't much inside the container, but there usually isn't. It is really more about the thrill of the hunt and the reason, a motivation to get out into the wilderness to explore that leads us to download waypoints from the website and go out and try to find the location and see what is there that inspires us geocachers. It is about adventure and exploration more than it is about trading treasures. I simply signed my name in the book inside and then had the privilege of being able to tell my story to my friends about finding this really old geocache in a remote area that has only been found 46 times in the eight years it has been sitting there.

As I drove back to my mother-in-laws house, I thought about roads, and how sometimes, just when we think the road we are on is not going to take us where we thought it would, it takes us somewhere else, somewhere unexpected, but somewhere we really wanted to get to in the first place. I thought about this belief that some people in my bible study have shared with me, the belief that God doesn't have just one plan for us, or that he adjusts our plan according to our choices. God will lead you where he wants to go, they say, and the choices you make will all lead to the same place, the place he calls you to go.

Today, He called me to go to the mountains, where I found peace, soothing new music, beautiful woodland streams, and the road I was supposed to be on. I came back feeling refreshed and happy, and like I had been given a gift, the gift of two hours of sheer wonder that made me feel like I really was, finally, on vacation.

All We Are Saying....Is Give Peace A Chance

On 93.7 The Arrow this morning, they were talking about the performance posted below, of Paul McCartney performing "A Day In the Life" Live in Liverpool. The remarkable thing about this, the DJs pointed out, is that it was the first time Paul has sang a (primarily) John Lennon song live in concert, and with Yoko Ono in the audience nonetheless. For those familiar with the late years of the Beatles, you might understand how time must have healed some wounds.

Hearing this over the radio, I was overcome with emotional connection to the music, and several thoughts struck me. The first was that Paul's voice has changed with age, and maybe not for the better (which in no way takes away from his musicial genius), and that Paul does not do a good John. Their voices were actually so different from each other, and the beginning of this song loses some of the effect without John's nasally influence. I was a huge Beatles fan in my younger days (and of course still love their music), but it was always John for me. Maybe I wasn't a Beatles fan as much as I was a John Lennon fan.

Anyway, to me this song seems to be about futility of life and the smallness of our individual existence. The first part, about the lucky man who blew his mind out in a car, reminds me of this movie we watched in college, Faces of Death, and a scene where a man in court pulls out a gun and blows his brains out while the court stenographer cannot help herself from laughing.

Although the news was rather sad...well, I just had to laugh.

Sometimes life is like that. Sometimes we have to laugh to keep from crying. Sometimes laughing is our first and most absurd reaction. Sometimes laughing helps us from taking it all too seriously. If we really think about it, really take in all of what life has to offer, it might be so overwhelming black and sad and futile that we would want to give up. If we reflect on the insignificance of the individual existence, it can make our lives feel meaningless. Oh sure there is the thought of what lies beneath, or above, where our souls go, that provides meaning to a meaningless world, but I am talking about the physical life on earth, and what we leave behind.

In the long run, do the things we belief and act on even matter? What parts of us will become a piece of our lasting legacy, or is legacy a dead issue anyway except as it relates to extreme talent or genetic success? In a hundred years, will our lives have made any kind of lasting impressions, will our names be remembered? Will our life have been meaningful beyond ourselves? Most of us will never know the answers to these questions.

So we take it one day at a time. We apply meaning to our actions on earth.

We wake up, get out of bed, drag a comb across our head....

I always wonder if they meant that we turn to our visceral experience or the metaphysical when we then says I'd love to turn you on.....

But then suddenly in this version, Paul drifts into another John Lennon song, "Give Peace a Chance". At first I found it unsettling, the tired refrain of an old anti-war hym. Haven't we all gotten past that? It was a remnant from the past, it was a long-haired John Lennon in hotel room love-ins with Yoko, it was a protest of a war that we have all put aside for now. Then I realized that of course this song is still relevant today. Different decade, different war, same message.

All We Are Saying....Is Give Peace a Chance.

That message might never go out of style.

It reminded me, though, of human evolution, both personal and political.

I saw images of the Beatles in the early pop years contrasting with the long haired freaky people look of the Maharashi years, juxtaposed Help! with the White Album. Imagine the screaming fans in black and white stadiums across the country, and then the studio years, all long hair and psychedelics. I thought about the bitter split between Paul and John, and the legal battles, and then now, a sixty five year old McCartney onstage doing a tribute to Lennon.

In listening to the song, I was taken back to another era in my life. I was thinking about how it might seem very odd to someone who knew my pothead political ideology back in the day (you say you want a revolution well you know) that I ended up marrying a soldier. I was the neohippie, with boots on, waiting a chance to spring into action on the peace scale ladder. There was beaded necklaces made by hand, bell bottoms, hippiespeak, and a ten year plan for promoting world peace (we all want to change the world). I remember wearing the shirt of John Lennon wearing the "New York" shirt, how I would listen to the Beatles all the time, how fly that shit was on hallucinogens, how I would never compromise my personal beliefs.

My friends who knew me back in the day would sometimes wonder how someone like me could support the war, and I would quip that "I don't support the war, the war supports me", or, "I don't support the war, I support my soldier". All my anti-war beliefs didn't stand in the way of care packages or moral support for our own war hero.

You tell me that it's evolution, well you know...

Sometimes we move along in our personal evolution so far that it becomes hard to recognize ourselves. I look back at that person I was and she seems like someone else, like viewing a movie of someone else's life. I will fervently deny that people change, and I think there is some part of the essence of one's self that will always remain true. The problem is discovering that essence. What are the fixed parts of our psyche that remain unchanged by evolution?

I remember a conversation in recent years with the father of my high school sweetheart. I was telling him about my church and he was surprised, and commented "You never struck me as the type for organized religion." I wondered when he said that how well he had known me at all, because during the time I was dating his son, I was becoming a confirmed Catholic. There were nonpracticing years in there, and now I am a Methodist. Does that make me a different person? I don't think so, I simply see it as someone capable of deep spirituality seeking the right fit.

Does it make Paul a different person to be doing a tribute to his dead friend, when he wouldn't even show up to the Beatles induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, citing unresolved difficulties with the remaining members of the band almost two decades after they broke up? Is it change, or is it evolution?

Or is he simply giving peace a chance?

The Beatles - Let it Be

I've been thinking about this song. This video makes me nostalgic for a time I never experienced.

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