Madman With A Box

"To hell with the 'raggedy.' Time to put on a show." -- the Eleventh Doctor

I haven't had to study for anything since I took my last college final two years and twenty days ago. I have a certification exam coming up in a few weeks, though, which means I'm currently calling all of my hard-earned and long-lost study skills into practice. I'm making slow progress on my huge stack of source material, but in the process, I've realized something horrifying: living a couple of blocks away from the Hungarian Pastry Shop and its bottomless coffee mugs during college ruined me for life, since I can no longer concentrate enough to study at home. As a result, in an effort to buckle down and get some work done, I've undertaken an unofficial tour of the coffee shops of New York City. And since the weather has been gorgeous, a lot of walking is involved.

Today, I walked a couple of miles to spend a few hours in my favorite bakery. I was dressed for a lazy Saturday, too -- dark jeans, high-top red Chuck Taylors, and one of my favorite t-shirts:

The graphic is a stylized portrait of David Tennant wearing 3D glasses in the 2006 season finale of Doctor Who. The episode aired way before David Tennant became a household name... not that the man in the image is recognizable as Tennant anyway. It also predates the show's popularity in America (and the Doctor's appearances on the sides of MTA buses) by half a decade. Point is, it's foreign, it's subtle, it's niche, and it's ridiculously obscure. Though I've worn the t-shirt regularly for the past three years, I can count on one hand the number of times someone has been able to positively identify the image's source.

Back to today's story. I studied at the bakery for a few hours, then I began walking to my next destination. Halfway down a residential block, I noticed an Orthodox priest walking towards me. How did I know he was an Orthodox priest? He looked exactly like the image that shows up on Wikipedia when you search for "Orthodox priest," robes, beard and all:

We locked eyes as we approached each other. I smiled and gave a little "good morning" nod. He gasped and pointed at my t-shirt. "That is my FAVORITE television show!" he exclaimed in a deep, heavily accented voice. After I picked up my jaw from the pavement, I told him that it was my favorite show, too. We then wished each other a good day and walked on.

I guess the Doctor transcends more than just time and space.

The Geeks Were Right

"Egghead boys with thin white legs. They've got modified features and software brains, but that's what the girls like." -- The Faint

Today is Geek Pride Day, America's excuse to dork out with impunity from ridicule. According to Wikipedia's description of the holiday, it's celebrated on May 25th in commemoration of the premiere of Star Wars on that date in 1977.

Appropriate, then, that I just encountered a woman on First Avenue trying to rein in a squirmy child. "Get back over here, Anakin!" she shouted. "Don't wander off! Anakin!"

No words. But I salute her for celebrating her geekery so boldly.


- Posted from my iPod Touch

What You Own

"I'm wearing someone else's clothes and looking better. I'm wearing someone else's clothes and feeling fine." -- Jason Robert Brown

It's finally warm enough for me to spend time outside without freezing to death and I actually left work on time today. Thus, when I got home, I dug out a pair of shorts and my Viva La Zvi t-shirt, laced up my sneakers, knotted my curls into a ponytail, and went for a brief run.

A couple of hours later, I took a good look at the shorts I wore.

They're black cotton, size medium. The label says "Discus." They're loose-fitting and, if the shape and stitching of the crotch is any indication, they were definitely designed with a man's anatomy in mind. The elastic band sits at my natural waistline and the hems end about three inches above my knees.

What's wrong with this picture? Working out -- sweating, turning red, getting winded -- makes me feel gross, so when I do it in public, I try to disguise the disgustingness by wearing incredibly flattering workout gear. Meaning my pants are skin-tight, my shorts are short, and my waistbands don't venture any higher than my hipbones. And today's baggy, high-waisted shorts with the mysteriously misplaced crotch seams do not fit that paradigm of hotness.

Which leads me to one regrettable conclusion: I did not purchase the shorts I'm wearing.

This in turn leads me to a second regrettable conclusion: I borrowed the shorts I'm wearing from someone and completely forgot to ever return them.

If they once belonged to you, my sincerest apologies. I'll happily send them home if you're willing to own up to them.

Now I Know Better

"Tonight, you arrested my mind when you came to my defense. With a knife in the shape of your mouth, in the form of your body, with the wrath of a god. Oh, you stood by me. And I stand by my belief." -- Gavin DeGraw

I graduated from college in May of 2008, and two days later, I started my first full-time job. My first week of work was spent in typical fashion for a career in science -- catching up on data entry, doing lots of literature searches, completing half a dozen web training programs, etcetera ad nauseam. I couldn't get through all of that without background noise and I couldn't justify keeping my iPod on for eight hours a day, so I turned to Pandora Radio for my music fix.

I don't remember the name of the Pandora station that occupied my workdays back then; I chose the music specifically for non-distracting background noise and it served its purpose beautifully. Every so often, though, a song would play that cut through my concentration and made me focus on the music. And every time that happened, the artist was always the same.

Gavin DeGraw. A cute guy with a grand piano who had albums on the charts for five years before I discovered him. And when that happened, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. If someone told me that Gavin was practiced in the art of telepathy and regularly rifled through my thoughts as a part of his songwriting process, I wouldn't doubt it. Not many musicians are able to sing lyrics that feel ripped out of my chest, or play instruments with the same passion or misery I'm feeling, or choose melodies seemingly orchestrated to my daily routine. I purchased Chariot during the first week of June and listened to it nonstop for the next two months.

Those two months were some of the most nerve-wracking, mindwarping, emotionally draining days I've ever experienced. I was settling into real life, meeting new people, and trying to balance what was left of college with my newborn career. I admitted attraction to someone who actually reciprocated -- hey, this never happens -- but I was powerless to do anything about it. A very good friend made a very bad decision and I took it too personally. I said some cautious hellos and one earth-shattering goodbye. Gavin and his piano were there to narrate all of it, to give a voice to my frustration, and to help me make sense of everything that was happening to me. He managed to awaken thoughts I didn't know I was thinking and feelings I never realized I was feeling.

The world kept turning. Things got worse, then they got better, then they got really bad, then they got better again. I gained a few new musical obsessions. My type and quantity of work changed, so I couldn't get distracted by Pandora's uncanny song choices any more. I fell for someone best described by Taylor Swift and Peter Cincotti. I left Chariot to languish on my iPod's ample hard drive.

Fast-forward nearly two years, to March 2010. Thanks to Rutila and her excellent taste in literature, I had the privilege of reading a collecion of essays called Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums That Changed Their Lives. Each author chose an album and crafted an essay around it, taking care to explain the music in terms of social impact, emotional relevance, coming-of-age, or inspirational value. The collection blew me away; the writers spoke about their subjects with the same reverence I often feel for favored pieces of music, and it heartened me to learn that I'm not the only lost soul who uses other people's lyrics to shove my own experiences into sharper focus.

I've tried to examine that tendency before. I've written about the poetry of Bob Dylan's songs, sang West Side Story in concert during a time when Maria's situation mirrored my own, borrowed a Jonathan Larson lyric that he had borrowed from Stephen Sondheim. I'd never penned an homage to a complete album, though, and reading Heavy Rotation made me want to try.

I was inspired. I was itching to write. I couldn't decide on an album, though. Sure, I have favorite lyrics -- they show up as the first line of every blog post I write, and they often express what's really on my mind far more frankly than my prose does. I have favorite songs that could easily inspire a blog post or two. Albums, however, stumped me. There's my all-time favorite album (Twentysomething by Jamie Cullum), the first album I ever bought with my own money (The Nylon Curtain by Billy Joel), the album that changed my personal definition of music (Jethro Tull's Thick As A Brick), and the album that I hated when I first heard it and loved a year later (the Les Miserables 10th Anniversary Concert). But I couldn't write more than a few sentences about any of them. They all told a story, but none of them told MY story. Or any story I wanted to tell, for that matter. I set the project aside and decided to revisit it another day.

My PIs were out of town last week, so I settled in to enter data and opened Pandora for background noise. I wasn't in the mood to listen to any of my more recent stations, so I scrolled down to the very bottom of my list and clicked on something random. An advertisement for Axe body spray aired, followed by a hushed, plaintive, nearly a capella lyric:

"You need a friend? I'll be around. Don't let this end, for I'll see you again. What can I say to convince you to change your mind to me?"

As Gavin sang about unconditional love in the face of rejection, I was transported to a lawn on a mild summer night, fighting desperately to stay calm despite the undeniable recognition that I was about to lose something forever. I turned off Pandora, fished my iPod out of my purse, and turned on Chariot for the first time in years.

The album used to serve as the theme music to my existence. Now it evokes emotions, sensations, and experiences with far more clarity than the mere act of remembering ever could. "I Don't Want To Be" fills me with blinding rage, utter betrayal, and just a little bit of disappointment. "Belief" recalls lying on a bare mattress on a bare floor in a bare dorm room in light so faint I can barely see what I'm doing but it doesn't really matter anyway. "Crush" makes me feel like I have a secret... sad, but in a nice way. "Follow Through" sends me walking home with a Silver Moon baguette in my hand, smug as all heck and anticipating the next step in my life.

As an exercise prior to writing this essay, I gave Chariot the American Idiot treatment -- I rearranged the songs to tell my story, added some narrative between the tracks, and made an iTunes playlist. Listening to it was like living it all over again... and it was all a lot better the second time.