When it rains...

So I finished the last post and got onto spotify to play around with some new music. And almost like it found me, this song came on the radio. I literally know nothing about Antony and the Johnsons except that this song is gospel in all the right ways. It pushed its way into my head from the first piano chord and started its work on me. Rest assured that I will soon own this album. Weird that I should post about being unable to properly mourn and then find a song that so perfectly encapsulates that pain. This is probably the most healing I have felt in a long time. Might be a coincidence but it's a welcomed one.

This is River of Sorrow by Antony & the Johnsons

The Incredible Process of Letting Go

Two and a half months. The longest break I've ever taken from this blog. I thought about posting a lot, but the truth is I haven't had the motivation to do much of anything lately. A small explainer first, and then I'll get to the actual post.

This last three months has been a cluster fuck of emotions. I lost Elly, which I am no where near dealing with or even addressing in a healthy or sober fashion. My writing partner and I are making significant (But secret because that's how Hollywood works) steps into making our little show a reality. I found out that a guy named Nick, who I worked with for years, died in a really stupid and pointless way. Put all together it just made for to many emotions to deal with.

Weirdly enough, I didn't attend Elly's funeral. I couldn't. There was something to being confronted by her death that I wasn't sure I would be able to take. And maybe that was a mistake, and I would be a more healed, better person if I had sucked it up and gone. But I didn't. I did go to Nick's wake. About a hundred people (Mostly people he had worked with) gathered at the Egyptian theater in Hollywood to drink burbon and talk about him. There was food at one point but I didn't stay that long. I had a couple shots of his favorite stuff and admired how many people this gruff and slightly caustic man had touched enough that they were in mourning for him. I cried a little, but not in front of anyone. And then I walked around Hollywood for a bit and drove myself home.

The reaction I should be having to all the news we keep getting about the show should be a wash of good feelings. I don't know if it just hasn't sunk in, or if all the sad and angry things I'm feeling just wont let the good emotions poke through. I know I miss Elly. I know don't actively miss Nick, but I'm angry about the incredibly stupid way that he was lost to the world. I know that this show being made would give my sister and I the life we've been fighting for, the life we want.

And in the mean time I'm hooked on pop music. Literally. Pop music gives you a dopamine rush that no other kind of music allows. It's a good alternative to my usual summer music (Punk) and it's a cheap alternative to the therapy I so obviously need.

Enjoy

For the record that I Bastille doing the most adorable cover of a terrible Miley Cyrus song ever. EVER

A Few Thoughts About My Week

I never used to worry about sexual aggressive galaxies. But thanks to Bailey and a recent class trip this conversation was had:

Bailey- apparently the three types of galaxy interactions are collision, cannibalism, and harassment. Does one galaxy complain to its boss about the repeated unwanted attention of the other?

Me- listen, when one galaxy spends most of its time staring at the other galaxies star clusters...

Bailey- "sir, I feel that the Milky Ways behavior is inappropriate." "Now, Andromeda, just because he stares at your spiral arms and strokes his central bulge while leering at you is no reason to over react"

Except B has a point. Harassment is not fun but I suspect it's a great deal more pleasant than canibalism. 

Captain America comes out Thrusday night. I will be seeing it like the good uber nerd that I am. You should see it to. It kicks off a truly wonderous summer for geekery that includes two marvel movies and a Wachowski sibling film. Be still my nerdy heart. 

My nephew is getting married tomorrow. The news has sent my (admittedly prone to hysterical gestures) family into a tizzy. While I stand by wishing him luck while not expecting a whole lot, the marriage is a last minute thing. He told his mother in a text message. So now my stance is "I wish them well, and don't really expect much, and also I hope that kid grows out of his asshole faze before someone beats the living snot out of him because he will only cause trouble for the nurses."

So those are my big thoughts for the weekend. Have fun and be safe. Only one week to the return of Bucky Barnes. 

March Music Recommendation

Hey all,
I know, it's been near a month. I'm out of practice. I've been off balance since my friend died, and truth be told I don't know that I'm handling it all that well. Actually I'm 99% sure that what I've been doing doesn't qualify as "handling it" so much as it is blatant avoidance.

In that vein, this moth's music recommendation is hitting home for me. His name Is Armon Jay, and his album Everything's Different, Nothing's Changed came out in January. It's got a bluesy feel that fits his Southern base.

The title track is currently my "jam" and I mean that if you were to visit my profile on Thisismyjam.com you would find the music video. It's a song about transition, right down to the chord structure. He opens it with "I'm feeling unsteady, a little off balance" as a way to start a story about not knowing how to fit anywhere. About looking for vices and distractions to pull him away from the inherent failures of his reality. By the time the ending refrain kicks in with a haunting chorus of "I will wait for you" I feel like I'm falling into a hole that matches his.

He's on our now, so you should definitely check to see if he's gonna be hitting up your area. He's a little squirrelly, as performers go, but worth the watch.

You can find his music video here.

Elly

I wanna tell you about my friend Elly. She moved to Laramie when we were 10, and she was the weirdest kid I'd ever met. She had this super long blonde hair that flowed down her back and she was hyper and read during recess. We didn't get along all the time, and I was a little too dark to see it right away but she had a light that seemed like it flowed out of her. Not to mention a killer singing voice.

Last April, just shy of her 24th birthday, Elly was diagnosed with cancer. It was agressive and scary, we didn't think she would lsat the week. But Elly never did back down from a fight. Six months later she was running a 5K and basically giving the middle finger to her doctors. When I saw her over Christmas she was thin, and a little weaker but the light was still there. She still wanted to talk about Supernatural and Leverage. She wanted to know if I'd run into any cool famous people in LA. She wanted to hear what music I was listening to and she was showing off her new leather jacket. We talked and caught up. I listened to her talk about all the traveling she wanted to do and the places she wanted to see. We ate a few Reeses (she always had some with her) and then I hugged her and told her how much I loved her before letting her go get ready for Christmas mass with her family. 

Elly died last night. The details seem to interest everyone else a lot more than they interest me. I care only that I lost a friend. I care that she'll never see 25, or go to Spain or Alaska, that she has all these days that she should have had that got stolen. And I care that I am a better person for having know her. She was a blessing in the purest sense of the word. 

I love you Elly. I will miss you so much. I'm about to put on Pirates of the Carribean and eat a whole bag of Reeses. Cuz I know you would like that. Thank you for every choir concert, every field trip, every lazy day watching tv in my basement. I love you. I love you. 

You're gonna get sick of me ranting about Noah Gundersen

But his album came out on Tuesday and I have been letting it soak into me slowly like healing waters. Oof. Near perfection which I totally saw coming but it still gave me those unexpected moments where the music swells like a tide and I get to let myself wash away for a minute. I am sitting in my dining room right now with the track Boathouse ringing in my ears. The violin is pulling in an almost painful way and Noah is singing a song about a broken man with a broken family and when the chorus kicks in I feel as broken as the man in the song does. 

Noah is playing a sold out show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood this week. I will be there, and I'm dragging my sister Christy along with me. So far I've only managed to talk my best friend into being as obsessed as I am, but by Friday night I know I will have Christy on board. Because she has emotions and the Gundersen family is spectacularly good at manipulating emotions and playing them with the same talent that drives their voices and words. 

Christy brought up an interesting story last night. She pointed out that when we discovered Mumford and Sons it was because a friend of hers made a point to play them for her and she wrote down to look them up. This is significant because when we fell head first into the world of music that the Mumfies opened up we gained some of our favorite artists. Without those boys there would be no Laura Marling when I feel like I need another jaded woman to sympathize with. There would be no Avetts to help me feel grounded, and no Johnny Flynn to make me feel like rereading a Shakespeare play to find all the meanings I missed the first time round. Yes, the odds are that we would have stumbled into this music eventually, but it's so woven into the time in which I discovered it that I can't imagine what those days would look like without those songs. 

These are songs that I freely allow to transport me to different places, or change my mood up or down because they are worthy of that right. They vibrate at the same frequencies as my mind and heart and wholy belong in my world. They have been pulled into my identity like twigs into a birds nest. There is no way to dislodge them without undoing a huge chunk of me. 

So I am grateful that Christy chose to spend that day with her friend. I am grateful that he knew that Christy would enjoy that music. I'm grateful that she was listening and turned around to share that music with me. My world is richer for the music I have in it. 

With that in mind I will continue my one woman quest to push Noah Gundersen, and Justified, and Keats, and anything else I can find beauty and value in. I hope people will do me the same courtesy even when it does feel like a political campaign. Because our lives are improved when we connect to something, and my life in this respect gets a little better every day.

My imperfect reactions

So I want to share an experience I had at my job tonight, but I'm hoping you will all hold back your judgement till the end of the story. This is not me bitching about my job. Most days I really like what I do. My theater is old and tiny and full of history. Working there is not super difficult or intellectually stimulating but it gets me in a social setting talking about things I love or reading or just hanging out with friends in a place that's not my house for 40 hours a week. I don't want you to take this story as a complaint so much as a meditation on an ongoing problem I have with people. 

My theater has a lot of old customers. More than most because generally the people willing to sit through three hours of French film are either film students or the elder population. I love most of our little old people. They're some of the most interesting and accepting people I meet. And today was senior day at the theater which meant we had a rush on the over 62 crowd wanting to see said French film because tickets are less than $5. At one point in the afternoon a woman came in. She had missed the last show of her film and the next one didn't start for an hour. She was fairly grumpy about it because the later show didn't have what she called the special price ( I always find complaints like this funny because people seem to think I can create shows and theaters out of thin air) and said she was going to dinner and might come back. The other manager who was sitting with me remarked on how negative this woman's attitude was but I didn't really give it much thought. 

Then two hours later she returned. I asked her how her dinner was. She complained that it was both overpriced and not very good. I gave a small half smile and rang up her ticket while she yelled at the people standing behind her for being too close. I rang her up for the senior price. It turns out that this woman was not a senior and the special price she had mentioned was the matinee price. She was livid. I admitted my mistake, fixed the transaction on her card and stayed as quiet as I could while she railed at me for being so rude. Then she went to the other manager and started shouting insults at me across the lobby. Here's where I want to start the discussion. The insults that she chose were about my weight and physical attractiveness. This had probably close to nothing to do with how I actually appear to her. If I had to guess I would say that her real goal was to make me as visibly upset as she felt (a losing battle as it was based on the false assumption that I give two shits what any customer thinks of me or the way that I look) and since my insult to her had been based on appearance, that's where she decided to hit. Because what girl living in our society who isn't a size two doesn't worry about their weight a little? What girl anywhere in this country doesn't worry that they aren't pretty enough?

I worry that I live in a world where my first instinct on hearing these was to justify my appearance. To tell her that I may be a little overweight but I am by no means "grossly obese" as she annunciated quite clearly several times. I worry that my next instinct was to comment that I thought she was a senior because of her aged face and tatty wig. I worry that even though I could tell this woman was unstable and clearly I had hit a nerve that I never intended on, my first thoughts jumped to defense and offense and not to understanding. 

So here I am, post work, sitting next to a hot bath that I ran while I typed out my thoughts. I have the next two days off to recover from this and all the other little strains that the last week of work has pushed on me. I have promised to spend time thanking my mother tomorrow for instilling me with enough self restraint not to lash out at someone without thinking it through first. I have promised to spend a little time thinking about ways to push myself to reacting with compassion before I react with anger. And I have promised to cut myself a little slack when I fail at that. I am only human after all. 

"I don't  know any perfect people. Just very flawed people who are still worth loving" john green