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murlough23
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Name: David
Birthday: 1/19/1978
Interests: Almost anything music related... mixing CD's, writing reviews of great (and not-so-great) bands, playing guitar and songwriting... also hiking, reading (mostly Christian non-fiction), writing stuff no one will ever read in my journal, and hanging with friends from church and college.
Expertise: Web design and database development.
Occupation: Computer related (Internet)
Industry: Government
Message: message me
Member Since:
2/10/2003
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| Why I Stopped Caring About Christian MusicLately I've been looking at the most recent additions to my CD collection, my iTunes library, and the things I've been spinning most often in the car, most of which probably give my wife a puzzled internal reaction along the lines of "Where in the F does he find this stuff?", but she's either too polite to say anything, or too tired to care (other than to commandeer the volume knob on days when she's really tired and some "clearly not American Idol-caliber" singer is a little too ragged for her tastes). Long story short, I've become a bit of a wannabe indie rocker. I say "wannabe" because I'll still quite proud of a lot of my glossy mainstream favorites. But due mostly to a handful of Internet friends who know how to dig deep and who seem to have a relentless taste for musical exploration, you'll now see my Xanga entries boasting bands with odd names such as Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, and to include some non-zoological names, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The New Pornographers. Stuff where I'd probably have thought a few years back, "Oh, come on, you just dug that one up to prove you're more out there than I am. No way I'd listen to bands with such silly names who probably sing about total nonsense." And now here I am, championing some of these bands while wrestling with my mixed reactions to others, but enjoying the exploration all the same.
And despite the massive amount of time I spend listening to music (it's how I make it through 8 hours of coding on the average work day with my sanity intact), there are still only 24 hours in the day. All of that exploration of the obscure has to displace something. And you know what it's mostly displaced? Christian music. I used to listen to nothing but CCM. I'm a bad boy now, I guess, because I used to look at a lot of my InterVarsity friends in college, the ones who had all sorts of interesting and obscure names in their CD collections, and wonder why most of these people didn't listen to any Christian music despite being Christians. It's only within the past few years that I've discovered the occasional "secular rock" gem from the 90's and realized that I was missing out. And that's not to say that I didn't find anything on my own in the CCM world back then that was genuinely good. I still believe in a scant few records that I think could hold their own among such company. But let's be honest, I was mostly interested in playing it safe and listening to catchy rock music without having to worry about what might offend my prudish sensibilities at the time. A lot of that stuff, I liked more due to what it was not than what it was. Hey, it's the way I was raised (more so by church culture than by my Mom). It took me a while to learn how to listen and discern for myself.
This all changed somewhere around 2000, with the advent of Internet file sharing. Suddenly, I was free to take a peek at full albums by mainstream bands who had radio hits that I thought were pretty catchy and not innately offensive in any way, and before I knew it, I was into a lot of those "Star-type bands"... you know, the ones they play on your local "Star" radio station. Some of that stuff was pretty superficial, some I can still relate to, but basically I learned that most "secular music" was reasonably innocuous. After a while, I guess I started to realize that I'd heard about 10,000 different versions of the "Matchbox Twenty template" and the "Linkin Park template" and so forth, and I started to become more interested in some of the stuff my online friends were digging up circa 2003 and 2004. Up until then, the Christian music was still competing reasonably well with the mainstream stuff, since pretty much all of it was reasonably glossy and immediately catchy, and I started to realize that I was more drawn to the artists who could pack a solid hook while keeping the phrasing interesting. If it was "Christian", I didn't want the Bible or the same old Sunday school lesson directly quoted at me. I wanted it expressed in someone's own creative phrasing, and I wanted honesty about how hard it was to actually be a genuine Christ-follower, and not just a bunch of "I will follow You forever from this point forward and never mess up again"-type platitudes. If it was "mainstream", it was most likely about relationships, and that was fine, so long as it dug into the complexities of how men and women are drawn to each other, are spurned by each other, fail to understand one another, reconcile with one another, etc., rather than just a bunch of "I love you and I'm giddy" or "You dumped me and you can go to hell"-type songs. My interest in lyrics took a leap forward, and that was a big draw in the direction of a lot of the indie stuff, even if the music was often a little too ragged or took too many detours for my tastes. I didn't want to be able to call the next move five seconds before it happened every time.
Looking back at how my interests and my subsequent music purchases changed over the following years, I can see how it might look like I changed in a desperate effort to keep up with the curve and maintain some sort of credibility in my role as an amateur music critic. My eyes have certainly been opened to a lot of different ways of approaching music as a result of this. But I don't think this change was all brought on by me trying to prove something, or by friends trying to mold me into something. (They just found good music and made good suggestions. Nothing wrong with that.) I think the industry changed, too. Maybe it was the same "Internet revolution" that led me to so many music discoveries and supposedly started to eat away at the sales figures of the big record labels in both Nashville and L.A. Whatever the case, playlists noticeably shrunk, and it wasn't too long before I found that I couldn't stand Star or KROQ (mainstream stations) or Air1 or the Fish (Christian stations) any longer. It was like they were scared of taking chances because a listener base was now harder to maintain, so they kept a smaller roster of artists on tap and played each of them more often. So it wasn't long before I became more or less unaware of what was hitting it big on any radio station, unless someone happened to turn me on to a band they happened to like at right around the same time that band happened to have a hit single out. (Evanescence was a good example. They were 100% mainstream in terms of their sound and their goals, but when I was first made aware of them, all that was available for me to hear was their one "indie" album. Radio wouldn't have done that for me.)
So what's all this got to do with Christian music, specifically? Why would I stop caring about an entire community of Christian musicians just because the few who actually made it to radio didn't appeal to me? Isn't that like pretending you don't know your old nerdy friends just because suddenly the "cool" crowd has decided you can be one of them? Well, no. I would say that the individual musicians I liked who still passed muster in terms of the aspects of music I was realizing meant the most to me (a somewhat unique musical approach, an ability to express things well in their own words, an actual personality that wasn't afraid to let the flaws show), I continued to follow, and I follow many of them to this day. But one by one, it seems like almost all of them have jumped ship on the "Nashville machine" and are doing their own thing in terms of how their music is recorded, who owns it, and how it gets distributed. The only "Christian" CD I've acquired within the past six months that has even a prayer of getting played on Christian radio would be the Jars of Clay album currently in my "Now Playing", and even that was recorded independent of any label input. (Their old label just jumped back in at the last minute to get in on the distribution, probably realizing they had lost a valuable asset when the band left them in favor of more creative freedom.) Sure, there are other bands I still follow, like Falling Up or Switchfoot or Anberlin who got their start in the CCM world and whose fanbasess are probably still largely made up of Christians. No point in ditching any of those; they make good music (with varying levels of spiritual content). I don't care if some people still go, "Hey wait, I know those guys started out as a 'Christian band'! You can't fool me!" and turn their noses up at it without giving it a chance. I'll still recommend those guys in a heartbeat.
But turn on a Christian radio station nowadays, and it's torture for me. Most of the big names making the short list for the yearly WoW compilations now, I've ever never heard of, or if I have, I'm thoroughly disinterested in their music. Jeremy Camp? Boring. Mercy Me? Dullsville. Brandon Heath? No personality. Casting Crowns? A lot like getting lectured by a middle-aged youth pastor. Even groups I used to like, such as the Newsboys, have gotten so stale to me that I barely even notice when they put out something new. I'm convinced that groups like Switchfoot and Relient K (who I do genuinely still enjoy) only remain popular with Christian audiences because of the crossover effect - we're proud of them for making headway in the mainstream, but we still only play their safest songs with the most obviously Christian content on Christian radio. (Jars of Clay's ongoing popularity, if I'm really truthful about it, probably owes a lot of its current spins on Christian radio to their brief flirtation with mainstream rock popularity in the 90's due to "Flood". Not that they haven't made almost uniformly excellent albums all the way through, but people still haven't gotten over that expectation that the band will somehow remake that first album and let them all relive their youth group glory days.)
Sometimes I have fun making fun of how banal it's all become, and then I have to remember what Christian music is like before it was even open to anything that sounded remotely like rock music. Stylistically, it's probably gotten better. Chris Tomlin would have probably been accused of being devil spawn in the 1980's because he had actual electric guitars; now Christian record labels want to bottle his essence and paste other faces on the label and sell it hundreds of times over. The focus has gotten narrower. An industry that started out as a very grassroots sort of thing in the 60's and 70's, with no pretension of being popular and having any "mainstream" relevance, but just content to speak hard truths to whatever lost souls stumbled across it (and not that some of that stuff wasn't unbeilvably cheesy, too - I've heard Love Song!), realized somewhere along the way that you find something everybody will buy, and then to make more money, you sell a trillion copies of it. That's business. That's not exactly headline news. But that's why I can't stand Christian radio, or CCM culture in general any more. Most of my favorite artists are sick of it, too - even some of the ones that Christian radio will still play. Some of 'em might get along with the folks who run Nashville and play nice for those folks when asked, but it seems like their creative ambitions are elsewhere. (David Crowder Band is about the only group I can think of who seems to still sit absolutely comfortable within the walls of CCM, and who I still have a reasonable amount of artistic respect for. They are a worship band - sometimes a very simplistic one, actually. What makes them stand out is that they don't care how untrendy or geeky their sound might be - if they want old-school electronics or banjos or samples of old Gospel recordings, they just go for it.)
So take a closer look at all of those unfamiliar "indie-sounding" names that pop up on my playlist and that probably make me look like some indie kid trying to stay ahead of the curve. Many of 'em are actually Christians. None of the bands I mentioned at the top of this article (the ones with the zoological names and so forth) identify as such, but consider these names: Sleeping at Last. Sufjan Stevens. Over the Rhine. Copeland. House of Heroes. The Listening. Thrice. Eisley. mewithoutYou. Future of Forestry. Cool Hand Luke. Deas Vail. Most, if not all of these bands are made up of Christians, or at least have primary songwriters who are Christians and explore Christian themes in a literate and intriguing fashion, even if you have to dig a bit to find the true meaning. This isn't "hiding your light under a bushel". Some of them are actually very straightforward about their religious origins, but it still takes some work to figure out where a song ends up and why the writer chose to go there. It's simply a case of a God-given gift - the ability to create, and in some small way, to imitate the Creator - that a person cannot ignore, and the things that are most important to the person worming their way into the songwriting just because the writer can't help but discuss what they know and feel and love and hate. Christian radio moguls have likely never heard of these artists, or if they have, they're probably forbidden from playing 'em, and not due to objectionable content, but due to the major label players crowding them out. You could likely name many more that I have yet to discover, or that I'll never have the good fortune of discovering due to how deep and wide the "indie music world" reaches. If given a chance, a lot of these artists could prove that being a Christian isn't the kiss of death for creativity and artistic viability (or for just plain making good music). Some actually have proven that to a select few who have been open-minded enough to listen and judge for themselves despite the "Christian band" tag that the artist may or may not event want. These are the folks who remind me that "Christian music" is actually alive and well, just extremely disjointed and operating in an extremely fractured, grassroots, renegade, do-whatever-works-for-your-niche sort of world. And maybe that's just the way it's gotta be for the time being, as the larger "industry" goes through a crisis that forces them to take the whole structure down and rebuild it with a renewed sense of purpose.
So, if it seems weird to you that, as a Christian, I express so much disdain for "Christian music", it's only because I've seen the potential for what it could be, and I'm bummed that those Christians, who continue to be such an inspiration to my own faith and a reminder to look closer at the true meaning of the things I say I believe, aren't getting their voices heard by more people in the Church who could likely find a lot of joy in their music.
And to my college friends, whose relationships with God I judged as superficial based on their CD collections - that was stupid of me. I'm sorry.
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| Say Say Oh Playmate, Come Out and Play with MeChristine and I made the last minute decision to see Katie Herzig at the Hotel Cafe on Monday night. I was lamenting the fact that Katie seemed to only be touring with Vienna Teng on the East Coast, and doing her own thing out here, but it looks like the joke was on me. Katie was actually opening for Vienna Teng at this show, despite the rest of their tour together being outside of California. Why it wasn't listed on Katie's website, I have no idea, but that was a helluva surprise once we arrived at the venue!
Anyway, even if Vienna hadn't been there, Katie's set provided plenty to gush about. It was her and an all-girl band... Katie on acoustic, one gal pal on electric, and another on cello. The three harmonized beautifully and Katie's delectable voice filled the small venue with ease. You can tell from Katie's music that she is a playful soul, and I expected, this was reflected perfectly in her live show, from the "fake trumpet solo" during "Forevermore" to the (presumably) older song "Hey Na Na", which sounded more like a dance/pop sort of thing than one could expect to get away with in a nightclub/coffeehouse type of venue. She offered a handful of other tracks from Apple Tree as well as a few new ones, and when asking for requests to determine the final song, it came down to "Hologram" vs. "How the West Was Won". (I was one of the folks who shouted for "Hologram", and it won, since the vote came down to a personal friend of Katie's in the audience who was celebrating a birthday that day.)
Oh, and Vienna came on stage to sing and play piano with her during "Wish You Well", which greatly increased my appreciation for what I thought was one of the lesser songs on Katie's album. Katie has now sung with Vienna Teng and Jars of Clay, thereby reducing the degrees of separation between my two favorite artists to 2.
Setlist:
- Sumatra
- Songbird
- Forevermore
- Oh My Darling
- Two Hearts Are Better than One
- Wish You Well (w/ Vienna Teng)
- Hey Na Na
- I Hurt Too
- Hologram
Now for Vienna's set... it had a number of the same songs from when I saw her two months ago, but for most of the set it was Vienna solo, joined for two songs by a "professor" who contributed accordion and clarinet. She had her looping device, and in addition to its expected use for audience-contributed background vocals on "Gravity" and the entirety of "The Last Snowfall" looped on her own, she also used it to rebuild "1Br/1Ba" from the ground up, rhythm and BGV's and all, save for the aforementioned clarinet, which got in a hell of a solo. The set was heavy on Dreaming Through the Noise, which I can't complain about since it's my favorite Vienna album, rounded out by tracks from her new disc and one oldie. (We were encouraged to hoot, holler, and catcall during the acapella "Grandmother Song", though Vienna noted that it might seem a bit odd to be catcalling her grandmother... who she supposed was pretty hot as grandmothers go.) Excellent set as always - I may prefer her with a full band, but seeing her solo took me back to the good old days when Waking Hour was still the only thing I had of hers to treasure.
Christine was a trooper - she was expecting a 1-hour concert starting at 8 instead of a 2-hour concert starting at 9. Thankfully it was someone she really liked (plus she missed Vienna when I went two months ago due to school), so she hung in there. But she has to get up at 6:30 tomorrow - OUCH. She thanked me for a good date, so thankfully I'm not in the doghouse for insisting we stick around until the end. (Seriously, she almost nodded off during "Recessional". Beautiful as the performance was, I can't say that I blame her.)
Setlist:
- Blue Caravan
- Gravity
- Antebellum
- In Another Life
- 1Br/1Ba
- City Hall
- Recessional
- The Last Snowfall
- Grandmother Song
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| Ditch DayOK, can somebody explain to me what series of thoughts would have to occur in a person's head to make them do the following?
1) Approach you after church and invite you to lunch.
2) Suggest a specific restaurant at which to eat lunch together.
3) Inform you that she's trying to find someone else who she wanted to invite to lunch as well so they could catch up, and then disappear while looking for that person.
4) Not answer her phone when you're attempting to call her to find out if she's gone to the restaurant yet.
5) Call you right when you get to the restaurant, only to tell you she ran into another group of people and decided to go out with them instead.
Seriously, it felt like I was still in high school, getting ditched at the last minute by "friends" who had planned to do something with me because they found a cooler group of friends to do stuff with, and I was just the contingency plan all along. Though in this case, the friend knows Christine better than she knows me, so Christine was really the one being snubbed. There was nobody else in our group. It was just the two of us. And I was so livid over the scatterbrained change of plans that I wasn't in the mood to pay over 10 bucks just to wait in line at Souplantation and sulk for an hour over my salad about how flaky this "friend" was. I figured I could sulk over cheap food at home.
As with most situations of this nature, I figure it's not really an intentional snub, or somebody ditching you because they think you're uncool. It's generally a matter of the person not thinking at all - just throwing out ideas on a whim and not realizing that you're taking their suggestion of "Hey, let's do this" as a definite plan. If I'd invited someone else to lunch and they'd absent-mindedly agreed, only to bail in favor of a better plan, it'd still be annoying, but I could let it go more easily, because it was my plan, not theirs. But I figure when you initiate something and the other person shows interest, you should either follow through on it or at least give the person enough advance warning if you have to bail that they won't be left without alternative options. We had said no to other folks we could have had lunch with by that point, so basically that meant we had waited around after church for nothing. A minor annoyance in the grand scheem of things, but it's an apt illustration of how cluelessly rude some people can be.
The kicker is that this friend supposedly has plans to go on a weekend trip with Christine to Colorado later this summer. Suddenly I realize that this'll probably never actually happen.
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| If This Were the Last...So, you know how it goes when a reasonably well-known musician dies - someone who's not necessarily a household name but that a lot of folks will at least recall some minimal exposure to - and then suddenly they're winning posthumous awards and people are checking out their music who might have otherwise passed them by?
Well, that situation has nothing to do with the unexpected passing of Michael Jackson yesterday. Pretty much everybody in most corners of the globe knew who he was. He was famous the world over, and he probably remains one of the top-selling artists of all time (despite having been largely inactive since about 2001, at least in terms of making new music). So his death - which none of us saw coming because it wasn't like he was way up there in his years - rocked the world. In this age of social networking and news traveling at the speed of fiber-optics, Jackson's death very nearly managed to crash the Internet. (OK, that's an exaggeration. But it crashed Wikipedia, Twitter, and several news sites, which is an accomplishment.) Pretty much everyone was stunned and saddened by it. And I'm kind of on the outside of that situation, looking in.
Now let me explain - I didn't dislike Michael Jackson or his music. I just never really got into it. And it's not like I think his death isn't sad and tragic. It totally is. But because I only had cursory knowledge of his catalogue - I'd recognize his biggest songs from the chorus melody or the riff or whatever - I never really got swept up in the larger-than-life image that he put forth, or felt a deep emotional connection to any of his work. Most of it became before I was really into music at all, and even after that point, it was outside of my preferred range of musical genres. So I wasn't a fan. But I wasn't actively a non-fan. It just means that I recognize the void almost everyone now feels, despite not feeling it myself.
But I think Michael Jackson was one of those artists like the Beatles (a group who, ironically, had their catalogue bought out by Jackson) - even if you haven't listened to them, you've listened to them. Because you've probably heard a myriad of artists influenced by Michael Jackson even if you never sat down and listened to one of Jackson's albums. (The closest I came to listening to Michael Jackson's music was a couple of Weird Al parodies, truth be told.) Just about anything that pulled influences from the pop/rock world and the R&B world probably owes some of its influence, or at least its likelihood of succeeding on the radio, to Jackson. I probably listen to a ton of groups who would cite him as a musical icon who helped shape their own tastes in at least some small way. There's just no escaping someone who has that level of exposure. So I have to respect what I didn't happen to get any first-hand experience with.
I didn't want to write some sort of weird tribute blog for an artist I honestly knew very little about - you'll probably see a lot of virtual gushing on various sites over the next few days from people who are suddenly the guys' biggest fans (and from some who genuinely always were, I guess). But I figured it'd be weird to pretend I was anything other than a passer-by. Still, even at that superficial level of experience, I have to acknowledge that the guy made a hell of a lot of difference , and that he will be missed.
I created the 80th edition of my personal soundtrack project this week. It covers May/June, and this time around a number of songs (largely on the second disc - the first is generally more lighthearted and fanciful stuff) concentrate on themes of life ending and life starting anew. Those are pretty massive themes that tons of songs have been written about, so it's not like my interest in such songs is unique to these two months of my life. But I feel like I've thought a lot about my own mortality lately. Not because I expect to live anything less than a long, full life, but because I've come to realize more and more how much I love certain aspects of my life, certain routines and rituals and hobbies that I take for granted, and that I would feel extremely devastated if I ever came to realize this would be the last time I got to do one of these things. Even something as simple as going on a road trip or going out on a date with my wife or listening to one of my favorite CDs - things that I currently assume I'll get to do an infinite number of times in the future. But if I were doing something for the last time, wouldn't I want it to be extra meaningful? Wouldn't I make it the awesome trip to end all awesome trips, or make it the most romantic date ever, or devote a full 45 minutes to an hour (or however long) to just absorb a great musical work of art with no distractions or interruptions, quite possibly while singing along at the top of my lungs? Of course. But in reality, I'll likely never know when the last time around actually comes before any of these things. So they're likely to go by like it's just another normal instance - which means I should stop and think and appreciate these little blessings more than I often do.
Another theme that pops up near the end is night vs. day, sleep vs. awakening, and the appreciation of something as simple as the breath in one's lungs. It's no coincidence that there are two songs entitled "Breathe" (one on each disc). For several months now, I've actually suspected that I might be suffering from sleep apnea. I haven't confirmed it with a doctor yet (partially because I've been too lazy and too overworked to actually schedule the appointment), but the tell-tale signs are all there. I wake up with a stiff feeling in my chest a lot of days, and often with stomachaches and/or headaches, as if my body was running on minimal power while I slept and is now taking forever to get back up to speed, like a computer that can't quite get itself out of sleep mode. Fully waking up is often difficult for me, even after a full eight hours of sleep, so I stand in the shower cursing myself for not being able to fully "snap out of it" and get my day started at full alertness. I'm not so sleepy that I can't safely drive myself to work or whatever, but the best of my cognitive process probably doesn't get going until after lunch most days (which explains my work schedule). Then, because I got up and got going so late, I come home from work late, and I stay up late due to the other part of the equation: insomnia. I struggle to fall asleep most nights, even when I feel dead tired right before going to bed. Christine tells me that sometimes, once I do manage to fall asleep, I'll snore a lot and then briefly stop breathing. That's a classic sign of sleep apnea right there. I don't take it to be quite so severe that I have to worry about falling asleep and never waking up again - though I suppose that could be a real consequence if this is left untreated and it gets worse. According to her, I just catch myself and start breathing again, or it wakes me up - but enough episodes of this during the night are sure to leave me feeling robbed of a true feeling of rest the next morning. So yeah, I need to make that phone call and go see a doctor about this. I've been just hoping it'll go away for too long.
So a few of the songs I picked are sort of a reminder to myself that I want to see this change, that I want to become a person who grabs hold of each day, starts it off with the tank on full and the determination to seize it rather than just blundering through it, and to sleep in peaceful satisfaction at the end of it, rather than lying awake wondering if the next day will be spent in zombie mode just like the previous one was. Whatever medical issues surround this are just an outward reflection of an inward, spiritual problem. I've caught myself in a rhythm of not truly resting, not truly reflecting on the value of the life that God gave me a second shot at after I ruined it the first time. But I keep shrugging it off, as if the malaise will go away on its own and I'll be a better, more intentional person "tomorrow". The physical change will only help if it becomes a catalyst for a spiritual change. So I've selected a few of these songs as a reminder to myself to not take this healing for granted, should God choose to give it.
And with that, here's the tracklisting.
DISC ONE
- "Scenic Route", Jars of Clay
- "Funny the Way It Is", Dave Matthews Band
- "Are There Giants Too, in the Dance?", Meg & Dia
- "Right Moves", Josh Ritter
- "Bommerang/Two Birds", Mae
- "Southern Point", Grizzly Bear
- "No Gringo", Vienna Teng
- "El Gatillo (Trigger Revisited)", Calexico
- "Breathe", U2
- "Submarines of Stockholm", A. C. Newman
- "Glass of Water", Coldplay
- "Drops in the River", Fleet Foxes
- "Lady on the Water", Blitzen Trapper
- "Spellbound", Doves
- "Bluish", Animal Collective
- "Colors in Array", Future of Forestry
DISC TWO
- "Hold Out", The Reign of Kindo
- "The End", The Listening
- "Code Name: Raven", House of Heroes
- "Hero", Jars of Clay
- "Magician Reversed", Falling Up
- "Clockwork", Mute Math
- "Arms of a Thief", Iron & Wine
- "Vengeance Is Sleeping", Neko Case
- "The Angel of Death Came to David's Room", mewithoutYou
- "Last Night on Earth", Green Day
- "The Last Snowfall", Vienna Teng
- "Northern Lights", Anathallo
- "Closer to Me", Future of Forestry
- "Night/Day", Mae
- "Chinese Sleep Chant", Coldplay
- "Breathe", Anberlin
And finally, Christine decided that a good use for some of her free time now that she's in between jobs and in between semesters would be to join Facebook. She went from not even having a blog (I think she created a Xanga once, but never actually wrote in it) to a sudden great leap forward as far as social networking is concerned. I'm still resisting joining Facebook. I just worry that it will present me with perceived new social obligations rather than actually helping me keep up with people whom I otherwise wouldn't keep up with. But I'll be honest. My wife being honest makes me curious. So I guess I'll live vicariously through her and see whether it helps her or just stresses her out.
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| College Is Wasted on the YoungI had a rather rude awakening on Saturday - Christine came into the room frantically telling me that the sink was overflowing and that nasty black water was about to spill all over the kitchen floor... was now spilling all the kitchen floor... DO SOMETHING!!! I could hear a lot of bumping and grinding upstairs that sounded like plumbing work being done, so I groggily threw on some clothes (don't feel too sorry for me, it was like 11 AM) and went up to bang on our upstairs neighbors' door. It took three insistent tries before someone finally opened it. The guy working on the plumbing was cool enough to take responsibility for his unclogging of the upstairs pipes cause the clogging of ours, and he came down and snaked out pipes and mopped our floor for us. But man, those dishes were NASTY after that. And it STUNK. I didn't want to go into the kitchen for most of the day after that. Thankfully it was nothing a little Lysol couldn't fix.
Thankfully, plumbing woes were not the highlight of our weekend. Saturday was my 10th year college reunion. Somehow it didn't carry the same excitement with it that the 5-year reunion did back in 2004... maybe it had something to do with the fact that the people I was most looking forward to seeing, I had seen throughout the years anyway. Lina and Cathy had both contacted me before the reunion to see if I'd be coming, since knowing for sure two good friends would be there gave them more incentive to come. It wasn't like none of us knew anyone else there. I actually got a tour of the brand new dorm that had just gone up last year (which is practically a hotel... microwaves and fridges in the rooms? Private bathrooms? Where's the shared suffering we all had to go through?), and saw some people I hadn't talked to in years (one only sporadically since the last reunion despite us both having each others' Email addresses, another since 2001!), and I really enjoyed catching up with them. But it was brief, because I just sort of "crashed" the thing without signing up, so I couldn't follow those folks to the expensive dinner that they had all paid for. (Cathy signed up for it and then Lina and I both saw the price and balked. What could we do? We both had significant others to consider, so the dinner would have run us over 100 bucks! What was Oxy thinking? Thankfully Cathy knew other folks from our class at the dinner, so she didn't pay 50 bucks just to eat by herself.) I wish now that I had taken more initiative to get contact info from some of those folks. Hopefully it won't be another five years until I get another chance. I need to get in touch with the person who tracks our class notes for the Oxy magazine and see if I can persuade her to pass my Email address along to a few folks.
One of the activities that I didn't attend this weekend was dedicated to a man who, during his freshman year at Oxy, had gone by "Barry" until convinced by one of his friends to take pride in his given name. Most of the world knows this man as Barack Obama, and of course Oxy's going to milk the fact that he spent half of college there for all it's worth. So they had a "Barack Walk", apparently an exploration of campus intended to visit the places where he had spent time as a student. I could only think, "What is this, a pilgrimage? For crying out loud, these are dorms and dining halls we're talking about." Sometimes I just have to laugh at how people seem to have trouble differentiating between Obama the man, and Obama the religion. But then again, I can see the novelty value in relating the college experiences of a man who is now President of the United States to our own. I didn't go to an Ivy league school, so in the past, the chance of me having lived in a place where a U.S. President spent part of his formative years would have been about nil. There's something cool about thinking, "Hmmm, this dude was once an awkward freshman like me, living off of bad cafeteria food and writing papers at 3 A.M. and struggling to sleep through the hubbub that the paper-thin dorm walls did little to conceal." It makes the journey from those humble college beginnings to doing some "grown-up thing that matters" seem a little more attainable. (I joked that there was also a "McCain Walk", but that it required an actual cane. This only invited comments from my college friends about how they haven't missed hearing those dumb comments every day since graduation.)
Five years ago, when I came back for my first reunion, I was heavy into freshman year nostalgia. I wanted to be a "fly on the wall" and watch it all unfold again. This year, I felt farther removed from it. I didn't feel like looking back - not that I hated my old self or anything, but just that I felt I'd spent enough time on nostalgia already. As I ran into folks who had lived up in Stewie with me my freshman year and excitedly greeted me, "Divad!", I remembered that I was once an unsure kid who went by a nickname because something about his real name made him uncomfortable, too. (I thought going by the all-too-common "David" would lead to people calling me "Dave" for short. I hated "Dave". So I went by my "aspiring writer" pseuodnym. I dropped that backwards nom de plume at somewhere around the point that I realized I sucked at creative writing. But it lives on in my "Soundtracks", I guess.) Now I barely know that socially awkward person who spent the entirety of college figuring out how not to piss off the people he called his friends. And while there are people who recognize the "Divad" character and perhaps get some fond rememberance of dumb jokes that I told or otherwise goofy things that I did in college, it's the people who have really kept up with me and remained close friends all this years that I am most amazed by. I think back to college, and I can't imagine why they stuck with me. I was kind of a jerk!
I was recently watching an episode of Quantum Leap in which, Al, the holographic observer, remarked that "college is wasted on the young". I realize now how true this is. Maybe last time around, I wasn't far enough removed from my college years to see how painfully in need of maturity I was. I still cherish those years, because I honestly had a blast and there's really never another time in life that's gonna be quite like it. But I no longer wish I could find another time in my life that is like it. I'm comfortable moving on to the next phase, despite the responsibilities it entails and the fact that I'm not meant to spend any more years of my life just learning neat things at a distance while someone else worries about cooking my food and paying my bills. Sure, that would be fun, but I think it was really the couple of years after college, when I went through the trial by fire of getting a real job and having a long-term relationship unravel so that I could eventually meet my wife, that forced me to truly grow up a bit. Those who knew me from before those years have extended a special form of grace, in a way - they know who I am at my most impatient, most ignorant, and most selfish, and they still stuck with me. (Though they are probably now painfully aware of their own ignorance at the time and how they've grown since then.) There's a facet of God in that closest circle of friends from college - they've seen the underside, and yet still they love.
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