Stuck in my head...

Sitting in the bright white light of my computer screen, in the silent evening, all the lights off, writing about my deepest, darkest secrets, I am listening to my Sad Songs playlist on the iPod, wondering about where my thoughts should be landing, and what kind of dreams will come of my whirling brainstorms.

Sad songs, or at least what I call sad songs, speak to my soul, and I want to cry out and sing along at the top of my lungs. Sad song lyrics sit on my chest like an animal, weighing me down, making it hard to breathe. I love that feeling; I love wallowing in it and letting the pain in the singers' voices wash over me like a rain storm.

I don't know if most people listen to song lyrics the way I do--I need to know each word, and why it was chosen, and then I want to ruminate in all the words together and know how the songwriter was feeling as she wrote.

I don't remember the first song I memorized all the words to. I do remember spending several hours in high school at Jennifer Catt's house with my hand on the rewind button of a CD boom box, listening to Lisa Loeb and learning all the words to "Stay," and trying to sing it with the exact same inflection in my voice as she did. I broke the radio in my Pontiac Grand Am (making out with a boy in a parking lot) when Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill album was in the cassette player, and the tape played for months in a loop, until I could sing every word to every song, and had the entire tape memorized, including the amount of milliseconds between songs and the key change between tunes. I memorized all the words to the fast part of "Hook" by Blues Traveler so that I could recite it as a monologue on command (a skill I totally copied from my high school youth group director, because I thought both she and the idea of having a trademark monologue were beyond cool--let me know if you want to hear it; I did an improptu rehearsal the other day and didn't skip a beat).

When I hear a song I love, I want to know it, and to live it. I still spend my driving time in the car rewinding CDs to hear a line again, until I can imitate the whole thing, turns of phrase and breaths included. I imagine my life in a series of vignettes set to music, like a video on MTV. I always have a song stuck in my head, 24 hours a day. If you stop me in the hallway or on the street and ask what song is playing, I'll never let you down (go ahead: try it). Sometimes it is an advertising jingle, but there's always music playing in my inner ears.

I don't know what it is about music that hits right at my core--I know that I gravitate to artists with complex and meaningful lyrics, and that I prefer singers that I can imitate (so Christina Aguleira and Beyonce are usually not at the top of my list--both are talented singers, so much so that I can't compete, so I don't even try).

I heard an interesting story from WNYC's Radio Lab about people who hear music so loudly in their heads that it seems real. Thankfully I don't hear this music in my head THAT loudly, but I do think, if I had to have any kind of debilitating condition, I'd like to have this one.

I'll leave some lyrics from one of my favorite sad songs with you as the end of my post. If you have some sad songs you'd like to share, please let me know so I can add them to my playlist.


And oh, the fear I've known, that I might reap the praise of strangers and end up on my own. All I've sung was a song, but maybe I was wrong....

I am alone in a hotel room tonight. I squeeze the sky out, but there's not a star appears. Begin my studies with this paper and this pencil, and I'm working through the grammar of my fears. --Indigo Girls, "Language or the Kiss"

Patience

I have just discovered that I am not a very patient person.

You might be saying to yourself, "Um, hello, you're just noticing?" or "How can you not know whether you are patient or not?" These are good questions.

As it turns out, I haven't ever really thought about it before. As I mentioned in Tuesday's post, I went to a great yoga class on Monday night, were I learned the word "kshama," which means patience, or being in the now. Since then I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, which is good--but it's made me realize just how impatient I am.

I hate waiting for someone to email me or text message me back. I want it to happen instantaneously. When I send someone an instant message, I want them to respond instantly. When I call someone on the phone, I want them to answer. I hate it when my friends don't update their blogs every day for me to read, even though I don't always update my own blog in a timely manner. Whether it is at work, or at home, I have been noticing that I'm irritated when I don't receive instant gratification.

I hate traffic, and red traffic signals, and even the drive home (it is just too long). I hate waiting for planes, or waiting for luggage to come around the carousel. I spend the week waiting for the weekend. And this week, I have been impatient for another yoga class! This sort of defeats the purpose of the pondering, doesn't it? If I am supposed to be trying to be patient, then I shouldn't be tapping my foot impatiently waiting for class to come around.

I'm not sure how one goes about teaching oneself to be patient. I think it might have something to do with breathing deeply and trying to find something to focus on in the moment. Does this have something to do with our instantaneous culture? Cell phones and PDA's that deliver all our information to it the moment it happens--we don't have to wait to get to a computer to read our email--it is sent straight to the phone! My Facebook updates are all sent to me in text messages. When I have a question about, oh, say, what's the average amount of calories a person can burn while working at a desk, or how many individuals in the 20th and 21st century have owned lions as housepets, I immediately drop everything I'm doing and BAM! Google directs me to an answer. If I am surrounded and immersed in this kind of instant gratification all the time, how can I learn to be patient?

As an adult, and a human, I have to at least pretend to be patient on a regular basis. My puppy, when she wants to play, stands in front of you and barks until you grab the other end of whatever it is she wants to tug. It's not a small bark, either--it's as big as she is, 125 pounds. I have to sit on my hands and wait for a colleague to respond to a message, or for my friends to email me back, knowing full well that I am not the only person requiring their attention for the day.

Maybe being aware of it is the first step, right? Admitting I have a problem? There, done. What's next? I can't wait.

Intelligence Quotient

When I was in elementary school, I was taken out of class one day and led to a little wood-paneled office. The woman there asked me all sorts of interesting questions, had me look at pictures and read her things from books, and I think had me walk across a little low balance beam, though that part may have been only in my head. After I was there for what seemed like ages in my little mind, the woman asked me if I would like to do something special one afternoon a week, where I would get to leave my class with a couple other kids and play with interesting toys and puzzles and read new books. I thought that sounded great, so I agreed.

They called it Gifted, I believe, and I and a few other kids went to a different classroom on Wednesday afternoons and played with interesting toys. I don’t remember much more about it than that, but I did really enjoy it. It also made me feel very special and smart. That I was picked out of all the students as someone who was worthy of going to Gifted. I remember trying not to act like it was a big deal, but Wednesday afternoon was always my favorite part of the week.

In middle school and high school, I took the “honors” classes, and I thought they were a breeze. I rarely studied and made straight A’s through school, until my senior year when I took a Calculus class and couldn’t keep up (I blamed it on the teacher and the fact that math was boring, and wrote it off as a fluke). I ended up with a B in Calculus and headed off to college.

College was a whole other story. I signed up for Calculus (hey, I had already taken it once, how hard could it be the second time?), Chemistry 2 (since I had taken college level chemistry in high school and passed with flying colors), and some general education classes. The first semester was downhill from day one.

I’m sure part of the problem was that I wasn’t really sleeping, I stayed out late, partied a lot, and tried to do homework at 3 a.m. while slightly intoxicated and not quite awake. I could barely stay awake during the walk to class, let alone lectures. I ended up with a D in chemistry (thanks to a very compassionate professor who would let me come to office hours even though I didn’t pay attention in class) and a C in calculus (yes, a worse grade than the first time I took the EXACT SAME CLASS). And that was after studying MUCH harder than I ever had in high school. My other grades were A’s and B’s, but I had to work hard at them, too.

After considering leaving school after first semester, I found my niche (NOT in math and science, by the way) and, even though I still had to work hard, I managed to bring my GPA up to a respectable number by the time I graduated. That whole experience taught me that I wasn’t as smart as I had once thought I was…in fact, I considered myself to be on the slightly below-average side of the curve for students at my college. After believing myself so special as to be selected for Gifted class, it was hard to handle, but I figured that I had either fooled that woman in elementary school, or that my intelligence had leveled off over time.

Then I became what you might call a “grownup.” (I use this term loosely, as I don’t feel that I have had nearly enough time to grow up to the point where I am an adult…buy I digress.)

In my daily life, whether it is at work or around the city, I think I have discovered that I am smarter than I thought. I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m bragging…it’s just that I think most of the time, people don’t spend enough time on anything to fully understand, and therefore waste everyone else’s time with questions that they could have answered themselves, had they stopped for just a moment.

Additionally, adults never really seem to act like adults…the longer I am one, or am pretending to be one, it seems that people are just the same as they were as teenagers—older but no wiser. It is fascinating to me to listen to a conversation between two people and see just what they were like as children, displaying what they were taught by those older and supposedly wiser than they.

It makes me feel a little smarter (though way less intelligent than some of my friends, who read constantly and absorb information like a sponge, whether it be about literature or history or computer programming and theory or law) to know that I can step back and see this, even if I don’t always act like someone with more than a quarter century of life behind her.

Soaking It In

After I spent the week in Colorado running, walking, hiking, and biking, I felt like my calf muscles were so tight they were going to snap at any moment like a rubber band, and all the rest of my body was sore and stiff. When we arrived at our resort at the beginning of the week, I had noticed that there was a Yoga studio right across the street, so after we turned our bikes back in to the rental place, I went over to check out their schedule. Later that evening, I took a great beginner’s class, and I can’t believe I haven’t done that more often.

Up to this point, most my experience with yoga has been second-hand—my friend Red practices at home and has read up on the principles of yoga (not surprising, since she always seems to know a lot about most of the things I become interested in—she’s smart and savvy and loves learning). I had taken a class at the Liberty Community Center, but it was more focused on yoga as exercise, rather than as a practice and an all-around learning experience.

So last night, I decided I would try it out in Kansas City. The Knitters and I tried yoga at the Liberty Memorial for the summer solstice, but it was hard for me as a beginner to keep up with the group of experienced practitioners. After I did some research about yoga studios in Kansas City, however, I ended up with my best option as Kansas Siddhi Yoga, the same group that hosted the summer solstice event. Last night I attended a class at their KSY West studio at 1717 Wyandotte.

I was intimidated at first. Not having participated in very many “true” yoga classes, I was worried I wouldn’t know the poses, and, though it is irrational, I felt like everyone would be watching me and see how awkward I was. I unfurled my mat and grabbed all the appropriate equipment from the back of the room (after slyly watching someone before me collect her things and copying her actions), and then sat down to wait for the start of class.

I tend to fidget a lot, whether it is in a class or at my desk at work or in a meeting or watching t.v. I have a very hard time sitting still—I always want to adjust my shirt or crack my knuckles or twirl my hair. At the class I took in Colorado, the teacher kept reminding us NOT to fidget, and as I tried to sit quietly and prepare myself to be open to this new class, I noticed how still everyone else was sitting, and tried to follow suit.

The teacher, Gina (who is also the owner of the studio) opened the class with 10 minutes or so of speaking. She talked about how part of the practice of yoga, outside being a form of exercise, is to apply your yoga practice to your daily life. It is important to take things in stages, and fully experience each stage—whether that is in learning a new pose or in going about your daily life. She said the following (and I paraphrase), and I have been repeating it in my head ever since:

"Be here, in this moment. There does not exist yet, or does not exist anymore. If here is all there is, if this moment is all that exists, then you can only be able to be here, in this moment."

I spent most of the class trying to shut out the day and focus on each moment of the class, to fully experience each pose and what my body was doing as I moved. It’s not very easy to do, and I probably spent more time pulling my mind back to the class than I did actually being there in the moment, but it was my first day, so I am taking it in stages. I think this class will help me practice “soaking it in,” per my happiness commandments. If you want to come with me to a class, let me know—it was very enjoyable. I’ll be going back on a regular basis.

Congratulations, Susie!

Big congratulations go out to my baby sister Susan today, who has just published her first choral arrangement with Santa Barbara Music Publishing.

The piece was originally written and performed by Sara Groves, a Christian artist whose parents still live in Springfield. It's a gorgeous song with beautiful lyrics, and since my sister is so talented, the arrangement is stunning. Susan has arranged multiple pieces for the acapella group she sang in at Missouri State University, A Cub Bella.

It doesn't look like the price list at SBMP.com has been updated just yet, but if you know anyone who would like to purchase the piece for a choir to perform, they should be able to order it shortly from SBMP's web site.

Way to go, Susie! I am so proud of you!

I ♥ Chris Thile

Dear Chris Thile,
If you happen to peruse the wide, wide world of web for postings including your name from random fans, please know that this post is intended in no way to be frightening or off-putting. I just think you're the bee's knees, and I had to share my love for you with the world.

Dear blog readers,
If you haven't heard of Chris Thile, I suggest--nay, I implore--you go right out to iTunes and buy some of his music. Chris is an incredible mandolin player--you'll never believe how fast his fingers can move on the strings, or the beauty of the melodies he creates. His three most recent solo albums (Not All Who Wander Are Lost, Deceiver, and How to Grow a Woman From the Ground) are all excellent (the first of the three albums is all instrumental and the other two include some tracks with vocals and some without). He is formerly of the group Nickel Creek (a progressive bluegrass trio with Sean and Sara Watkins, which is now defunct) and is currently performing with a new band called Punch Brothers, as well as other random performances by himself and with other talented musicians.

I am on vacation with the family (my parents, my sister and her husband, and my own husband). When I saw on Chris Thile's web site that he would be in Aspen while we were a mere two hours away, I decided I was willing to make the drive and pay the possibly exorbitant amount of money to see him perform. Somehow I roped the rest of my family into doing this as well.

Chris performed last night at Harris Concert Hall in Aspen, CO (a venue of the Aspen Music School) with Edgar Meyer, a bassist I have only recently been introduced to by my friend Alex, who gave me a copy of A Short Trip Home, a really interesting album with Edgar Meyer and Josh Bell, and several other ridiculously talented string players.

Edgar Meyer is also a stellar musician--you've never seen the bass played like this. He plays it more like a cello--with his fingers flying over the fingerboard almost to the bridge, hitting notes I never thought would come out of a bass (at least not with a pleasant sound). He practically has to lean over the bass to play--it probably makes his back sore to stand that way for a few hours!

While Edgar was thrilling to watch and obviously one of the most talented musicians I had ever seen, it was Chris Thile who kept my attention. He wore a suit that looked like it might have belonged to one of the Beatles, and shoes that were black (and looked a little funny next to his navy suit). His hair was messy and his clothes were wrinkled. When he plays, he does a funny little dance...in time with the music but still awkward, but also endearing. What I love the best is that he isn't concerned with what the audience thinks (which I suppose is true about every musician who is successful--the reason your audience loves you is that you are who you are, consistently and believably).

They made few small jokes, but mostly just played--fingers flying and humor in their tunes, intimately connected to the music. Some bluegrass and some classical, pieces written by both of them and also some written together, which will be available on a collaborative album in 2008, titled simply, Chris Thile & Edgar Meyer.

For the first half of the show I was in the back row of a small auditorium, holding maybe 500 people, maybe less. For the second half, I sat on the stage, just behind the performers (my parents bought their tickets at the last minute and those were the only available seats). Nothing moves me more than passion--for life, for music, for one's work, whatever it is. These two definitely have that and more...some indefinable quality that makes a performance worth watching.

I wish I could convey better how fun it was for me to watch the show...I'm no music critic that is for sure.

Chris, if you read this, thanks for the concert--it was the perfect addition to my summer vacation. I hope to see you again somewhere soon.

Mental Hyperactivity

I have always had an overactive imagination.

One of my favorite games as a child was to play in my backyard, pretending that I had a horse named Blackie that followed me around. In my mind, Blackie and I would gallop through the woods behind my neighbor's house, and I would feed him in the pretend stable in my yard.

There were other games I played--my friend Nicole and I would ride through the neighborhood on our 10-speed bikes, as superheroes coming to save the world from evil. My bike's name was Thunder (Nicole's was Lightning), and we had a theme song that we would sing as we sped towards the innocent victims that needed our assistance.

Nicole and I could play for hours with Fisher-Price Little People, but it was a complicated soap opera world they lived in, where twins vied for the same role in a toothpaste commercial, boyfriends cheated on their girlfriends, and families were in constant turmoil.

All of these things seemed much more exciting than our own lives (with happily married parents and siblings who slightly annoyed us, in a nice quiet neighborhood in a small midwestern town). Thanks to my mother, I rarely watched television (1 hour limit per day) and we didn't have any video games until I was 10 and my sister and I pooled our money to buy one ourselves. Mom made a rule that we HAD to read at least an hour each day before we could do anything else. My sister saw this as torture, but I thought it was the best rule ever created at our house.

Then, I'm sure my parents saw my overactive imagination as a blessing--I could be out in the back yard for hours, entertaining myself. I'm sure that my imagination is at the root of why I feel the need to be creative.

There is a downside to this imagination, though--it hasn't gotten any less powerful since I was in elementary school. In fact, I think it has gotten MORE powerful, and more dangerous.

I am easily distracted at work, or even with friends, or at home in the middle of a movie. My brain is taken over by my crazy imagination and I can't focus at all. When I'm driving I imagine crazy scenarios, straight out of an action movie. I worry that I'll drive off the road thinking I'm being chased by a spy from the former Soviet Union.

When my friends or family are late arriving to my house to pick me up for some event, I imagine that they've had a terrible accident. My imagination takes me through all the stages of grief in lightning speed. I imagine what it would be like to continue my life without them--how heartbroken I'd be, how unable to continue, how crushed. Then my brain concocts a heroic story of survival and rebirth as I work through my pain to become a better, stronger person.

In conversation, I have a hard time taking what someone says at face value. Every movement, every facial twitch, every choice of word sends me reeling into what they're really thinking, and what they meant and where they've been. With friends I haven't seen in a while, I imagine inserting myself into their interesting lives. Sometimes I imagine how my life would have turned out differently if I had made this choice or that choice, and I can see the entirety of my existence mapped out before me in the new direction.

The problem is I get wistful about it, and start to believe my imaginary scenarios could and should be real, which makes me feel unbalanced and chaotic. Even the horrible ones--I am such a brave heroine in my own mind that I almost wouldn't mind if something tragic happened, just so I could live out those scenes in real life.

This overactive imagination is part of Commandment #9 (Think Moderation), but I'm not sure if there is a way to stifle that part of my brain. I've started writing down the stories that are coming out of that part of my head, in the hopes that if I can get them out of there, I won't obsess as much, but it could make it worse. Any ideas about how to quiet the mind? (Substance free suggestions, please--I've already tried chemical remedies.)