Quodlibets

S's version of the meme

Step 1: Put your MP3 player or whatever on random.
Step 2: Post the first line(s) from the first 30 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song and artist the lines come from.
Step 4: Strike through the songs when someone guesses correctly.
Step 5: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING

1. I didn't ask, you shouldn't have told me...
2. Lying cheatin', hurtin' thats all you seem to do...
3. Ooooh, a storm is threat’ning, My very life today...
4. We walked the earth, talked and never spoke a word...
5. Your love is strong, and you're so sweet, you make me hard, you make me weak...
6. People... keep on learnin', soldiers... keep on warrin'...
7. Come in, make yourself at home, I'm a bit late, hate to make you wait...
8. I would tell you about the things they put me through, the pain I've been subjected to...
9. She has me like a pisces when I am weak...
10. I don't practice santeria...
11. Everyday I wake up, alone because, I'm not like all the other boys...
12. There's a lady who knows, all that glitters is gold...
13. I don't mind, other guys dancin' with my girl...
14. I've been workin from 7-11 every night...
15. I let the beast in too soon, I don't know how to live without my hand on his throat, I fight him always and still...
16. How do you fight loneliness, smile all the time...
17. Where I come from isn't all that great, my automobile is a piece of crap...
18. I am still living with your ghost, lonely and dreamin' of the west coast...
19. I think I'll go on a walkabout, find out what it's all about...
20. Take a walk, out the gate you go and never stop...
21. I'm ahead, I'm the man, I'm the first mammal to wear pants...
22. She had black hair, like ravens crawlin' over her shoulders, all the way down...
23. Restless soul, enjoy your youth...
24. I woke up and called this morning, the tone of your voice was a warning...
25. Well I been lookin' real hard, and I'm trying to find a job, but it just keeps gettin' tougher every day...
26. Like a fool I went and stayed too long, I'm wondering if your loves still strong...
27. hip hip, hip hip, hip hip, hip hip...
28. Welcome to your life, there's no turning back...
29. Never was cornflake girl, thought that was a good solution hangin' with the raisin girls...
30. I wrote her off for the tenth time today, I practiced all the things I would say...

Update:  Apologies to commenters.  I don't have the list of songs, so I have to wait until S comes online later this morning to confirm you are correct.  I did strike out the ones I knew you were correct on, and I'll continue to approve comments and do the same all morning.

This Meme Requires Participation!

Step 1: Put your MP3 player or whatever on random.
Step 2: Post the first line(s) from the first 30 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song and artist the lines come from.
Step 4: Strike through the songs when someone guesses correctly.
Step 5: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING

(Please play!  I already contributed at the place I found this meme...frogblog.)

1.  Tending the garden of noise, where I grow the traffic
2.  Open the door and let your love come down
3.  Step out the front door like a ghost into a fog
4.  When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars
5.  Every time I look into your loving eyes

6. I don't know if it was real or in a dream
7.  I waited 'til I saw the sun, don't know why I didn't come
8.  This one goes out to the one I love
9.  You lost your reputation on a woman
10.  So much for the city, tell me that you'll dance to the end

11.  I lie in an early bed, thinking late thoughts
12.  I'm waking from a dream, the neighborhood is green
13.  Miss Independent, Miss Self-Sufficient, Miss Keep-Your-Distance
14.  Hold me close and hold me fast, the magic spell you cast
15.  Every day is so wonderful and suddenly, it's hard to breathe

16.  I'm only happy when it rains, I'm only happy when it's complicated
17. The color of the sky as far as I can see is coal grey
18.  I'm on my second drink, but I've had a few before
19.  Things are falling down on me, heavy things I could not see
20.  Sitting in a park in Paris, France, reading the news and it sure looks bad

21.  There must be some kinda way out of here, said the joker to the thief
22.  Slappin' leather was devised during a wild streak in her life
23.  I'd swim across Lake Michigan, I'd sell my shoes.
24.  Don't hold yourself like that, you'll hurt your knees
25.  All the things you said to me today changed my perspective in every way

26.  I threw away your greatest hits, you left them here the day you split
27.  I may know the word, but not say it
28.  How long before I get in, before it starts before I begin
29.  It goes away, all of this and more of nothing in my life
30.  I'm getting tired of your shit, you don't ever buy me nothing.

The Derm

So, I'm a hypochondriac, which if you know me, you know.  I'm almost always convinced something is majorly wrong with me.  (Don't try to fix me, just accept it and move on.)  This time, it was a painful mole.  Which, if you read about online, leads you to believe you must go to the dermatologist RIGHT NOW.  So I made an appointment, thinking I could get some other nagging skin issues taken care of and get my moles checked out.

My moles are fine.  They're normal.  My skin, however?  A mess.  I've got two recognizable skin conditions.  One, I knew about.  The second?  An unhappy shock.  (There is a third problem: skin tags, which are gross, but apparently genetic.  You can get them cut off, but they sadly just keep popping up all over.  Plus, they seriously just take sterile scissors and cut them off.  She said they numb them, but still.  Ouch.)

So not that the internets really cares, but I have Keratosis Pilaris on my arms.  It's genetic and incurable.  In other words, it's not going anywhere.  I can use a steroid cream for a month, every once in a while to decrease the ugly redness of it, but that's it.  There is a body wash and lotion offered by my derm for $50 that supposedly helps, but that's pretty expensive for something I'll have to use FOREVER if I want to make my arms look okay.  If you're not sure, or if you've never seen my arms, KP is when your skin doesn't know how to die and fall off.  Basically, it dies, but then gets stuck in your hair follicle, or whatnot, making unsightly red bumps, that can, occasionally, be irritating and itchy.  But mostly, they're just ugly as hell.  And pretty much here to stay.

The other thing I've apparently developed is Rosacea.  I thought it might be adult-onset acne, but my derm-lady thinks not.  Rosacea, thanks to my derm-provided reading, rarely resolves, and mostly gets progressively worse, if you don't treat it.  (Thank god I freaked about a mole!)  I have to try this facial gel, and see if that does anything.  If not, I have to go back to the derm and we'll keep trying things.  Frankly, EVERYTHING makes it worse:  alcohol, hot baths or hut tubs, hot drinks, overheating from exercise or exertion, extremes of hot and cold weather (I live in the Chicago area.  Bet that doesn't help.), rubbing your face, using alcohol-based cosmetics and hair spray.  S joked that "walking down this hall right now" makes it worse.  And like I said, it doesn't normally go away.  Ever.

I told my sister today that if I won the genetics-teeth contest, then I've been roundly defeated in the genetics-skin game.  Because the two skin conditions are genetic as well as the damn skin tags.  Not sure which is worse:  bad teeth, or bad skin.

(And to be told these things, I waited over an hour in a waiting room.  Yes, the derm (actually a PA) was running that late.  To say I was disgruntled is an understatement; every minute that I waited I became more convinced that she was going to look at my moles and scream: CANCER!  We're cutting them all off!  I'm not a good waiter.  Esp. in a doctor's office.)

#$&@$%&@*%#@&%

I'm defective.  I don't have that thing in my brain that tells me that swearing is bad and that I should avoid it at all costs--hearing or doing.  I can't even concede that it might be bad to say fuck in front of a child.  I don't think it is bad to say fuck in front of a child, because a word is a word, and fuck just isn't that bad.  It's only bad because society says it's bad.  It's not a derrogatory name for another person, or a way to put someone down.  It's not really hurting anyone in the way that, say, yelling "You fat pig." is.  (And yes, that did happen to me; and yes, there was a child in the car of the person that yelled it.)  It just seems to me that we're teaching kids that the wrong things are wrong. 

I will admit that I swear like a dockworker, and that I'm not really ashamed of it.  If it makes me seem unintelligent, it's because you don't know me, because I know I'm not unintelligent.  If it makes me unladylike, well, okay.  I'm not really interested in being a lady anyway.  It won't offend me to hear it, either, and I take exception to men who apologize to women after they've sworn.  Like my ears will turn black, or something, and my head will explode from the sheer vulgarity of it?  Come on.  I demand to be treated like an equal, and if that means you swear in front of other men, you swear in front of me.  I'm no shrinking violet. 

So yeah.  I think sometimes it even bothers S that I swear so much (he's not prone to swearing either, because I think it's been beat (metaphorically) into his head that swearing is bad.  When I asked him why it was bad, he said because.  It just is.  That, folks, isn't a good enough reason for me.), but I don't care.  Like I just explained in my parenthetical aside, something "just" being bad because it is bad isn't a reason.  It really isn't.  The only place "because I said so" or "it just is" is applicable, is when you're five and your parents say it.  I don't think someone can tell me, a 26 year-old woman, "you can't swear because I said so."

I don't know.  It just seems like if you're going to lament something, lament the actual bad things that are happening, like starving children and abstinence-only education and federal discrimination of people who like people who happen to be of the same gender.  You know, there's a million other worthy things to be concerned about, and thinking the world is going to shit because some teenagers say fuck a lot sorta seems to be not seeing the forest for the trees.  But hey, that's just me, and I'll fucking think what I want.

When a book is so annoying you have to finish it

Let me preface what I'm about to say by saying that I adore Sarah Dessen.  I picked up That Lullaby while I was working in a bookstore, thinking it looked good, and I was right.  It was very good.  I made short work of all of her other books, and now I just look forward to her new books. 

Yesterday, S and I walked to our local Borders (I'm big on walking places, lately; this morning we walked to breakfast and then walked home in the freezing rain.  V unpleasant.) and if I walk to a bookstore, inevitably, I buy books.  Well, unbeknownst to me, Dessen has a new book.  Of course, I bought it, and of course, I brought it home and ripped into it.

I hated it.  Okay, that's not fair.  I really liked it, but I was so annoyed with the damn thing that I almost stopped reading halfway through (when I put it down last night before I went to bed, I seriously considered not picking it up again.).  I JUST left a comment on Kelly's blog about music in books, and how sometimes YA novels resonate more with me because their authors seem to have a better grasp of current music than some of the adult authors I read.  Dessen's book is called Just Listen.  It's about music.  I mean, music is centrally important to the book; the main male character is obsessed with music.  Sounds good, right?

No.  Because Dessen INVENTED almost every single band mentioned in the book.  There is nothing that annoys me so much.  Especially because every single made up band is transparently based on a real band, ie Drake Payton--frat boy hippie rock.  Jesus, why couldn't she just say Dave Matthews?  The book was, as soon as I realized how things were going to be, band-wise, no longer relevant.  I know that seems harsh, but when you DO care about music, you care about the music that pops up in your books.  Probably if you're not really into music, it doesn't matter that Dessen completely invented a different world of music (though, for all I know, all the avant-garde musicians mentioned in the book are real, though I suspect not).  But to me, it's just a glaringly bad choice.  Music is incredibly important to a lot of young people, and by making up bands, I'd guess you lose them.  It left me feeling like the story was empty, in some ways. 

I will say that a few real bands were mentioned.  Led Zeppelin, for one.  I love Led Zeppelin, and I understood why the characters liked the Zeppelin song mentioned.  It made sense.  But in every single place where a song is made up, or a fake name masquerades for a real artist, I growled.  Inwardly, but still.  Like I said, it's such an error, in my mind, that I almost put it down.  I almost stopped.  IF a world is more than marginally divorced from reality, I will accept made-up bands and so on.  But this book obviously takes place now, in a very real world.  And the mixing of real and non-real bands?  Maybe that's what made it so horribly bad.  Not sure.  Regardless, I'm incredibly disappointed in it, which is very sad, because unlike other authors I love, Dessen's books have been consistently good. 

Boo hiss, Sarah Dessen, boo hiss. 

Firsts meme

(stolen from frogblog)

1. Who was your first prom date?  A boy named after a city.  Who was head over heels in love with my best friend.
2. Who was your first roommate(s)?  A girl named Sherry, who got drunk-dialed every weekend, even though she never came home on the weekends.  Once, I had to chase her down because she was drunk sleepwalking.  Very annoying.
3. What alcoholic beverage did you drink the first time you got drunk?  I was doing shots.  In Rome.  Designer shots, like "dirty girl scouts" and "B52s".
4. What was your first job?  I worked as a library page.  Said I never wanted to work in a library again after that, and here I am today.  Working in a library.
5. What was your first car?  A brand-new, bluish-gray Toyota Carolla, which earned the nickname the P-mobile.  I loved that car like crazy.
6. When did you go to your first funeral?  I think one of my grandma's sisters died when I was very young, and I went to that.  But I can't be sure.  I might have made that up.  And then, there were no funerals or wakes until I was 19, when my dad's dad died.
7. How old were you when you first moved away from your hometown?  Well.  I don't know.  We moved when I was 13 or 14 to a new town.  Which one was my hometown?  Probably the second, in which case I was 18 when I left for college.  But oh ho, I came back.
8. Who was your first grade teacher?  I do not remember her name.  I only remember Mrs. Reynolds, who was the enrichment/gifted teacher.  I went to her classroom once a day?  Twice a week?  Something like that.  I looooved her.
9. Where did you go on your first ride on an airplane?  I was a baby.  My parents took me to Arizona (I think before my first birthday.), and consequently, I cannot remember that trip.  I've been on airplanes pretty steadily since--to Florida and Arizona, and then later to places farther flung.
10. When did you sneak out of your house for the first time, who was it with?  I never had to sneak out!  Ha, and I wasn't the type of kid who would have, anyway.  I don't think I've ever been grounded, even.  I was too good.  I was a goody-two-shoes, all the way through high school.
11. Who was your first Best Friend and are you still friends with them?  I don't know.  I'm not sure I really had one that was distinct.  I mean, I was really close with my cousins Bee, Sketch and J, who grew up a block away, and then there were also the Hess kids--Christian and Christiana (not their real names).  We were close for a long time, until their family whacked out on evangelical Christianity.  At least, that's how I remember it.
12. Where did you live the first time you moved out of your parents’ house?  Holy Cross Hall.
13. Who is the first person you call when you have a bad day?  I don't have to call anyone.  I come home from work and bawl it all out to S.
14. Whose wedding were you in the first time you were a bridesmaid/groomsman?  Haven't been one, ever.  I suppose it will be my sister's wedding, whenever that shall happen.
15. What is the first thing you do in the morning?  Get in the shower.  Really.  I stumble out of bed and straight into the shower.  (I suppose, technically, I make a pit stop at the toilet first.)
16. What was the first concert you ever went to?  R.E.M.  The Monster tour.  So good.
17. First tattoo or piercing?  No tattoos.  I don't know how old I was when I got my ears pierced, but I was 20 when I had them doubled, and then I tripled one when I turned 21 or 22.  Now I'm back down to one in each ear.  And of course, I got my nose pierced in April '99, so I was 19, soon to be 20.
18. First celebrity crush? I can't pinpoint one.  Maybe Luke Skywalker.  (Emphatically NOT Mark Hamill.  I don't remember ever thinking HE was cute.  Only Luke.)
19. Age of first kiss? Too embarrassing to tell.  Really, really embarrassing.
20. First crush?  Hmm.  I remember in 2nd grade I liked this boy named Mike, who had silly fuzzy spiked blonde hair.  And after that, it was one boy after another. 
21. First time you did drugs?  I had a bender in college.  A weeklong spring break bender that took place at my parents' (at the time) home in FL.  I was with my cousin J, and two girls from school, Lucia and Kitty (not her real name, though Lucia's name really is Lucia).  I barely knew Lucia (she was a friend of my girlfriend--in the same major), and Kitty was a girl in my major.  We became close, though I would not say we were particularly close at the time.  Still, we went to FL, partied like animals (the recipe for a Mano party like animals is liquor, something else that I want to be oblique about, and Euchre.  And a pool and a blow-up, rideable Shamu.  I hasten to add, however, that I never rode the whale while drunk.  That was sincerely the GREATEST spring break EVER, and it will never be eclipsed in my memory.  Oh, and there was skinny-dipping.  Skinny-dipping into a hot tub, which isn't quite the same as other sorts of skinny-dipping.  Also, there was an incident with spoons.  Frozen spoons, which sounds more gross than it was.  There's a rumor that spoons will make hickeys look less red, which is all I'll say, or my cousin J will KILL me.  Except that I must add that I did not have the hickeys on me, and I had nothing to do with giving the hickeys.  I was the emergency go-to person for making the acquired hickeys disappear.  Now he really is going to kill me.  I know it.) and had a LOT of fun.  We drove down, too, and my cousin and I did the majority of the driving (from South Bend IN all the way into FL) and well, that's probably all I need to say about it.  Finis.