Friday, December 04, 2009

both eyes open, still movin’ blindly

There’s a song on the rough mix CD that Skinny gave me…  they tried it out at one of their shows and Soup put it to a vote. We all voted against it, choosing “Booty Beach” as the winner that night. At any rate, Soup raps at the end of this song and the words just got into my head. (Hundred miles an hour, goin’ nowhere fast…) I’m still not a fan of the rest of the song because anything that references dying fathers is definitely a permanent fixture on my do NOT play list, but that rap at the end, it just speaks to me. I’ve found myself reciting it more than once recently.

The BU hockey team is struggling. I wish that this year’s captains were able to bottle up what ever last year’s captains did and use it. It looks like they’re trying to, but time will tell if they’re successful. In the meantime, it’s hard to watch. Hockey East is completely screwed up this year. Even the national polls are a little messed up. It’s a very odd time to be a BU fan - rebuilding years suck. But, we’ve been building relationships with our sectionmates, so it’s been a good year for that. It’s nice when you get to commiserate with someone who understands what you’re feeling. So many of my friends aren’t hockey fans, and if they are, they’re NHL hockey fans. It’s a completely different (dare I say worse?) product than college hockey now. College hockey is so much better on a thousand levels. Mostly because these kids still play like there’s something “real” on the line, because they love the game, because - with the exception of the ban on fighting - the game is still what I consider “pure”. It hasn’t been commercialized and the rule books haven’t been rewritten to make a consumer-friendly product.

I finally finished a birthday present that was supposed to be completed in September. Now that the recipient has it, I guess I can spill why it took so long. There was a comment a while back about how she liked this band, so I made the decision to make her a mega mix. I have what feels like a gazillion songs - bootlegs, commercial recordings, rarities, etc. - and to go through all of them and find the “perfect” version of each one, to try to balance them all out, to try and stay away from the commercially available versions,  without repeating songs just because I liked the “then and now” aspect, that was so freaking hard. I didn’t know just how mentally taxing… I must have put together a thousand different versions. I’d pretty much been working on it since August, but it was *so* hard.  I did repeat one, though. As much as I like the original version of that song, there’s a reference to Jefferson Holt that has since been removed, so I also added the revised version. At least I didn’t screw up and put them on the same disc. The mix ended up spanning four discs, and I could have done two more. There were also three other mixes - two mashups and one with some of my favorite singer/songwriters. Those, in a way, were a little harder. My taste in music has become a little more melancholy as of late, so there were some lyrics and song titles that I felt a little uncomfortable sharing. Too soul baring, in a way. Five months for seven mixes… I think that’s a new record of being all OCD about making the perfect mix. Oh well. At least I finished them before Christmas!

Last night was my friend’s holiday party. I’d been on the fence about going because I feel like complete crap. I still do, but I was heavily medicated last night. I’m so glad we put the dogs in the kennel so the hubby could come play with me. It was great fun and for a while, the weight of the world was off my shoulders.  So much I could say about last night - so many misheard things, so many random shout-outs, a wicked embarrassing story involving Bubble Tea was told - complete with verbatim quotes from the event!, Pony - but the thing I’ll always remember is that out of the five of us who obsessively tweet, not a single one of us tweeted last night. Not. A. Single. Tweet. Every since texting and Twitter came into our lives, I don’t think I’ve ever been as present in the moment as I was last night. Yeah, there were “OMG! I HAVE to tweet this moments!”, but those were filed away to be written about later. 

We were ORDERED to go to a New Year’s Eve party with the same group of friends, and I don’t think I’ve looked forward to NYE as much as I am this year. Slowly but surely, I’m gaining control over my life again. Still not getting the closure I need in some areas, others are getting better more quickly than I thought they would, and The Big Thing that’s really been weighing me down is still weighing me down, but I’ve grown used to the weight. Not happy with the ripples its causing in my life, but there’s nothing that can be done about it, so I’m just waiting it out.

Life goes on, whether we want it to or not, right?  This pain is just a price we pay for the privilege of waking up every morning…