Driven to Tears

I'm in Maine at the moment, visiting my parents and also taking a few days away from my usual routines so I can tackle a couple sets of revisions with fresh eyes and a relaxed noggin, in a different space than I normally do. The drive from Boston takes about two hours, and I bet I spent at least half that time crying.

Before you worry, I wasn't sobbing, my vision wasn't impaired, I wasn't having a mental breakdown. I wasn't even upset. I blame the music… Though I must say, I was overdue for a good cry. Felt damn good.

Me crying to music isn't a phenomenon. I can't sing along to a single track on Joni Mitchell's "Blue" album without my voice cracking and my eyes watering, but that's Joni fault. Have you listened to Little Green or A Case of You? I defy you not to sob. Same with Martin Sexton's My Maria. Then again, I lose it over Tom Waits' Jersey Girl, so it may be me.

But the music in question from today's crying jag came from a CD I'd just burned for my mom, for her birthday. It was a compilation of a bunch of our shared favorites from my childhood, plus a couple numbers from my teenage and adult years, and it was pretty much all pop. So why the sobbing? I blame some kind of nostalgia allergy.

I started crying on track one, Judy Garland's Sweet Sixteen, which isn't sad in any way. Then the Carpenters' Top of the World, a ridiculously cheerful song, and similarly the Monkees' Daydream Believer. The next track, Bread's It Don't Matter to Me… Yeah, okay, I brought that on myself. And John Denver's Calypso, yup, balled through it, too. The Bee Gees—yeah, still crying, ditto Olivia Newton John. (I was born in 1979, so I grew up on a healthy dose of my mom's lingering disco records and early eighties' pop, and happily so. I blame my present-day Kylie Minogue habit on it.) I really lost it during James Taylor's Mexico, but I can't actually sing through any James Taylor song without crying for some reason…except Mockingbird. That one's safe. Anyhow, the list goes on, all the way north to Kennebunk. But then I let the CD flip over and started crying again when Bread cropped up a second time. Thank goodness the theme from the film version of The Goodbye Girl wasn't available on iTunes when I'd been putting the CD together. I'd probably have wrecked the car.

What is up with this? Most of these songs aren't sad, and they only trigger happy memories from my childhood…like dancing around to The Pointer Sisters' Jump in my childhood living room. Yet this happens to me regularly. It's almost like the songs are set to some weird wavelength that short-circuits the memory center of my brain. It's as potent as a scent-triggered memory, and a smell's never made me cry. Not that I remember, anyhow.

The singing has something to do with it, too. I don't cry just listening to James Taylor's Walking Man, but if I sing even a bar of it, my voice cracks and my eyes well. Is it just me? Does anybody else burst into tears, singing along with the songs from their formative years? Or am I just a sentimental weirdo?

I hope it's universal. Can't wait to imprint my future kid's brain with latent emotional triggers wired to Elvis Costello and Neko Case.

Thrusty Thursday: Eugene Hütz

After last week and Henrik Lundqvist's ridiculously handsome face, I felt it was high time to get back to admiring less conventional men. After all, weirdos need perving, too. But don't worry—next week I'm perving over an annoyingly good-looking French ballet dancer…just as soon as I watch Black Swan and get myself better acquainted with Benjamin Millepied and his no doubt gifted thighs. And procure screen-grabs of said thighs.

But this week I'm thrusting against Eugene Hütz (born under the exhausting monicker of Yevheniy Oleksandrovych Nikolayev-Simanov, in what's now Ukraine). He's a composer, DJ, and frontman of the New York punk outfit Gogol Bordello. He looks how I imagine the lovechild of former Thrustees Vincent Gallo and Santino Rice might turn out. Or maybe I picked him solely because his just-a-mustache reminds me of my perenniel crush on Howard Moon. In any case, here he is:

Shine on, you crazy, chain-smoking Slavic bastard.

Thrusty Thursday: Bruce McCulloch

There was like an eight-way earworm battle on Twitter yesterday that got first "The Daves I Know" and then "Terriers" in my head, but also reminded me why Bruce was always my favorite Kid in the Hall. So let's get thrusty, the 1990s, Canadian, Brucio way!

Stuff that's good…

I spent so much of May in a rough mood, I wanted to write a post about stuff that's good. So without further ado, here are some awesome things.

1. A new season of The Bachelorette. My favorite guilty TV pleasure…until Instant Watcher posts another season of Celebrity Rehab, anyhow. I'm saving yesterday's episode for tomorrow afternoon, once I've hit my word count goal and tackled a bit of design freelance and wine o'clock rolls around. And whenever possible, I like to complement a new-sale bottle of champagne with an episode of The Bachelor or Bachelorette. I figure if I poison both my mind and body at once, they'll cancel each other out. So far this season I'm rooting for two of the dudes—West and JP. Not sure they've got the best chemistry with Ashley out of the whole group, but I hereby declare them my top-pick foxy front runners.

2. Neko Case. I've been listening to her 2006 album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood practically non-stop for the past month. Love love love. It's already right up there in my moody-folky-chick-rock favorites list beside Patty Griffin's Flaming Red and Tori Amos' Boys for Pélé.

3. Weekly writing goals. In just the past three weeks I've switched from daily word count goals to a weekly one. It's tough to predict whether I'll be able to churn out 4,000 words before lunch, or struggle all day to type a measly 500, so instead of saying, "I'm going to write 2,000 words every day this week," I'm saying, "I'm going to write 10,000 words this week." It's an ambitious number for me, but I try to take weekends off from writing and editing (work-life-balance and all that) so if I'm still a thousand words short on Saturday morning, I can play a little catch up. I think the key has been not capping myself at 2K for any given day, as I used to, as once I'd hit that number, I was off the hook, mentally clocked out for the rest of the day. Now I think, "I hit 2,000 easily. Better push for 3,000 in case tomorrow brings a word drought." It's working great so far, and I recommend it to other writers with fluctuating daily counts. A good month for me used to 30,000 words, and now I'm looking poised to bank about 45K.

4. Dog the Bounty Hunter's autobiography. Well, his second autobiography, anyhow. I'm just about done with Where Mercy is Shown, Mercy is Given. I grabbed it randomly from the library and checked it out without shame. It's not a literary masterpiece, but it's endlessly entertaining and surprisingly heartfelt.

5. No sugar = I lost three pounds. Actually, I couldn't tell you if it's absence of sugar or my getting back into yoga and calisthenics in the past couple weeks, but I've lost weight. It's likely both, of course. But ditching the sugar has definitely reduced the random carb cravings. As with meat last month, I'm really not missing it—the odd wistful twinge as the manfriend enjoys a block of chocolate or an ice cream sandwich, but nothing I could classify as true temptation.

6. Klondike. I've absolutely re-addicted myself to Klondike. Found the nifty free Real Solitaire app for my iPad and both the manfriend and I can't quit. Every morning over coffee, over lunch, over beers while dinner's cooking, before bed… In fact, new Angry Birds Rio levels came out yesterday and we haven't even opened them yet—the deck's got us by the throats.

6. Crank 2. We watched this movie randomly because for whatever reason, Revolver (another Jason Statham movie) decided not to play on Instant Watcher. I can't remember the last time the manfriend was so delighted by a movie. We'd never seen the original Crank, but that didn't matter. This action movie was spastic, incessant, ridiculous, nearly seizure-inducing…but really fun. Plus it's got Statham in a fitted hoodie, running really fast, all throughout the movie. And you know what a fast-running, desperate man does to me. He also electrocutes himself with jumper cables every ten minutes or so, which I found oddly stirring.

Hope everyone's enjoying their Junes so far!

10K Training, Day One

This morning was my first structured training workout toward my new goal of running a 10K (6.2 miles). Since I wasn't starting directly from the sofa, I picked Week Seven, Day One of the Couch to 10K iPod app's regimen. Five-minute warm-up walk, then alternate four minutes of running with two minutes of walking for fifty-eight minutes, then five minutes' cool-down.

Note to self, eat bigger breakfast…

but not whatever this is.

I'm not used to running for more than a half-hour at a time, so there were some predictably rude awakenings around the halfway point. The artificial energy from my coffee buzz dissipated. My legs went from feeling like capable springs to sacks of meat by the forty-five-minute mark, and my blood sugar crashed right around that same time. I'm going to have to eat a bigger breakfast on training days. Note to self: buy bananas. I didn't get too thirsty since it was cool and damp outside, and the walking intervals gave me adequate opportunities to recupe from all the panting. And to slow my breathing enough to take those inhalations that "hit bottom," as I think of it. But in a few weeks' time I'll probably need one of those runners' hip-holster things with a water bottle slot. And maybe a banana slot.

I started this morning in a funk, one of those randomly lousy Monday moods we all get. I'm still feeling predictably naked, post release-week, and my usual healthy layer of author-armor was nowhere in sight. But after an hour-plus of sweating, my body's so chock-full of serotonin and endorphins and accomplishment, I don't care who says what about me. If my manfriend's reading this, you know which Reddit meme cartoon archetype to picture me as.

The workout was a challenge, but not torture. Oh and as a bonus, I burned about six hundred calories—looking forward to replacing those at lunchtime. My arsenal of ridiculous pop and hip-hop music helped, as always. I had to bulk up my exercise playlist considerably to fill sixty-eight minutes, so I busted out some of my all-time favorite running tracks—Nelly / Ride Wit Me, Lyrics Born / Callin' Out, Skee-Lo / I Wish, plus a ton of Kylie and Gaga and Usher, Missy Elliot and Ludacris and George Michael. A motley, upbeat line-up. My manfriend, when he runs, does so to his beloved mournful, dirgey, lyric-less rock, which does not compute with me. He runs like he's on a vision quest. I run like I'm in my own music video. Whatever keeps your legs moving, I suppose.

Bucked from the Hobby Horse

My manfriend brought home his very first guitar this week, and has been spending a lot of time holed up in his office with his shiny new Precious and amp and how-to book, the muted sounds of electric strumming leaking through the door while I read at night or work on my own projects on the weekends. Do I feel neglected? Hell no! I've been nagging him to cultivate a new hobby for a long time, so I'm pumped. Plus his fingers are getting all callused. Growr.

Anyone else recently take up a new pastime? Tell me so that I may be jealous. I'm missing a hobby of my own at the moment.

Oh, my poor neglected tub o' yarn.

For a long time, writing was my hobby. Then when I lost my day job as a designer and had a few months of severance pay and unemployment insurance to help keep Team Awesome afloat, writing became my "jobby"—the thing my manfriend and I decided I should pursue as though it were my full-time paid gig, even though I wasn't yet published. It was clear to the both of us that I was good at it, and it fulfilled me more than working at my old job (which while fairly fun and decent-paying, wasn't feeling especially creative after five years of working on the same types of projects). So I had our collective couple's blessing to pursue writing until the money got unreasonably tight. And who'd have guessed it, six months into the lark, I sold my first book! Followed by another dozen. Though money is indeed way tighter than it was when I earned a salary, I'm still full-steam-ahead on making writing my full-time gig.

So, my hobby-turned-jobby turned into an actual job. Which leaves me hobbiless. I have a bunch of quasi-hobbies—reading, watching reality TV (while drinking wine), playing Angry Birds (also while drinking wine)… But those are passive occupations, requiring little of me aside from my attention, so I don't qualify them as hobbies. Walking and running are more physical upkeep than pastimes to me, cooking is as pleasurable as always but still a household obligation, so I don't count those, either. I find myself with occasional graphic design projects, for myself or others, but they're more diversions, not so much what I think of as a hobby.

A hobby is a long-term activity, in my view, one that requires you to continuously learn and gain competency. Like the study of a foreign language, yoga, painting watercolors, rock-climbing, poetry, amateur filmmaking, martial arts [wistful sigh], quilting, non-essential cooking, sailing, community theater, skateboarding, carving the faces of foreign dignitaries onto walnuts… You see where I'm going with this attempted definition. Something persistently challenging and hopefully creative. Something you look forward to while you toil away at your day job, and occasionally fantasize that you might one day make a living from.

Well my new day job, miracle of miracles, is still as creatively fulfilling as it was before The Call. So by the end of the day or the work week my mind is tapped, hence all my passive "hobbies". Staring at a page or screen is all I've got in me. I used to knit (I can produce a variety of impressive items, all of them roughly rectangle-shaped), practice Taekwondo, study French, sew, and try my hand at a variety of visual arts projects. I've always tended to grow bored easily then seek out new challenges as soon as I felt I'd grown competent with (if not mastered) a given skill. But now my brain's mush after fifty hours of working on projects that, generally speaking, I have massive creative control over.

Hmmm, suddenly this post sounds really douchey. Let me be clear—I'm not complaining! But I do miss having a hobby in my life. I've shifted to having projects instead, since that implies a challenge with a finite lifespan—an end. I very much feel that writing is something I'm still in the midst of getting good at, and I just don't have the energy to cultivate any additional creative skills just now.

What happens when your hobby turns into your profession? Does it become your "calling"? Your "passion"? Your "life"? I don't really know. But I do know that I'm just a little jealous of my manfriend, sequestered this very moment in his room, strumming away, with the promise of years of creative growth and challenge spread before him, should he choose to continue on his musical journey. I guess for now I'll just have to live vicariously. Possibly while drinking wine.

Thrusty Thursday: Adam Levine

Full disclosure: I really know very little about musician Adam Levine. Google tells me he's the frontman for Maroon 5, a band I'm fairly sure I'd recognize at least one single by…do the kids still use the term "single"? I also know that he's not Rob Thomas and looks nothing like Rob Thomas, but when I hear "Maroon 5", for some reason I get that Rob Thomas / Santana song in my head.

Is that a velvet suit? Oh rockstars, 

the things you can get away with!

Anyhow, the reason I'm highlighting Adam Levine is that I've been on the digital prowl for foxy, edgy Jewish men. For a book! It's for a book. Needing visual inspiration for a hero I'm just beginning to write, I Googled "hot Jewish men", and you know what? It actually worked. The search returned some rather intimidating photos from such sources as the Men of Israel calendar, but otherwise I got what I was after. Way to go, internet! Adam Levine stood out, as he's got short dark hair, a five o'clock shadow, subdued rockstar dress sense, and arm tattoos, like my hero. Pre-fab muse! Yes, you'll do nicely. And so with that, I must get down to work.

Heavy Metal Penguin

My thanks to Kramy at City Dangers for the heads-up. We have a rockhopper penguin at the New England Aquarium who used to do this on occasion, back when I was a regular pengo volunteer. We called it Noir's Happy Dance. How silly I feel now, to realize he was just moshing.

Best "New" Things This Year

Bear in mind I'm not always at the cutting edge of, well, most anything, so these are new-to-me favorites for the year, not necessarily actual new things. But anyhow, here's what topped my lists in 2010:

MOVIES District 13 (French, post-Apocalyptic-ish action, 2004), Cemetery Junction (drama, 2010), Ong-Bak (Thai, martial arts action, 2003), and Harlan County, USA (documentary, 1976).

MUSIC My boy Elvis Costello's new album, National Ransom (2010), various Lady Gaga singles, and a slew of outdated pop and hip-hop I won't embarrass myself by ennumerating.

BOOKS A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs (2008), The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (2010), 703 by Nancy Makin (2010), Attachment (2008) by Isabel Fonseca, anything by Kristan Higgins.

TV SHOWS Louis (comedy, 2010), An Idiot Abroad (reality / travel / comedy, 2010), various new-to-me seasons of Top Gear (reality, current incarnation 2002—present), seasons one through five of Say Yes to the Dress (reality, 2007–present). Oh and Hoarders, as always.

GAMES Angry Birds and Angry Birds Seasons (iPad, 2009, 2010), Mario Kart 64 (Nintendo 64 emulator, originally 1996), Machinarium (Mac, 2009), Boggle (iPad, 2010).

Sunday Confessional: My Favorite Bad Music

Obviously, music is far too subjective for us to really label anything irrefutably good or bad, but you know what I mean. I went to art school, where the majority tends to turn up its collective nose at manufactured pop tunes, that strain of music designed to be ear-wormish and profitable, to trick listeners into mistaking its catchiness for quality. Sort of the way fast food joints trick us into thinking their delicious fatty fare is preferable to nutritious, less exploding-in-my-mouth-with-flavors-spawned-just-off-the-New-Jersey-Turnpike options.

But I'll own it—I love shitty pop music. It started with Elvis Costello. My boy Elvis is not shitty by any stretch of the imagination, but when I heard "The Other Side of Summer" for the first time in eleventh grade whilst working at my local record store, I was hooked. Glib message or not, it was undeniably pop, yet I adored it. I'd long ago denounced the genre and had spent the years following that shift freebasing Nine Inch Nails and Tool and other dirgey, mopey, restless rock, and I was finally ready to enjoy some chirpy, commercial pop.

As I grew older and got more into exercising, I gravitated toward pop to accent my workouts. It's no fun jogging to Tori Amos. Also as I got older, I began to yearn for my favorite childhood albums, ones wrapped up in memories of my mom dancing me around the living room—The Monkees, Olivia Newton John, the Bee Gees, Debbie Gibson, Phil Collins, Tina Turner. Those examples are all on my iPod now and I listen to them regularly, probably driving my manfriend up the wall. I've also added some artists not favored by my parents, but burned into my earliest cultural memories nevertheless, such as ABBA and Prince.

My pod is equally rife with more current pop offenders, like Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Rhianna, Beyoncé… Then a few that are suspended somewhere between new and nostalgic—Eminem, Destiny's Child, Christina Aguilera, Mandy Moore, NSYNC. Those are the ones I probably secretly liked when I was in college and TRL was still reflecting (or perhaps dictating) the popular tastes, but I refused to admit my enjoyment of them to myself or my peers. Thank goodness I've since gotten over myself.

Let me scan my pod and see what other dark confessions lurk in my Artists list… Ah yes! Anastacia, Craig David, Elton John, the Fugees, George Michael, Jamiroquai, John Denver, Kylie Minogue (a LOT of Kylie Minogue), Ludacris, Mariah Carey, Missy Elliot (a LOOOT of Missy Elliot), Nelly, ODB, Salt-n-Pepa, Sean Paul, Shakira, the Spice Girls, Usher, Will Smith…

So, I've shown you mine. Now show me yours. What dirty little secrets is your iPod harboring?