Because sometimes blogging is better than therapy

This started out as a post about R.E.M. I have 299 R.E.M. songs on my iPod and I've been listening to them for the past couple of days at work.

R.E.M. has been my favorite band since the mid-90s when I was a freshman in High School. I fell in love with them sometime between Automatic for the People and Monster.

At the same time I was falling in love with R.E.M., the show My So-Called Life debuted.

Somehow, in my mind, the two will always be inexplicably linked.

And this is where this post takes an wildly different turn than I originally intended it to...

Imagine being surrounded by kids who loved grunge or hip hop and telling them that you favorite band was a bunch of middle aged guys from Athens, Ga. My love for Michael's melancholy voice and nimble lyrics made me feel intellectually superior to my peers. In High School, I was invisible. Loving R.E.M. made me feel like I stood out.

I fancied myself a brunette Angela Chase--cool beyond words with a sweet, fragile sensibility. The truth is, I was a lot more like Brian Krakow--socially awkward, geeky, and pretending not to care what other people think while wanting desperately to be accepted.

Like every teenager ever, I struggled to identify who I was and to accept the parts of myself that made me feel different from my peers. I was bookish and quiet and didn't dress quite right. I didn't have perfect hair or social graces. I didn't go to football games or dances or to parties.

Honestly, I kind of carried my pain like a cross I had to bear. I got an almost sick amount of pleasure from being on the outside looking in. I felt intensely lonely sometimes, but I didn't do anything to change my situation. I could've cut my hair or bought new clothes. I could've gone to football games. I could've worked harder to "fit in." Instead, I reveled in my outcast-ness. But I wasn't even really an outcast, truthfully. An outcast would've been made fun of or treated poorly. Me? I was invisible to most of the people I went to school with. Just another body they bumped into in the hallway between math class and lunch.

R.E.M. spoke to me then, made me feel normal in much the same way that watching My So-Called Life did. Angela Chase and Brian Krakow made me feel like it was okay to want to be liked and to hurt when I not only wasn't like but also wasn't noticed. R.E.M. spoke to the quiet place in me that felt uncomfortable in my own skin like nothing else I had ever heard.

I don't actually remember what my point was. When I started writing, this was going to be an ode to R.E.M. Somewhere along the way, though, it became a blog post about me. It kind of feels like an ode to the 16-year old me who just wanted to be noticed.

Rainy days and Mondays

I listen to my iPod at work. I have always listened to music when I have work to do. Music helps me focus and helps me be more productive. I can't explain the "why" of it--it just does. When I was in college, I had the radio on (or CDs playing) for almost the entire four years.

Today is a rainy day in the StL. I don't have a window that faces outside, but I can see outside from my office. I work underground, so I can't see the rain falling, but I can hear it and I can see that it is gray.

For some reason, the weather is dictating the music I'm listening to. I've been listening to dreamy, slightly melancholy music. So far I've listened to all of Recovering the Satellites by Counting Crows and I'm midway through Under the Table and Dreaming by DMB.

Listening to DMB is strange for me because I don't really like them all that much. It's nothing personal, I just don't like jam bands. Well, okay, I do like the Black Crows, but I don't like it when they jam in concert. I don't like Phish. I don't like The Dead. I don't like jam bands.

I do keep Under the Table and Dreaming on my iPod, though, for days like this.

Breaking on through

There are albums that, for a long time, I didn't "get." Some of them, I knew that I liked them, but I wasn't connecting with them in any meaningful way. Some of them, I couldn't even listen to them without hitting an invisible wall and turning them off in frustration.

For some reason, my level of connection with an album is sometimes connected with mood. I won't "get" an album until I listen to it whilst in a certain mood. Then, for some reason, it reaches into my soul and we connect. Sounds corny, right? It's actually quite soothing. The Dude and I have talked a lot about how I listen more closely to lyrics than he does and how I have to buy into something whole-heartedly before it makes an impact. So, it stands to reason that it might take the precise alignment of the stars for me to fully appreciate some things.

Erin McKeown's We Will Become Like Birds has been crazy problematic for me for a while. I latched on to McKeown when her album Sing You Sinners got rave reviews. I love her voice, but I didn't connect much with that album so I decided to go with an older album. Her voice is wispy and ephemeral which is funny because those two adjectives probably couldn't be used to describe McKeown herself. Based on all of the pictures of her I've seen, I would expect her voice to be deeper and smokier.

Anyway, I love McKeown's voice, but I was having such a hard time connecting with We Will Become Like Birds. It seemed too wildly esoteric for me. I couldn't crack her code. So, I'm sitting her in my PJs doing some work on my computer. It's a Saturday morning and I was up late last night hanging out with some people I've met from Church. I'm not usually slow to start my day, but today I am. I was listening to Modest Mouse's We were dead before the ship even sank and the next album in my iTunes playlist is McKeown's We will become like birds. Suddenly it makes sense. It's light playfulness makes sense to me suddenly on my lazy Saturday morning. It never clicked with me at work because I wasn't in the right headspace, I guess.

It's funny how those things work.