Month: March 2021

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How Does It Feel To Feel?

In two separate conversations lately, I’ve been giving friends updates on my current work and financial situation — spoilers: both have been better than they currently are — only to receive roughly the same response: “I’m surprised how upbeat you sound, despite everything that’s going on!”

I’m paraphrasing; one of the responses was more along the lines of, “Why do you sound so happy?” as if I was doing something wrong by not being more depressed, which I admit that I love. There’s something amusing to me about admonishing someone for not being distraught enough in reaction to dire circumstances, as if they’re doing it wrong. Aren’t we… supposed to not surrender to the history of the world, and all that kind of thing…?

Nonetheless, I’ve been caught with the idea that I am happier than I have the right to be over the last few days. Not that I feel as if I’m being criticized, per se, because that really is just a funny idea to me — be more sad, dammit — but, instead, that maybe I’m missing something that means far worse things than I have properly taken into account. What if I really should be more sad, or more worried, or more angry, than I currently am?

Ironically, that concern — that I’m missing some implication or meaning that others are instinctively, immediately grasping, and it’ll all end in tears — is what’s been keeping me up at night, almost literally. I’ve had dreams about things going worse and me not seeing it coming, and woken up uncertain and wishing I could remember the details more clearly, just in case.

The idea that there’s worse around the corner and I’ve been blissfully unaware has slowly been becoming the worse that’s been around the corner all along, and now it’s derailing whatever good mood I was in before this. Is this a sign that memetic warfare is possible and potent, or merely that I’m particularly impressionable when things are up in the air?

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Start Getting Real

Watching The Real World: Homecoming or whatever it’s called yesterday proved to be a nostalgic experience, if not for the exact reasons that the show’s makers had intended. Don’t get me wrong, it was fun enough to watch Kevin, Heather, Julie, Norman, and the other three whose names I forget go on at genuinely extraordinary and dull length about how unbelievable it was that they were in exactly the same loft space as they’d been in 29 years earlier — that the show couldn’t have been filmed a year later to coincide with an actual anniversary feels as if it says everything about how lazy and contrived the whole thing is, wonderfully — but the nostalgia I felt wasn’t actually anything to do with the show itself, not really.

In the UK, the first season of Real World didn’t air on MTV, but as a Sunday lunchtime show on mainstream network Channel 4. As such, it picked up a lot of viewers who would otherwise have passed it by out of ignorance or simply never watching MTV. For example, me. Even better, for a further example, my mother.

While I’ll happily put my hands up as a fan of reality show trash, the same would never be true of my mum, who never watched an episode of Big Brother or any similar show in her life. But that first season of Real World obsessed her as much as it did me, feeling like the social experiment that the show claimed to be at the time — Michael Apted’s 7Up series on fast-forward and filled with particularly insufferable people.

We’d watch the show together as we ate lunch, the rest of the family doing more important things. (It was a Sunday, so they were probably reading the newspapers; buying seven or eight massive Sunday papers, with all the supplements and the magazines, was a weekly tradition in my family; we’d spend the rest of the day reading them.) It was a small, silly thing, our watching together and getting breathlessly sucked in — and reacting together, at whatever ridiculousness was happening that week — but, even at the time, it felt comforting and important, an unexpected thing we shared and bonded over quietly.

Far more than what had happened to the original cast, that’s what the reunion made me think of; a summer of lunchtimes with my mum, almost three decades ago. It’s a favorite memory, when I return to it.

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Start Walkin’

I’m not entirely sure why it happened, but yesterday I heard “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” and became utterly obsessed with the second verse. I’ve known the song for decades, and like all good people have long loved its casual cool in the amazing bass line, the sassy Nancy Sinatra delivery, and the ridiculous, overly enthusiastic horn section at the fade out, but this was something new — and, I suspect, something long overdue.

It’s not as if I was unaware of how good the lyrics to the song were; there’s no way you can hear the song and not notice lines like “you’ve been messin’ where you shouldn’t be messin’” or the amazing “I just found me a brand new box of matches/And what he knows, you ain’t had time to learn.” Even the verse that caught my ear yesterday starts with the iconic “you’ve been lyin’ when you oughtta be truthin’,” another memorable earworm.

There’s something about that line that sets up what struck me, though; the confidence about it — here’s how you should behave — and the wonder of “truthing,” a word that, if it did exist previously, certainly wasn’t commonly used. It’s so bold, so self-assured, that it’s utterly compelling in how quickly it communicates the attitude of the entire song: I’m not like everyone else, and you’re going to realize that when I’m gone.

The rest of the verse follows suit, with each new line a masterclass in both wordplay and attitude. “And you keep losing when you oughta not bet” is such a great put down of the song’s target — it’s not just that they’re losing, they’re dumb enough not to know when to quit — while “you keep samin’ when you oughta be a’changin’,” is more of “truthing” again; a word that doesn’t exist but should, creating something that just feels true and easily understandable in opposition to the norm. We know what changing is, so of course “saming” makes sense.

And then, of course, the killer kiss-off, to end the verse (and, likely, the heart of the song’s target): “Now what’s right is right, but you ain’t been right yet.” Good luck coming back from that.

Yes, Nancy Sinatra performs the shit out of the song, and, yes, the arrangement is a masterpiece. But what caught me yesterday was, to be blunt, sheer jealousy over how well-written these lyrics really are. If only I had even half the skill to be able to write like this. Good job, Lee Hazlewood, you talented fuck.

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Not The Droids You’re Looking For

One of the unexpected side effects of getting back to pitching and sending out feelers for work is that I suddenly have to pay attention to my email again. That’s not to say that I’ve been completely ignoring my email before now — although I have, I confess, been guilty of paying less attention to it than I should — but there’s a new hunger and need in me to pounce every time a notification appears that I have new mail: what if it’s someone saying yes? What if it means I get to write one of the stories I really want to write?

(This suggests that I’ve pitched stories that I don’t really want to write; reader, the truth is, I’ve pitched a number of those stories, mostly because I think they might be useful to editors and/or outlets, and I want to be someone who appears useful to editors and/or outlets. I’m my own worst enemy, especially if those are the pitches everyone says yes to.)

The problem with this is that I’m not entirely sure that it’s healthy to get as excited — or, perhaps “agitated” would be a more appropriate term to use — whenever I get email, given just how much email I’m still getting from the days when I was writing for two high-profile outlets and therefore placed on seemingly every PR person’s mailing list. I’m seeing notifications come in and thinking, maybe this is the one, and it’s really just the one from someone I’ve never heard about telling me that this is the time I need to start listening to this particularly country artist, or that I need to treat myself and they have the ideal product to help with that.

On the one hand, these emails aren’t really a problem; I scan them and, for the most part, delete them, all of which is easy enough to do. But I’m getting tired from the emotional rollercoaster of thinking that things were about to change, only to realize that the only thing changing is the exciting life story of the creator of a new and exciting vegan restaurant in Los Angeles.