I’m always in the market for good tunes to run or workout to. I just made a new playlist, and in case you’re interested, here it is. I have very random taste in music, and a lot of these songs came from recommendations (for example, Biloxxxi recommended that I invest in the Andrew W.K. album, and judging on the four or five songs that played during my run this morning, I think it was a good investment!). I also tend to run to heavier music than I listen to on a daily basis; my only real qualification for a song to be included is that it either (a) have a fast tempo or (b) be a song I really like that gets me pumped, even if it’s not particularly up-beat. So enjoy!
- It’s Time to Party, Andrew W.K.
- Don’t Stop Living in the Red, Andrew W.K.
- Last Caress, The Misfits
- Party Til You Puke, Andrew W.K.
- I’m On A Boat, The Lonely Planet f/ T-Pain
- This Much Fun, Cowboy Mouth
- Ready to Die, Andrew W.K.
- Rock Star, Hannah Montana
- Read Between the Lines, KSM
- Kids in America, Cascada
- Airplanes, B.o.B. f/ Hayley Williams
- Replay, Iyaz
- Give It Up To Me, Shakira f/ Lil Wayne
- Issues, Mindless Self Indulgence
- Party Hard, Andrew W.K.
- Break Your Heart, Taio Cruz & Luda
- I Love NYC, Andrew W.K.
- My First Kiss, 3OH!3 f/ Ke$ha
- Girls Own Love, Andrew W.K.
- Play Somethin Country, Brooks & Dunn
- In My Head, Jason Derulo
- Tik Tok, Ke$ha
- Bodies, Drowning Pool
- Fun Night, Andrew W.K.
- Encore/Numb, Jay-Z & Linkin Park
- I Get Wet, Andrew W.K.
- Down, Jay Sean f/ Lil Wayne
- Summer of ‘69, Bryan Adams
- She is Beautiful, Andrew W.K.
- Shawty Get Loose, Lil Mama
- Glad to be Alive, Cowboy Mouth
- Joe Strummer, Cowboy Mouth
- LoveGame, Lady Gaga
- Bring ‘em Out, T.I.
- Workin’ for the Weekend, Loverboy
- Shots, LMFAO & Lil Jon
- I Will, . . . But, SheDaisy
- Whatcha Say, Jason Derulo
- Redneck Woman, Gretchen Wilson
- Talk Dirty To Me, Poison
- World Without End, Five Iron Frenzy
- I Can Transform Ya, Chris Brown f/ Lil Wayne & Swizz Beatz
- 18 and Life, Skid Row
- Elevator, Flo Rida f/ Timbaland
- Drunken Lullabies, Flogging Molly
- Run to the Hills, Iron Maiden
- Are You Dead Yet?, Children of Bodom
- Got to Do It, Andrew W.K.
- Let It Rock, Kevin Rudolf f/ Lil Wayne
- Warrior, Scandal
- Ojos Asi, Shakira & Amr Diab
- Poker Face, Lady Gaga
- Just a Friend, Biz Markie
- Kiss Me Deadly, Lita Ford
- Ballroom Blitz, Sweet
- 4 Minutes, Madonna f/ Justin Timberlake & Timbaland
- Yeah!, Usher f/ Lil Jon & Ludacris
- Love is a Battlefield, Pat Benatar
- I Made It, Kevin Rudolf f/ Birdman, Jay Sean, & Lil Wayne
- Cherokee, Europe
- Video Killed the Radio Star, The Buggles
- Fat Bottomed Girls, Queen
- Independent, Webbie f/ Lil Boosie & Lil Phat
- The Boys of Summer, The Ataris
- Toes, Zac Brown Band
- Obsessed, Mariah Carey f/ Gucci Mane
- Bawitdaba, The Rock Heroes
- Run This Town, Jay-Z f/ Rihanna
- Playboys of the Southwestern World, Blake Shelton
- Yeah Ya Know (Takers), T.I.
- Poison, Alice Cooper
- Girls, Girls, Girls, Motley Crue
- Rebel Yell, Billy Idol
- C*m On Feel the Noize, Quiet Riot
- Man In The Box, Alice in Chains
- BedRock, Young Money & Lloyd
- Bad Romance, Lady Gaga
- Pour Some Sugar On Me, Def Leppard
- Africa, Toto
- ‘Till I Collapse, Eminem
- Uprising, Muse
- Baba O’Riley, The Who
- Possum Kingdom, The Toadies
- Lose Yourself, Eminem
- Love in an Elevator, Aerosmith
- It’s Raining Men, Weather Channel
- Get Low, Lil Jon & the Eastside Boys f/ Ying Yang Twins
- Live Your Life, T.I.
- Holy Diver, Dio
- Sweet Child o’ Mine, Guns & Roses
- Paradise by the Dashboard Light, Meat Loaf
- White Pearl, Black Oceans, Sonata Arctica
If you know of any songs that I missed that are worthy of inclusion, feel free to comment! Bonus points for any readers who can identify how I have them organized…
Hey y’all, long time no blog, I know. My words aren’t so great anyway, so here are some better words I recommend you read and enjoy!
First, a passage that could be written about me, but for the fact that its subject is in her fifties. It’s by Dave Eggers, from the introduction to the 2004 edition of The Best American Non-Required Reading:
She was fifty years old when she began to do this, to say “I appreciate it” each time she said “Thank you.” She said these words during interactions with clerks, bus drivers, cabbies, cashiers, bellhops, telephone operators. While for the first four or so decades of her life it seemed enough to say “Thank you” or “Thanks” or “Thanks a lot,” now she seems invariably to add “I appreciate it,” or more accurately, ” ‘Preciate it,” to her Thank yous. She can’t pinpoint when this happened, but it’s now involuntary, it’s constant, and the odd thing, the strange twist, is that she damn well means it every time. She really does appreciate it when people do kind things for her, no matter how trivial, no mater how expected the service might be given the person’s line of work. She is thankful when any human interaction goes off without a hitch, so thankful that her heart gets down on its knees in gratitude and her mouth translates this into words: ” ‘Preciate it.” Has she had so many ugly interactions in her life that she feels thankful for those that go smoothly? Perhaps. At her age, they have added up – the tussles with congenitally angry people, the random misunderstandings, the clashes with the uncompromising or the crazy. All she wants now is to pass through days without rancor. Days without rancor! She could engrave that on her door, tattoo it on her chest. Does she fear people? She does not. Is she affected when her meeting of a new person, in any context, goes poorly? She is devastated. For days she carries with her the sneers of surly pharmacy counter-persons, the inexplicable rage of the woman whose long-leashed dog got caught up in her legs and who somehow blamed her, the entangled! These conflicts affect her too much, she knows. Every one brings her close to a precipice from which she seems destined to fall into a two-day funk, and thus when instead of being pushed over she is pulled back and embraced, even the slightest amount — is extended the most basic human courtesy — she finds herself soaring. Seeing her life as a series of potential skirmishes, she appreciates, damn well ‘preciates, peace of any kind.
Second, in case you missed it, is David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to the 2005 grads of Kenyon College. I blogged about it before, you can read it here.
Third, a quote from Yann Martel’s first novel, Life of Pi (which, if you will permit me a digression, and you will, is infinitely more enjoyable than his most recent novel, Beatrice and Virgil):
The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.
From a quote about recognizing fear to one about recognizing love, the fourth quote is from Janisse Ray’s Wild Card Quilt, a novel about a woman who returns to her small Georgia hometown nearly two decades after leaving it for good:
I know, too, the danger of silence, as well as of leaving things unnamed and unrecognized. By understanding what you feel as love, by naming love, you claim it. By claiming a thing, you give it life. Then when something happens to yank it away from you, you are prepared for the sorrow that befalls. You are prepared to create anew that which is beloved. Then you will do whatever you can do to keep it alive.
Fifth, a quote from a book I don’t think I ever managed to finish reading: Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines. (I did read — and I heartily endorse — Ghosh’s The Glass Palace. Hey, nobody ever died saying “I wish I had digressed less,” right?)
Tridib . . . had said that we could not see without inventing what we saw, so at least we could try to do it properly. And then, because she shrugged dismissively and said: Why? Why should we try, why not just take the world as it is? I told her how he had said that we had to try because the alternative wasn’t blankness — it only meant that if we didn’t try ourselves, we would never be free of other people’s inventions.
I’m more than a little obsessed with Lewis Carroll and his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; you can (and should) read it online for free here, but here are a few of my favorite excerpts:
“Well in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else, if you run very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen, “Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar sternly. ‘Explain yourself!’
‘I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’
‘I don’t see,’ said the Caterpillar.
‘I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,’ Alice replied very politely, ‘for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.’
Next, a quote that was shared one night at a sorority chapter meeting in college, which is worth sharing again here. It’s by Veronica Shoffstall, and it’s a poem (or from a poem?) entitled “Comes the Dawn”:
After a while you learn the subtle difference
between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning,
and company doesn’t mean security,
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts,
and presents aren’t promises,
And you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes open,
with the grace of a woman – not the grief of a child.
And you learn to build all of your roads on today,
because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain,
and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn
that even sunshine burns if you get too much -
So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul,
instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure,
that you really are strong,
and you really do have worth.
And you learn and learn . . .
with every goodbye you learn.
And finally, I’ll leave you with a few shorter quotes:
“Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music — the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself.” ~Henry Miller
“Love the moment, and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all boundaries.” ~Corita Kent
“I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.” ~Mother Teresa
“In order not to feel the horrible burden of time which breaks your back and bends you down to the earth, you must be unremittingly intoxicated. But on what? Wine, poetry, virtue, as you please. But never be sober.” ~Charles-Pierre Baudelaire
“I broke something today, and I realized I should break something once a week . . . to remind me how fragile life is.” ~Andy Warhol
“Give me the luxuries in life and I will willingly do without the necessities.” ~Frank Lloyd Wright
“Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk – and to act.” ~Andre Malraux
I owe y’all a few posts, but those can wait, because this one is deserving. Rarely nowadays do you witness someone do something totally un-selfishly and without the hope of personal benefit. Even if there is some benefit to the actor, it’s nevertheless rare to see them go out of their way to help someone else whom they have no real reason to help and could just as easily ignore.
Tonight, while hostessing at the restaurant, a young guy walked in and asked if he could order something to go. I handed him a menu, and he turned to the woman behind him, who appeared to be in her mid-forties or -fifties and walked with a cane. The woman asked if there was a cheeseburger on the menu, and the guy showed her the list. She balked — these burgers were expensive (and to be fair, they kind of are: starting at $9 or $10) — don’t worry about it, he explained. She told him what she wanted and he headed to the bar to order it. At this point, I assume this guy either knows this woman or is with her as some part of a volunteer program to assist people with various activities of daily living that they are unable to do alone.
While the guy was ordering for her, the woman approached me and explained that she did not know him, but that he was buying her dinner out of the kindness of his own heart. Then I noticed the paper cup she was carrying with her. This woman had been asking for money outside the restaurant. No doubt many people had passed by without giving her a second glance or, for that matter, a first glance. But this stranger was different. After stopping, instead of putting a dollar or two in her cup, he escorted her to the nearest restaurant (mind you, there are places nearby that are much cheaper, including a McDonalds a mere two blocks away) and offered to buy her whatever she wanted.
The woman explained to me that she didn’t have any money. She had MS, and while she did have health insurance which covered the bulk of the $4,000 she spends each month on medicine, she remained responsible for a $65 co-pay. She had also just gotten divorced from her ex-husband, who apparently cleaned out their checking account on his way out. The divorce and the recurring co-payments, together with other necessary expenditures, had left her without enough money for food.
A lot of folks automatically judge people who are begging for money as being somehow deserving of that fate. I am guilty of it myself. And some of those people have brought it on themselves, whether through excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol or somehow squandering their resources. And it is easy to assume that the dollar you give a homeless person will go to alcohol or drugs. But how many people use that as their excuse for not giving that dollar to someone? If you are so concerned that this person is going to waste the dollar on alcohol or drugs, are you not at all concerned that this person WOULDN’T do that, and will instead go hungry again?
David Foster Wallace, a favorite writer of mine, explained in his 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class of Kenyon College that the real benefit of a liberal arts education is not the ability to think at all, but rather the ability to consciously choose what you think about:
[M]ost days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line — maybe she’s not usually like this; maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband, who’s dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicles department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.
Why is it so difficult for us — all of us, including me; I’m not trying to be preachy — to take Wallace’s advice and choose to think the best instead of assuming the worst? Instead of refusing to give away a dollar for our purported fear that it will ultimately hurt the recipient and society when the recipient spends it on alcohol or drugs, why can we not hand a dollar to them and assume they will spend it on dinner, as they purport to intend to? And even if we are steadfast in our belief that our kindness would simply further societal ills, why do we not do as the stranger tonight did and offer to give someone food instead of money?
I intend to pay forward this stranger’s random act of kindness, and I hope you will, too.
I’m having a bad day, and I’m fixing to head back home for a few days to let people take care of me and make me feel better about the state of my life (friends: take note, this is your task while I’m home). In the meantime, here is a craigslist ad from a few months back that I relate to all too well at the moment. Hope you enjoy. (The craigslist ad expired, so the link is to above the law; the image of the ad is below.)
Other unemployed-attorney humor, and not the first time lawyers have been compared to prostitutes…:
xo,
Sally Sunshine