| A few New Year's Thoughts . . . |
[Jan. 1st, 2008|09:54 am] |
Hole's Celebrity Skin is probably the most underrated reasonably well known rock album ever. From the opening of title song through "Awful" to the incredibly beautiful and sad "Malibu" to the rest of the album (errr, CD, I'm dating myself a bit here, aren't I?; new lps were already nonexistent by the time Celebrity Skin came out in the late 90's, I think), the whole CD just rocks-- the melodic strains of the music perfectly punctuating the by turns (and sometimes simultaneously) sad, angry, bitter, ironic, insightful, frequently self-mocking but always spirited and defiant lyrics.
Hole may be the most underrated reasonably well known rock band ever, as long as we're at it. ("reasonably well known" is thrown in because there are very good, possibly even genuinely great, artists out there who have a fan base in the hundreds, and that just sucks way more than someone who at least briefly got the spotlight not getting the respect they should). Live Through This is maybe a bit depressing for some people, especially the maybe best song on the album, "Doll Parts", but it too was as great as any of her husband's stuff, which is great indeed. (I'm *not* downing Kurt Cobain or Nirvana; he was a great artist and they were a great band, if I did some kind of all time top 100 list of albums or songs, they'd certainly have something there somewhere and they fully deserve all their acclaim; I'm just saying Courtney and Hole were right there with them, which is not something you hear very often)
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Not doing any overviews of my year, cause . . . just, no. I will make a comment on when I was 19, tho, and that year & it's aftermath's relevance to one of my least favorite sayings ever, which is relevant to this year.
When I was 19, I had just pulled out of a depressive period (I still give credit to both Springsteen and Prince for helping w/this; music can be a wonderful thing), decided that given how talented my test scores indicated I was, I needed to do something important and worthwhile w/myself, rededicated my life to Christ (I was a Christian back then, tho a pro-environment, pro-choice, pro-tolerance, pro-helping others Christian who already had a certain wariness of organized religion and wondered what some of these people thought they were reading), started writing and working to get myself in shape to walk on the (very good, top 10 nationally ranked) track team the next fall, and generally was all positive. This payed immediate dividends. Aside from just feeling better when you're in shape, I met someone cool who I wrote my first song about (and the only song I can still remember much of) and made a date w/her for the following weekend and was totally stoked.
Then a big egg-sized tumor showed up in my groin the next night, and was still there for the date, which was absolutely wonderful but wound up w/no sex cause I was embarrassed of her seeing this and thinking I was icky and deformed.
So much for my big push to accomplish all this stuff. I thought I had given myself a hernia weightlifting, and didn't have this tumor checked out for 3 *months*; it turned out to be a kind of lymphoma that normally shows up in the jaw of children under 6 in Africa and in AIDS patients, and usually doubles in # of cells every 24 hrs and kills people w/in 90 days; when I talk about having both better and worse luck than most people, this sort of thing is what I mean, tho some of the good luck might be attributed to my efforts to faith heal myself every night.
I did make the track team the following fall, despite a doctor who ran cross country collegiately telling me it would be four years before I would be competitive again even if I was Olympic class, but while I had never been injury prone before, this time they tore me apart. Achilles tendon strain. All four of my wisdom teeth cut out right at the start of track season. Ankle sprains and breaks. This sort of thing has continued, well, forever, since then.
Which leads to two observations:
(1) When it comes to illness and/or threat of death, it is so much, much MUCH easier to deal with bad things happening to you than it is to someone you care about. I guess that is sort of obvious, but I don't hear it remarked on much.
(2) That least favorite saying thing. "Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stronger." This makes a nice rallying cry if you go out of your way to avoid thinking about it, I suppose, but it's such obvious bullshit. Sometimes things that don't kill you make you weaker and more vulnerable and easier prey for the next thing. Sometimes they leave you traumatized or paralyzed or completely helpless. And sometimes it just depends. Surviving the cancer did make me mentally tougher and more confident, but the chemo left my physically a lot less durable after. And getting smacked down by one endless thing after another off and on ever since then? Not thinking I'm much stronger due to that. And migraines, which were both before and after? Those don't do anything good at all. And all the chronic hellstorms of the last few years? Wow, those might make us all so strong we friggin keel over dead.
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I might do a favorite books post of some sort later this month, tho it won't be a straight top ten kind of thing like last year. I read multiple books by several authors that I like, plus I'm not sure how to rank things and will more likely do a "these are my favorite things" fic list not in order, if I ever do it. Non-fiction will be separate, again. Plus I'm in the middle of a couple of things I wish to finish first.
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Best wishes for a Happy and Blessed and fun and relaxing and uplifting and enlightening 2008 to you all, and best wishes to the world that 2008 elections everywhere give us the sort of leaders we need to save this place and make it fun to live in! |
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