Not even close, bud.

I was talking the other night with a friend of mine.  We had had a few Negronis. Not too many, for a night when both of us had to be up at the crack of way too early the next day. One of us for work, one of me to catch a plane. We got to talking about music, and the songs that really speak to us, and whether or not that evolves. 

Fix You, by Coldplay. That's mine. Now my secret is out. Want to punch me in the gut while we're having dinner? Toss that one into the mix, and take a sly glance my way when those first few haunting notes are played. See what kind of mood I'm in that night. I'll either end up laughing along at the joke, or you'll find that I've become a shitty guest, all sullen and stoic, ready to hide out in the kitchen for the rest of the night.  I'm far more likely to laugh now, but I have my days. We all do.

When it first came out, I listened to it and heard one thing. Lights will guide you home. I lumped it in with Phil Collins' Take Me Home as a song that I could listen to as the end of a journey was near. It meant I'd get to see familiar things soon. It meant that I'd have my dog running down the hallway to greet me. It made me smile. I heard what I wanted to hear.

Then, as life does, things happened. When you feel so tired but you can't sleep. Tears streamed down my face. Far more often than I wanted them to. I listened to this song again. Found a whole new meaning in it. Found that it was an outlet for all that I was feeling, even on the days I didn't know what I was feeling. Found that when Aaron Sorkin used it in an episode of The Newsroom(Season 1, Ep. 4), I had to rewind TiVo a few times to get through the full episode. I was a mess. Literally.  Figuratively. Everything in between.

About halfway through, though, there's a great guitar break.  Soaring.  Hopeful.  Optimistic. The exact opposite of the opening organ chords.  Like the song, halfway through, I found hope in this song.  I found optimism.  I found a live canary in the mine.  The tears had stopped.  The world was still spinning, and I was going to be OK.  If you never try, you'll never know just what you're worth.  I found I was worth more than I gave myself credit for. So much more. And now, everyday, I work to live up to that.

Yes, tears streamed down my face, and sometimes, they still do. No, I'm not fixed. I'm not that silly to think I'm fixed, or that I'll ever be fixed. But I'm better. Striving to continue to improve. Who knows, maybe I'll even find a new song. Suggest one, or share yours.

Freedom through digitization

I've been working on a project for a few months now.  Just a background thing, really, as I have time for it.  I'm taking all the music I have on CD and ripping it to my hard drive.  Digitizing the collection, we librarians call it.  I know, I know, I'm not technically a librarian right now, but I have a degree, I may as well use it now and then, even if it's just to establish that I know a little bit of what I'm talking about.

I'm mostly done with this project.  I now have a stack of CDs sitting here, ready to go to the secondhand store.  If I get a few dollars for them I'll be happy.  I'll be more happy to not have to store them in the house anymore.  I'll be even more happy to not have to pack them up and drag them around the next time I move.

Why bother?  Beyond saving the untold dollars that buying it all from a commercial service would cost(I've already paid for them once, so why pay a second time?), I'm able to put all this on at least two different hard drives, so in event of an unplanned disaster, I will still have it all available.  I had an external hard drive fail just a few months ago, and may have lost hundreds of photos.  Still waiting on the recovery efforts for that one, so I don't know the final result yet, but it did spur me to action.  New hard drive in hand, another old hard drive cleaned up and reformatted, all sorts of backups done now.  That's right, I said "unplanned disaster."  Is there any other kind?

Next up on the digitization horizon?  Photos.  I've just finished looking through my parent's house and they have album after album of photos of my siblings and I.  Seems like my entire youth was documented on film, especially the embarrassing parts.  But after seeing the aftermath of Super Storm Sandy, and how people were absolutely despondent over the loss of not just their homes but all their belongings, including photos of loved ones.  I don't know why, but it sparked another random thought in my head that maybe the time to digitize is now, before something happens.

Once the music is done, the photos are next.  One big digital archive for me, and the freedom to know that unless I lose all the digital copies at the same time, I'm covered.

Hillary and the miles

Just saw on the news a segment on Hillary Clinton's health issues.  They were talking about how much she travels and how exhausting it must be. 

In the last three years she's flown almost 900,000 miles over the course of about 370 days on the road. That's a lot.  In terms that everyone can understand that's like going from New York to Los Angeles every third day.  That's just over six hours on a plane every three days.  It's a lot. 

I fly a lot, but nowhere near what she does.  Even with all the perks she has(a bed on the plane), I'm surprised that she hasn't been sick more often.  I'm surprised she hasn't taken some time on the bench due to "exhaustion".

She is, let's be honest, to be admired for her stamina and tenacity, regardless of your politics.