parens binubus

more than you want to know about a law school graduate/bar examinee who is also raising two children and doing her best at being a partner to her love.

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  • Sunday, May 07, 2006
    musical memories
    good lord, i am in FULL ON procrastination mode.

    Some songs coming up on my iPod, and the memories they trigger:

    1) Ursula Rucker "Supa Sista" -- Back during my divorce/initial separation, i had a friend who i worked with in the bookstore. she was single and very bitter after a nasty break up. on the weekends that the ex had the girls (we were in the same state at this time -- for a very short time), i often stayed with her. we had a good time together - listened to music, went to bars after work, etc. she introduced me to a good bit of music which was further out of the mainstream than I'd ever ventured (these are pre-Beloved days --- my non-mainstream music is now the staple of my musical diet, since i'm coupled with an ex college radio dj). One "tape" she had made for me was this poetry-music-R&B that i absolutely LOVED. but i lost the tape. i couldn't remember the artist's name, and all i could remember was one song "Supah Sistah" - that's how I remembered it. I started looking for it this year, and had the hardest time finding it.

    Then finally, the other day -- seriously, it was either Thursday or Friday -- I found it. I was so happy. Ursula Rucker's Supa Sista. I promptly downloaded the entire album off of iTunes. I found one song on there that I'm sure she didn't put on my tape -- it was a VERY graphic and painful story of a young girl being raped in a crack house while her mother was getting high. Graphic. So graphic, no one would EVER inflict it upon a mother of young children. i've already deleted it from the pod. It was just too hard. The rest, however, is fantastic, and I'm so happy to have it back. I highly recommend it.

    I lost the friend. it was pretty sad. once the ex moved to Wisconsin and I no longer had kid-free time, she sort of lost patience with me. bars and drinking was fun - sitting around and watching me cook for 2 tired kids was not. Then i got together with beloved, and she was even MORE upset with me - happiness in a relationship was Not Okay With Her.

    2) Aimee Mann "Just Like Anyone" --- beloved and i had what i would categorize as our "first date" around the time of both of our birthdays one year. he gave me Aimee Mann's Bachelor No. 2 (as well as a journal which he made for me). i had never heard her outside of 'Till Tuesday. I loved the album, and I still love Aimee Mann. For a later birthday (2 years later? 3?) he took me to a concert of hers in San Francisco. We had a great time. That was the last concert I've been to.

    3) Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young "Judy Blue Eyes" -- The first summer that Beloved and I spent together while the Things were in the Middle of the Country with the Schlurg, we went camping. I hadn't been camping since I was a Girl Scout. I never would have thought I'd start camping again. The Ex certainly never would have done it. And I was generally less adventurous with him, and having more expectations of luxury (HIS expectations, which I just took on as my own) rather than ones of enjoyment of nature and peace and DOING of things. But Beloved and I went camping. We drove down Route 101 in California to the Big Sur area, and went hunting for a camp site. We had a #1 option, but it was VERY FULL, and we ended up having to drive inland a good bit --- AFTER spending our first night in my car (i actually had a CAR back then! a rather nice Honda Accord). Beloved brought music. He brought CSN&Y, and I LOVED it. every time we had to pick a disk, i just wanted this one again. It was so peaceful and mellow, and so fed into the mood of the trip. I remember it playing while we were heading south on the windy roads, and I also remember the return trip into town, stuck in traffic heading up to the Bay Bridge, with it on the player again. We had the best time. I was so happy to be with him. And I still am.

    4) The Beatles "Blackbird" -- my uncle died in the year of 2001. He was 45 years old, and he died of a heart attack. It was less than 3 months after his wife (of roughly the same age) died of cancer. he'd had a very long fight with her illness. they were so happy together - they were married later in life, and were far from each other's first marriage. But they LOVED each other, and they LOVED life together. Uncle Bill was a real "eccentric" by the standards of my family. Even slightly "wild" -- turns out -- he smoked pot!!! [gasp! horror!!! god, i wish i knew him better before he died]. He had these crazy annual parties at his house with kegs and kegs of beer and wild people who got drunk [another gasp, more horror]. Once, my little brother (I think he was 8 or 9 at the time) got drunk at one of the parties.

    He died, though. And it was sudden, and it was sad -- people at the service were at the podium giving eulogies that were basically bullet points of reasons why it was NOT suicide, it was a HEART ATTACK!! He was that devestated over the loss of his [wonderful!] wife.

    As I've said before, my parents are fundamentalist Christians. My Uncle Bill was .... so NOT a fundamentalist Christian. But my father is his oldest brother. Therefore, he got to make the arrangements for the funeral. he called on his pastor, and on his friends to sing some music. They sang James Taylor's "You've Got a Friend" only, they stuck "in Jesus" on the end. of "Friend" --- every time.

    I sat there for that service absolutely RIGID with anger. I felt that they molested my Uncle's memory, his service, his everything. He had so many friends, and they were all the hippy-sort that Uncle Bill was [GOD, I wish I knew him better] - i'm sure they were much more livid than I was. My sis was having to try and calm me down b/c I think that my feelings were more than obvious on my face.

    his friends had a turn to sing, too. They sang Blackbird. I honestly feel like it's the first time I heard that song. In 2002.

    5) Billy Joel "She's Always a Woman to Me." I live in New England. I grew up in New England. In between, I lived in other parts of the country. I did not hear Billy Joel -- probably not even ONE TIME in those other states. But here? In New England? Billy Joel = God. Billy Joel = always hip. Billy Joel = On the Radio Once Per Hour. What the fuck IS it with Billy Joel? When I was a kid (high school) I didn't know that it was a "New England thing" -- to me, it was a "i'm a kid" thing (well, probably not in those words. It was probably a "this is today!!" thing). When I was little, my mom had records of Glass Houses and .... the other one (52nd Street?). The one with Big Shot on it. I remember being like 8, and Sis and I "spinning" around the living room to those records, as well as to Barry Manilow. Then I hit high school, and we were all listening to Billy Joel. My boyfriend took me to the "We Didn't Start the Fire" concert in my Junior year of High School. The "greatest hits" tape was all we listened to (other than Bon Jovi in the "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" days) in the car.

    Then I come back here .... how many years later? 100? (no, 14) and it's all the same. Why?

    6) Counting Crows "Omaha" -- after I graduated college (1994), before I married the ex (yeah, during that 6 month window), my very best friend from school moved from Virginia (where good old Liberty University is) to Connecticut, where she took a nanny job. Why? To be near me. B/c we were very close, and it was very hard to breathe without being near one another. She lived some ways away, so we could only get together on the weekend - she was a nanny, and I was a secretary. We had Jobs. But then she'd come to my parents' house, and we'd hang out all weekend long (my mother hated it). Counting Crows was one of the tapes .... or perhaps CD's -- this was the time where I had a CD player that plugged into the lighter of my car, and you could put a fake tape thing in the tape player, etc. Another one at the time was Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover by Sophie B. Hawkins. I know that was a tape, b/c it was a single, and once, my parents found it in the tape player of my car, and they were VERY UPSET, thinking that BF and I were [another gasp, perhaps a shudder and a prayer] .... lesbians. They thought it once about my sister and I, too, b/c we loved to sing Sinead O'Connor's "I am Stretched on Your Grave" at the top of our lungs together on road trips.

    7) 10,000 Maniacs "Trouble Me" -- when Schlurg and I were in college together ... before we started dating ... 10,000 Maniacs was one of our few things in common. the BF mentioned in the previous memory and I (along with the third of our trio) listened to 10,000 maniacs constantly in our dorm rooms. Schlurg told me one night (the night we met, come to think of it -- CURSE that day! I curse it!!), while out for coffee, that they were a favorite of his. it was something that made me think perhaps i could overlook his general awkwardness, too-tight jeans, and really lousy sense of humor for long enough to see what else was in there.

    When were dating -- perhaps even engaged -- this particular song was one he said "reminded him of me" b/c it made him think of how strong I was, and how I was someone who would just take all his troubles away. fucker.

    8) The Beatles - Yellow Submarine --My daughters LOVE this song, and they LOVE this movie!! I had never seen it before. Beloved decided it was okay for them, and I went along [i certainly don't disagree after the fact]. Thing One fell in LOVE. I mean, absolutely positively in love -- with the movie, the song (although "When I'm 64 is her true favorite), the Beatles. She and Beloved hunted down a Yellow Submarine T-shirt, with each of the Beatles' pictures on it. I think Paul is her favorite Beatle .... John is mine.

    9) James Taylor "Fire and Rain" -- there's a line in this song that i used to think was written FOR ME. When I was in high school, and my fundamentalist parents wanted to fit me for a chastity belt, which didn't work out so well for my boyfriend and i ... i felt as if the world was out to get me. Nobody understood me. waa waa waa.

    10) Ani DiFranco "As Is" [Little Plastic Castles]. This one is in two parts. I remember when I was married, living with the Schlurg, and had 2 kids -- Thing Two was a baby, and she was a MISERABLE baby. I was miserable. I hadn't lost all my pregnancy weight yet, I was feeling a wee bit trapped, and just overwhelmed in general. BF, referenced above, came to visit me. I felt ugly, fat, boring and ptooey. She was glamorous (as always), thin as a reed (we had been the same weight in college [a perfect weight for both of us] .... at the time she came to visit, i'd put on 30 pounds, and she'd lost 20 -- making her an absolute stick). We were in my kitchen, either cooking or cleaning, and she put on Ani DiFranco (I'm sure it was Not a Pretty Girl, b/c that's the one with the radio release "i'm 32 Flavors and thensome" on it, and that's the only way she would have heard of her) -- and she said, "I don't think you'll like her, she's a little too harsh for your taste." and I felt so out of it. I felt old and dumpy. And I *kind of* liked it. That was 1998.

    Come to 2001, or perhaps 2002, however, and BF and I are worlds apart, as she is sinking into the depths of giant born-again church land while I'm getting divorced [but didn't tell her for some time b/c my divorce was at the EXACT MOMENT of her wedding] - and I'm loving Ani DiFranco (that other friend? from song #1? she's the one who fully introduced me to Ani). Probably as BF is rethinking her earlier opinion, wondering how she could look past the sinfulness of Ani's love of women, and fornication outside of marriage.

    During my first full-time job after the divorce, I worked near a lake. I spent my lunch breaks running around said lake. To the above song. And the rest of the Little Plastic Castles CD. I started out with Not a Pretty Girl, but I dropped that INTO the lake one day, along with the CD player it was playing on. While waiting for the replacement disk to arrive, I fell in love with Little Plastic Castles, and found the arrangement of songs to be HIGHLY conducive to interval training.

    11) Sinead O'Connor "Nothing Compares to You" -- No list of zuska's musical memories could be complete without Sinead (and it really did play today - Beloved remarked, while cooking dinner "I can't even PICTURE the Prince version, i'm so used to the Sinead version!" and I said, "I don't think he ever sang it, i thought he wrote it, and just gave it to her to sing," and beloved said, "no, i think he recorded it.") I had this boyfriend in high school - Mr. Billy Joel, and Mr. "the world is out to get us" -- remember? Well, he was a loser. LOSER. I would never have been with him if my parents had told me I couldn't be. I realized this somewhere in my senior year of high school. But I was 17 (maybe even 16, I was young for my class, due to a December bday), and I needed an inspiration. I needed a SOUNDTRACK in order to break up with him. Sinead was it. My sister, she too - she was my inspiration. I used to sing this Sinead song, along with [i think the one right before it on the tape] I Feel So Different - at the TOP of my lungs in my car [sometimes alone, sometimes with sis] while driving around deciding I WOULD break up with him, I WOULD NOT get married straight from high school and I WOULD NOT be a secretary for my whole life. I was GOING TO COLLEGE, goddammit, and I was going to GO TO LAW SCHOOL and i was going to DO GREAT THINGS!!! This particular song, I believe, was what I imagined he would sing to me when I told him to take a hike. Loser.

    [so instead, i went to college, and THEN became a secretary for what felt like the rest of my life. i always found that EXTREMELY ironic - like what was the fucking point? I guess I found it, eventually. now that i finally made it to law school.]

    12) [ending before we hit the unlucky #] Barenaked Ladies "Call and Answer" -- I just love this song. I do not know when I found it ... i'm thinking when the kids were babies and the ex was at school 93 hours a day, but I'm not sure. I love it b/c this dude draws these lines, and he tells this girl, who he loves, that he will CRUCIFY HER if she plays those messed up crazy games that she plays. Why do I love that so much? Part of it is probably b/c I always love songs that seem like they're slow songs, and then they get all fast and angry somewhere in the middle. I've always loved that change up in the middle of a song. But I also truly love the lyrics.

    The other day, it came on the pod and I turned it up for Beloved b/c I knew he didn't know the song (too mainstream for him), and he said, "no wonder you like them, they sound like James Taylor." I couldn't believe that!! i was like - how can you POSSIBLY compare Barenaked Ladies and James Taylor? he said it was something in the voice -- i forget exactly how he categorized it. It wasn't the MUSIC, it was the voice. So I flipped through and found some Sweet Baby James, and I thought "huh, perhaps it is there? in the voice?" But then I had to listen to Call and Answer again, b/c Beloved kept me from listening to the lyrics, which I love!!!

    _______________________________________________

    Well, that was a fine way to kill 45 minutes. Now it's 12:22, and I need to go to bed. Even though I didn't meet my SCHOOL WORK goals for the evening. Ah well.
    posted by Zuska @ 11:20 PM  
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