Friday, August 15, 2014

It's the middle of August...

School is going to start in less than three weeks. I have summer homework to do (except I don't actually know if any of my classes are solidified so I haven't started yet...), scholarships to apply for, a job to go to. A lot of things. And I'm kind of doing them. I've been good the past week, actually doing my laundry, buckling down on those scholarship applications, planning out my common app essay (gulp).

But the thing is, I've also kind of not been doing them.

Take right now for example. Right now I'm listening to "Linger" by The Cranberries, imagining who the song was written for and if anyone ever got unwrapped from someone's finger. And who's finger was it? Were their nails jagged and painted black, or perfectly manicured ovals? I think they were black. And isn't it interesting how "they" has become an acceptable gender-neutral pronoun for an unidentified individual (as opposed to always using "he")? Go feminists. Woah, Florence and the Machine was just playing... now it's Talking Heads... they're going by so quickly, like a never-ending tide of just music washing all over me.

You think this is bad? You should see me on the train. I may appear to be tuning out the world, checking emails and making sure my makeup isn't smudged on the way to work, tapping my feet and yawning on the way home. But I'm not.

If you think about, traveling (going to and getting from) places takes up a huge amount of time. Sometimes more than the actual time anyone actually does anything. I used to want to be able to skip transportation, it being such an expensive and time-consuming expenditure... but now I realize that my life, or anyone's for that matter, wouldn't be the same without it.

Because I'll tell you what I am on the train or bus, in the car or on my own two feet: I'm a witness.

I'm watching the people read/tweet/laugh. I'm imagining their lives, aware of how one of them is bound to have lost a mother/son/friend and wondering just how that might have hurt/shocked/left them. I also look like a tourist on the train. No matter how hard I try to pretend to be utterly indifferent to the passing scenery, there's nothing I can do to stop my gaping at the way the sunrise hits that window on the Trump Tower, and how the Sears Tower will always be the Sears Tower and nothing else because that's just what it is... and how it actually isn't because what something's called isn't what it is. And how what I just said has been said before, and is a quote... and I can't remember the author or find the specific quote right now and how that's bothering me and you'll have to trust me on it.

Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars" is on, I'm thinking about how my mom just got mad at me because I forgot to wake her up when she asked me to (25 minutes ago). She and my dad were planning on seeing "Calvary," which sounds like a very good movie and is something I would like to see sometime. Too bad it's only playing at the Landmark Century right now and there is no train that goes there, only a bus because I don't like buses. Train people are different than bus people. I'm definitely a train person. I hope my parents do go. I feel bad.

Now a Red Hot Chili Peppers song is playing, which oddly made me think about how "Hotel California" was playing at work on Thursday and Friday, and how Mike was telling everyone about how the song is about purgatory, listing out the lyrics and trying to convince all of us. And how today he tried translating "sharing is caring" into Spanish, and asked for my help (to which all I could respond was "compartir es..." because there really is no direct translation of that type of "care" into Spanish.

So yeah.

That's what's going on my head right now. There's a commercial on Spotify, I guess I better get back to finishing Naviance (only three more questions!). You know, the things that I have to do. Despite the fact that there's always music in my head no matter that the music hasn't come back.

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