A month or so ago, my friend Michelle posted about her memories of traveling Europe with her best friends while sharing headphones on trains to listen to a Rilo Kiley CD in a walkman. For her, those songs will always take her back to that time, when she was a younger, different self, seeing new things with good friends, and she can't help but feel nostalgic for that old self when she hears the music.
Her post struck me, because she was so dead on about the problem of time. Time is something we discussed in my poetry class on Tuesday night after reading an essay by David Baker in Radiant Lyre. For Baker, time is something constructed by people, but also something we are inevitably opposed to. This opposition is evident in lyric poetry when you think of John Donne chiding the sun to leave him and his lover to their love making. But the role of the lyric (or in this case, the pop song) also has to be to work within the parameters of time. It encapsulates a moment that we can always go back to and reinfuse with time, with memory, and understand again why the lyric is so powerful.
That said, I want to take a cue from Michelle and share a song that stands in my history and always reminds me of wonderful things, but particularly an amazingly debauched Spring Break camping trip with my Writing Center compatriots back at UCA. God, I miss those crazy kids some days. Anyway, the song is Regina Spektor's "Hotel Song," and I remember it being the theme song of our trip. Eight tipsy (and a few stoned) twentysomethings piled into a red Jeep Cherokee tearing up the gravel roads of podunk Ponca, Arkansas, singing out the windows, "a little bag of cocaine, a little bag of cocaine, so who's the girl wearing my dress?" It was one of those moments when you can't possibly wish to be anywhere else, that time could end then and you'd know you felt really alive at least once. God, the Ozarks couldn't offer us enough that day. Here's a video of Regina Spektor for those of you who are unfamiliar with the song (shame on you!)
Hey, it's Thursday. That means the weekend is almost here. Godspeed, friends, making it through the last two days. Can you believe the end of this semester is within sight?
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Feel free to use it! If you become famous, just let me write a paper/book on you as a writer...And I can point to myself as an influence, hehe.
Teaching is something that you love it, not because it pays well... ; )
Won't you get paid more when you are really teaching classes? And how many classes will you be teaching next semester?
Turns out, we were able to get the heat pump on our own, but that will be the last thing we can buy on credit for quite a while...
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