(no subject)
Nov. 9th, 2018 09:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI was home from work Wednesday; I was too tired and too crazy to make it in. I couldn't help but stay up with the election returns on Tuesday. There was a point when 538's live forecast, before they switched to a less volatile model, was predicting better than even odds of Republicans taking the house and it made me feel physically ill. It was like reliving the increasing horror of the odds of a Clinton victory sliding ever downward on election night two years ago. I didn't get to sleep until after midnight and was dead on my feet at quarter to five when I usually start getting ready for the day.
Danae was home with me. At first, I thought I'd sleep in a bit and do some work. Instead, I spent the day on the couch with her until my therapy appointment, startled awake over and over from bad dreams.
In the end, the results are basically what I expected, and that's pretty good. I'm scared of Sessions leaving, and sad about Texas and Florida, but I don't even know what I'd do if the Democrats didn't have the lower chamber. There's a lot of balancing to do for the left, between aggressively fighting the right's agenda and avoiding some kind of public perception of spiteful obstructionism. (Why doesn't that seem to be a problem for the right?) I worry about whether things will get much better and that they'll end up staying the same or even getting worse. Continued one-party control of all of Congress, though, feels like a bullet-train to hell so at least that left the station without us.
--
Between Rufus having another seizure last night and working at the dog shelter afterward until nine, I overslept enough this morning that I drove the car in. I'm disappointed; I would have loved to bike in the first snow of the year.
---
I suspect have a different relationship to a lot of music than most people. Music is tied closely enough to social groups and culture that someone's tastes in it can serve as a shorthand for any number of characteristics. I, though, typically am exposed to music through buying a CD at a thrift store that I've heard of or that sounds interesting and seeing whether I like it in a vacuum, disconnected from the context that a typical listener might associate with it. I also typically listen to entire albums at once to start with, because I want to place the individual songs in the context of the the others.
I bought Lady Gaga's "The Fame" a few days ago and have listened to it. It's certainly tightly put together, technically. Paparazzi and Poker Face particularly are catchy and stick in my head. Paparazzi, of course, is a super-creepy song about a stalker, while Poker Face seems to be about intentionally withholding your thoughts and feelings from someone you're attracted to.
Oddly enough, it made me think a little about Meatloaf's "Bat Out of Hell." I already owned the LP, but I found it on CD a while back and had to buy it that way too to make listening in the car easier. I like most of that album because, even though it sets up clearly adversarial relationships with the women in the song, the coherent nature of the songs as a whole paints an interesting character portrait of the singer and I can kind of get inside his head a little bit. Like acting, I can live a little bit of another life for a bit and have experiences that aren't in my real life. I don't get that from "The Fame." It's either too far outside my own experience, or expresses actions and a mindset that I don't feel any desire to be inside of.
On a tangent, it occurred to me that, while most of "Bat Out of Hell" would be simply awful philosophy to base relationships on, "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" is actually an example of pretty good communication!
...And now I have Poker Face in my head. It's amazing how catchy pop music can be.
Danae was home with me. At first, I thought I'd sleep in a bit and do some work. Instead, I spent the day on the couch with her until my therapy appointment, startled awake over and over from bad dreams.
In the end, the results are basically what I expected, and that's pretty good. I'm scared of Sessions leaving, and sad about Texas and Florida, but I don't even know what I'd do if the Democrats didn't have the lower chamber. There's a lot of balancing to do for the left, between aggressively fighting the right's agenda and avoiding some kind of public perception of spiteful obstructionism. (Why doesn't that seem to be a problem for the right?) I worry about whether things will get much better and that they'll end up staying the same or even getting worse. Continued one-party control of all of Congress, though, feels like a bullet-train to hell so at least that left the station without us.
--
Between Rufus having another seizure last night and working at the dog shelter afterward until nine, I overslept enough this morning that I drove the car in. I'm disappointed; I would have loved to bike in the first snow of the year.
---
I suspect have a different relationship to a lot of music than most people. Music is tied closely enough to social groups and culture that someone's tastes in it can serve as a shorthand for any number of characteristics. I, though, typically am exposed to music through buying a CD at a thrift store that I've heard of or that sounds interesting and seeing whether I like it in a vacuum, disconnected from the context that a typical listener might associate with it. I also typically listen to entire albums at once to start with, because I want to place the individual songs in the context of the the others.
I bought Lady Gaga's "The Fame" a few days ago and have listened to it. It's certainly tightly put together, technically. Paparazzi and Poker Face particularly are catchy and stick in my head. Paparazzi, of course, is a super-creepy song about a stalker, while Poker Face seems to be about intentionally withholding your thoughts and feelings from someone you're attracted to.
Oddly enough, it made me think a little about Meatloaf's "Bat Out of Hell." I already owned the LP, but I found it on CD a while back and had to buy it that way too to make listening in the car easier. I like most of that album because, even though it sets up clearly adversarial relationships with the women in the song, the coherent nature of the songs as a whole paints an interesting character portrait of the singer and I can kind of get inside his head a little bit. Like acting, I can live a little bit of another life for a bit and have experiences that aren't in my real life. I don't get that from "The Fame." It's either too far outside my own experience, or expresses actions and a mindset that I don't feel any desire to be inside of.
On a tangent, it occurred to me that, while most of "Bat Out of Hell" would be simply awful philosophy to base relationships on, "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" is actually an example of pretty good communication!
...And now I have Poker Face in my head. It's amazing how catchy pop music can be.
