things I want

If you like Amazon.com wishlists (and I most certainly do), you will love TheThingsIWant.com. It brings out my materialistic side and serves as a dumping ground for all the things I’d love to splurge on when I buy my house.

Meanwhile, this is genius, and I must partake! If there’s one thing I understand, it’s overwrought, cringe-inducing adolescent journal entries. My journaling career began on January 1, 1983, when I was eight and a half years old. I’d received a Pac Man Book of Secrets for Christmas 1982 from my grandparents, and I took to journal-writing like the proverbial fish to water. I followed Anne Frank’s lead and christened my diary with a name about halfway through the year. I named it after...wait for it! wait for it!...KITT the car on Knight Rider. Yes, that’s right, I named my Pac Man diary after Knight Rider. You just try to get more ’80s than that. Go on, I dare you.

I think the best part of that diary is the fact that I was usually too lazy to write on weekends, so on the weekend pages I’d write something like, “I didn’t have time to write in you today,” and then I’d draw pictures of all the things I was supposedly doing which kept me from writing. Like riding a horse. Dude, I don’t think I ever rode a horse in my life. No, wait, strike that—my family once took me to Gettysburg’s Land of Little Horses, and my tube-socked self plodded around in dusty circles on a beleagured pony. That was the extent of my horseback riding experiences, although KITT, the Pac Man Book of Secrets, would beg to differ. I love that I had enough time to draw pictures and write “I didn’t have time to write in you today,” yet I didn’t have enough time to actually, you know, write.

So I’ve been keeping a journal for 24 years, and that includes several angst-ridden, maudlin volumes from my teen years. Picking just one entry for the Cringe Book is going to be so incredibly difficult.

Even though I don’t write as often as I should, and I abandoned hand-writing my entries in favor of typing and printing them out around 10 years ago, my fundamental motives for writing remain the same: it keeps me sane, it gives me clarity, and it preserves memories. As simple as that. My journals contain the meat of my life; this blog contains the broth.

Don’t you just love when you get completely obsessed with an album or a song and you can’t stop playing it? And you feel like maybe you’ll get the shakes if you don’t start listening to it RIGHT NOW?

It’s not uncommon for me to get ridiculously hooked on a particular song or a string of songs, but the album thing hasn’t been as quite an overwhelmingly consistent experience. In 10th grade I went through an obsessive period when all I wanted to listen to The Cure’s Disintegration and Sinead O’Connor’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got over and over again. I barely touched any of the other tapes in my collection. In 11th grade it was REM’s Out of Time and Morrissey’s Viva Hate. In 12th grade it was U2’s Achtung Baby. The summer after 12th grade it was Don McLean’s American Pie and Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits. Freshman year it was Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes and Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut. The summer after freshman year it was 10,000 Maniacs’s Our Time in Eden and Peter Gabriel’s Shaking the Tree. During the first part of sophomore year it was Cat Stevens’s Tea for the Tillerman and the Indigo Girls’s Rites of Passage. The second half of the year was consumed by Tori Amos’s Under the Pink. I’m sure I drove my dorm neighbor utterly batty that semester, but she was always listening to—and bellowing along with—Meatloaf and Celine Dion songs, so she deserved whatever punishment she got from me blasting Under the Pink and weeping. And maybe doing some other things I shouldn’t have been doing. That summer I obsessively listened to Counting Crows’s August and Everything After. I’d sit in my room listening to it on a continuous loop, undoubtedly trying the patience of my mom and sister. There were no album fixations my junior year, mostly because I was studying abroad and didn’t have access to my CD player. My portable disc player broke like three seconds after I arrived in England, so I was left with a tinny little Walkman that kind of killed my desire to sit and listen to CDs over and over for hours at a stretch. My senior year was dominated by Tori’s Boys for Pele.

After college the music fixation dropped off substantially. I obsessively listened to Tori’s From the Choirgirl Hotel in 1998 (so I always associate it with a shitty former job of mine!) and 2003 was all about Tori’s Scarlet’s Walk and Peter Gabriel’s Up. Over and over I listened to them, day in and day out. In 2004 I became completely obsessed with Damien Rice’s O, and here’s where we’ve come full circle, because right now I’m obsessed with his new album 9. My iPod is still in the shop, so I’ve been listening to CDs instead of MP3s during my daily commute, and this album has rarely left the player. It’s not quite as sumptuous as O, but gorgeously morose all the same. It’s just what I need right now. It’s giving me terrible earworms, though, which—because I’m not overly prone to earworms—makes me paranoid that I’ve got a tumor growing in the part of my brain where earworms are generated. Or maybe I’m just developing a raging case of OCD?


song heard most recently before posting:
Me, My Yoke and I—Damien Rice