that thing about music and emotional memory
Last weekend I downloaded a random mix that included the song "There, There Katie" by Jack's Mannequin, which made me cry, and then I listened to it constantly for like two days and continued to get choked up. I don't understand my obsessive brain loops, but they are what they are.
I liked the song a lot (it's lovely, other than the crying problem), but I'd never heard anything else by Jack's Mannequin, so Monday, I went into Barnes & Noble and picked up a CD. (And had one of my usual quietly humiliating social experiences where the very nice, quite cute clerk [who before he helped me, was helping a very small child who wanted to get into Green Day, and it was the cutest goddamn thing ever, this kid asking Very Serious questions and the clerk telling him the history of the band, ugh, adorable] was very friendly and polite and I had a very small freakout, refused to look at him, and ran away. GO TEAM ME.)
I put it on in my car on the way to work the next day and about two songs in stopped at a light and tried to figure out why I was having a lot of FEELINGS from the music. Not really the music itself, but something about the singer's voice. I kept zeroing in on that voice and having really intense...not sense-memory, but emotional-memory, I guess. Listening to the music was making me anxious and sad and worried, which was somewhat strange given that they were fairly upbeat songs.
Wikipedia helped me out when I got to work by informing me that the singer was also the singer for Something Corporate, which one of my roommates my sophomore year of college was really into and listened to a lot. Yeah, that explains it. That year didn't go so well.
Anyway. Andrew McMahon, you have a very distinctive voice (the only word I can think of is whiny, but it's not exactly whiny, so...whatever tonality we associate with whiny, it's related to that...except his voice lacks that quality on "There, There Katie," so wtf do I know), and I have been listening to your CD on repeat in an effort at aversion therapy to get over the response of flail that it gives me. We're doing okay! I spent two or three days only listening to track seven ("Miss Delaney") on repeat, because brain loops. I don't know why, I just fixated on that song. Probably the bit about being a sad robot. I think I'm going to change my LJ name thing to that.
TL;DR: music and emotional memory are sneaky and catch you when you're not looking.
**
I called in sick to work today, mostly for mental exhaustion. I had hoped I would be productive with the time off, but no. Not at all.
I'm mildly upset about dumb things and probably I should try to get lots of sleep this weekend. Fingers crossed.
Has anyone read Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert Redick? I got the link from a positive review, but I'd love some more context before I go shell out. I have a zillion unread books stacked around my room, but the idea of some epic fantasy is very appealing at the moment for some reason.
<3 Be awesome, everyone.
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