Today's Confession: When I'm bored I sometimes go YouTube diving (a dangerous pass-time, but I live on the edge), which is how I recently discovered a fascination/appreciation for Korean pop. What can I say, I like dancing and strange hairstyles/costumes and trippy/cracky music videos, and K-pop is great for all three.
Take this for example:
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I don't know what's happening exactly, but it looks like the music revolution is here and it's being headed by five pretty-boys with fantastic hair and weird clothes.
Or this (better dancing, less interesting costumes):
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There is a goddamned MYSTERY afoot, you guys! (Also: I've been informed that the one with the long hair during the dance breaks is in fact a dude. I don't know why he's wearing a tracksuit, or why the other one is wearing macrame, or why the other one has star-spangled shorts. I just don't know.)
My confession is, I seem to have a hell of a time telling the members of the idol groups apart, which sounds a little racist, but I swear it's not. I have the same problem telling the members of emo-rock bands apart, because they all have similar dyed-black haircuts and they all wear black clothes (and sometimes uniforms or something because they're trying to be ironic or some shit? IDEK), which means I mostly identify people I don't know very well based entirely on what they're wearing and what their hair looks like.
True story: A classmate of mine in the fourth grade came to school one day with a new really short hair cut. I spent TEN MINUTES trying to figure out who the "new guy" was before the teacher did roll call and I realized it was Amanda. A GIRL. Who was my FRIEND. In my defense, it was early in the school year and she was a NEW friend. Thankfully I didn't do anything COMPLETELY brain dead like try to introduce myself because that would have been HORRIBLE FOR EVERYONE.
So yeah, it doesn't help that K-pop idols tend to change their styles kind of drastically from vid to vid, and sometimes within the SAME VIDEO (like that second one, the five guys doing all the dancing are the same guys solving the mystery of the... stuff, but I have to pause and REALLY THINK ABOUT IT before I can make a guess at who is who). The first one is easier, because their hair is all really distinctive (I especially like Magical-Color-Change-Half-Long-Half-Short Guy [kind of reminds me of Suul] and Unexpectedly-Deep-Voice-Blue-Hair-Man), but if I look at another vid of the same group it's like "...Are these the same guys? The sound the same...."
So yeah. Little bit racist sounding, but totally not, just socially inept. I can't tell two people with a similar hair color apart unless they wear name tags. Lovely.
(It's a good thing I never went to a school that required uniforms. I would have been lost forever.)
(I don't know why I'm randomly yelling at you guys throughout this post, but just go with it, ok?)
Have some "Confessions"! This time from Chapter Five.
Chapter Five
Relearning How to Breath, or: Jake Only Loves Me for my Voice, but First I had to Learn How to Use It, Plus: Dance Lessons from the Criminally Insane
In the first week or so of living in the house, Jake sat me and RJ down and had us run through scales, just basic do-re-me stuff. Then he put his head in his hands and sighed deeply. “You’re about this close to being a total waste, you know,” he said. “Haven’t either of you ever sung before? Ever?”
RJ shrugged and explained about the music program at Freeland High, which is pretty nonexistent and worth exactly shit all. We’d both been in the choir for a few semesters, because we needed a fine art to graduate, and theater tech, which all the smokers and stoners generally take, was all full up. So it had been us and a handful of other guys and a bunch of girls and a choir director who was actually the band director and couldn’t sing worth shit and wasn’t terribly interested in any of us besides. Every couple of weeks he’d hand out some sheet music and told us to go practice in groups, which we usually chose to interpret as “get high and try to score with the girls in the practice rooms.”
“Ok,” Jake said. “No problem. We’ll just start from the top.” And then he showed us how we should be breathing. “Breath control is going to be really fucking important,” he stressed, “because we’ll be singing and dancing at the same time, and this isn’t no Milli Vanilli shit, so no lip syncing either.”
I had had no idea that there could possibly be a wrong way to breath, but I’d apparently been doing it for the past seventeen years of my life.
He talked extensively about the diaphragm and demonstrated by holding a note for a good minute and a half (first introducing the idea that Jake Song doesn’t need oxygen to live, and maybe that’s an exaggeration, but seriously, not by much).
And it wasn’t so bad. I got into a habit of closing my eyes when I sing, because whenever I practiced with Jake he’d just stare at me all intense and focused and it freaked me out.
“Dude,” he said once, “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, ok?”
“Ok?” I said, thinking he was gonna tear me apart about my pitch or something, again.
“Seriously, man, I’m not, like, hitting on you or anything.”
“…Ok…?”
“No homo.”
“No homo.”
“But seriously, man. Your voice? It’s like sex. I mean it, we could, like, do the soundtrack for a porno and make a million dollars or something.” Then he put his hands on either side of my face and grinned. “You’re gonna make me a million dollars, man!”
“…I’m not doing a porno.”
He laughed.
“Seriously, Jake, I don’t need that shit getting back to my sister, and it would, man.”
“No, dude, no actual porn. Just, like, subliminal sex messages.”
“…I’m not doing that either.”
He laughed again. “Dude, that’s what the bass line is. Why do you think *NSync got so much bigger than Backstreet? Richardson isn’t a true bass, like Bass is. Like you are.” Then he grinned at me and patted my head. “Just you wait. The ladies at our concerts aren’t even gonna know why they’re horny, they’re just gonna throw their panties at us.”
“Won’t a large portion of our audience be, like, twelve?”
He stopped grinning and glared at me. “Stop ruining this for me, ok?”
And then once we knew how to breathe and sing on pitch, there were the harmonies to figure out. Turns out five voices can fit together in some really intricate ways, and Jake wanted to try them all. The five of us would cram into the master bathroom (of all places) and just sing for hours, sometimes trying out the songs Jake was writing (with or without the words, and I used to think that being one of five guys oohing and ah-ing in a bathroom was the strangest thing I’d ever do) and sometimes singing songs we all already knew.
I thought I would have to bust Lewis’s teeth in for real the day I revealed that I pretty much knew the entire discography from *NSync, and I glared at him a lot, but then Riley told me that Lewis had a poster of Nick Carter hanging on his closet door and I figured we were even. At least I had two sisters to blame.
And the whole boyband thing was still hokey and weird, and sometimes I didn’t get along with the other guys and sometimes I found myself absurdly missing Freeland, or at least the ability to walk to Annie or John’s house whenever I felt like it or wanted one of them around. But every time we sang together it was just like that first time, and it raised the hair on my neck and made my chest feel hollow, like it was just resonating endlessly with our voices, every time.
***
Way worse than the singing could ever be-the singing is good, always has been, and I don’t care, anymore, if it makes me sound like a pansy or whatever, singing, especially with these guys, is the best thing that has ever happened to me-was the dancing. The dancing was hell.
It wasn’t so bad, or at least, it was livable torture when it was just me and Jake in the garage and him trying to show me stuff and teach me where the fucking down beat was and how to not stick my ass out quite so much. But then during rehearsals I had to do the routines with the other guys right there, and the mirror right in front of us. The whole point of a lot of the steps was that we all did them in perfect time with one another, which was a hard thing to do when everyone else went left and I somehow found myself going right (every. damn. time).
And every damn time Lewis would roll his eyes and sigh, but that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the way Jake’s mouth would twist as he told us to take it again from the top. And how he would eventually just rub his eyes and tell us all to take a break. Because when it was just us it almost seemed like I might be getting a little better, but then when it mattered it all fell apart.
“You’re over thinking things,” RJ said. RJ might struggle a little from time to time with the harmonies but he wasn’t having my problems with the dancing. After two months it was like he’d been born doing those moves, and he’d taken to gliding around the kitchen until I wanted to swat him onto his ass.
“He’s right,” Jake said. We’d just seen the steps off home and were lazing around the living room, trying to work up the energy to go upstairs to bed. “We’re gonna have to be performing this stuff eventually, you can’t let the audience see you thinking.”
“You guys want me to dance without thinking?” I grunted. “That doesn’t make any fucking sense.”
“No,” Jake said. “I mean, well, yeah. I mean.” He took a frustrated breath and started over. “At a certain point it’s just muscle memory, dude. So you can do the moves, and react to whatever happens on stage, and sing in sync with the rest of us, and play to the audience. The dancing should be the last thing on your mind, just let your body take over, you know.”
“…Shit,” I said. There was just no way, no fucking way I was ever going to get all of that. I should just quit, but just the thought of that made my stomach hurt. A pretty big change from being fairly sure I didn’t want to do it at all just a few months earlier, but it was too late for me to gracefully back out now. I’d go if I had to, but I wouldn’t be happy. I still have no idea when this group started making me happy, but there it is.
But Jake said, “No, man, no. Like, you already have the muscle memory thing. We’ve done those routines, like, a zillion times. You have it. You just gotta start trusting yourself.”
That was way easier said than done, because at that point I was invested, fully. I’d never had anything, before, where I actually cared if I succeeded or failed. It was terrifying, but… every time I managed an eight count without fucking anything up too badly, it was a little thrilling, too.
So I got up early and I stayed up late and I started to hate the sight of my own ugly face in the mirrors in the garage, working through the stupid intricate hand movements for Perfect over and over again, and nearly breaking my damn neck trying to do the flips Jake wanted to include for The Only One.
One day at school I realized I was doing the footwork in front of my locker. A girl I had one or two classes with caught me and said it was really cool, but I was pretty much just mortified that someone had seen me, so I distracted her with my usual tough guy act and we ended up making out in a stairwell instead of going to math. Her name was Kayla and we actually ended up going together for a few months before she dumped me for a stoner with a motorcycle.
***
Janie was at the house a lot, and she sat in on rehearsals whenever she had time to cheer us all on. She was never shy about criticisms (“RJ, you call that dancing! You look like you’re having a seizure!”), but she was equally generous with praise (“Lewis, baby, you let me know when you hit eighteen, ‘cause dayum, boy!”) and all the guys pretty much adored her.
Even Lewis turned up the charm to eleven when she was around, opening doors for her and preening a little when she gushed over how pretty he was. It would have almost made me jealous, except she always made a joke out of it-“Jesse should take pretty lessons from you, sugar cube,” or “You and Jesse would make the most gorgeous babies.”
Everyone loved Janie. She seemed to really believe in the group, and not just as a funny joke or something to get her little brother to do, like it had seemed at first. She listened to us sing and she’d just smile, and it reminded me of when we were kids and she waited in the kitchen with Annie all day, waiting to hear the latest *NSync song to come on over our crappy, staticy radio.
“It’s your voices,” she said to us once. “The way you all sing together? It’s gonna get you out of this desert, I just know it.”
Meanwhile she was still waitressing for high rollers wearing feathers and a leotard and high heels. She told me once that she’d had a better time and fewer come-ons when she was dancing at the Coyote Club in Freeland. At least the shoes were more comfortable.
She was living in a small apartment with a bunch of friends, but making noise about moving in with this guy she’d been seeing. She said he wanted her closer to him and that he was sweet, he worried about her working at the casino and the guys who would hit on her and sometimes thought it was ok to touch even though it wasn’t. She said he said just thinking about those guys made him crazy, and Janie liked it when the guy she was seeing got all possessive of her, said it made her feel like they really wanted her, and I guessed I could understand wanting to feel wanted.
I wish I could say that something about Dennis bothered me from the first moment I met him, but the truth is he was barely a blip on my radar. My sister dated a lot of guys, and for the most part they were in and out of her life so fast I barely bothered to learn names. She only brought the ones she really liked around to meet me, and Dennis smiled and shook my hand when we were introduced. He was a butch, blockhead-y kind of guy, Janie’s usual type-she liked a guy with muscles and swagger. He irritated me a little, but he didn’t really register as a threat, not for a few more months when the first bruises appeared.
I asked her about it and she laughed me off and teased me. “Sometimes a little rough can be a little nice, baby,” she said, patting my cheek. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
I didn’t like it, but she and Annie had both gone through the asshole guys before. Of course, before there had been John and Billy around to make the guy back off. I called John about it and he made frowning noises over the phone at me, then called Janie and had her tell him to mind his own business, so it all seemed normal.
The next time I saw Dennis I told him to watch himself and he pretended not to know what I was talking about, and then to mind my own damn business.
I asked Janie to break up with him, but she wouldn’t. She said he was really very sweet, and that she could handle him, and that I was worried for nothing.
Once, Lewis came to me in private after rehearsal and asked if she was still seeing that Dennis guy, and wasn’t I worried about her at all.
I snarled at him, because it was bad enough that I couldn’t protect her without a snot nosed suburb brat like Lewis calling me on it. “Don’t fucking worry about shit you don’t know anything about, alright?” I said, and he turned red and shoved me hard.
“Fuck you, ok? I’m not an idiot, Jesse, and my mom divorced my dad for a reason. I know what it means when a woman has a bruise the shape of a hand on her arm.”
I backed off and maybe mumbled an apology, because I hadn’t known any of that shit, but in the end there still wasn’t anything any of us could do.
But most of the time we didn’t see the bruises anyway. It’s not like Janie had never had to cover up bruises before, and she still smiled and laughed and played with all of us, and made Riley go awkward and rubbery by flirting with him a little, and inspired Jake to write a song for the group called “Calamity” once he found out that that had been her nickname since high school.
I called John and Annie a lot, but they couldn’t do anything, either, not while Janie was still defending him, calling him a sweetie who sometimes got a little worked up.
I mostly figured he would be like the other asshole jocks she’d dated a few times back in Freeland-there and stressful for a while, but then gone.
I wish like hell that I’d been right.
In other news, I got another order, this one for a purse, and I'm way behind on getting it finished because I wanna read instead. I'm gonna have to work my butt off tomorrow because I want to mail it by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. I'm thinking about getting some audio books from the library, which I usually don't like, but at least I'll be able to crochet at the same time, so it's just a matter of figuring out whether or not i can follow a story and count stitches at the same time. I'm also looking around for decent podfics, but I'm picky about narrators. So.