on the straaaangest coincidences
Have you ever felt like you're being...well...followed by fate? I mean, say you think of something - anything - that hasn't touched your life or entered your mind in a long time. Like, a LONG time. A word, a movie, a song, a book. Just something that makes you go, "Huh, haven't thought of that in a while." And then once you DO think of it, it's like it WON'T LEAVE YOU ALONE.
This has often happened to me. It's such an odd and recurring thing that I've developed a theory about how thoughts can sort of linger around you and manifest themselves. It's bullshit, I know, but come on, it's spooky bullshit. Anyway, case in point: I posted a few days ago about a song by Yuki Kajiura that I had literally not given a single speck of attention in over two years. WELL over two years, in fact. It was just a stray thought that came to me as I sat in class one day, and I followed it until I discovered the crazy random happenstance about the song's lyrics.
So just yesterday I was overcome with the urge to explore the rest of the songs on the album "Kaze no Machi e" appears on: Everlasting Songs, done by Yuki Kajiura's group FictionJunction. Some of the prettiest Japanese music I've ever heard, let me tell you - I downloaded the CD and spent an entire night with it on repeat. I thought that would be the end of it.
Well. I was wrong. Today, for absolutely No Reason At All - the same No Reason, in fact, that made me wonder about "Kaze no Machi e" and FictionJunction - I remembered a CD given to me many, many, many years ago by my friend H. We were in eighth or ninth grade at the time, and she burned a mixed playlist for me of songs she'd heard in different anime. Because it was a self-made disc, when I played it the song info didn't show up, so unless I approximately memorized the lyrics and searched for them online, I never knew what the songs were called or who sang them. Of those songs, I remember listening to "Emerald Green," "Hiru no Tsuki," and "Alchemy of Love" a lot.
And then there was The Song - my favorite one on the CD. It was an instrumental piece for piano and violin - so sad and so gorgeous that I would just play it over and over and want to cry at its sheer beauty. Today, I thought of that song - and it WOULD NOT LEAVE ME ALONE.
I tried to remember what it was called, but as I mentioned, it was instrumental and thus had no lyrics which I could Google to find out the name. I played it - what I could remember of it - over and over in my head, wracking my brain to think of which anime it could have been in. Many of H's favorite anime were ones she subsequently introduced me to, so I had a comprehensive list to work from, but alas: I could not for the life of me think of any anime I'd watched that had the song in it. I Youtubed "anime violin" and "anime piano violin," but yielded no satisfactory results. To be honest, it's been on my mind ALL DAMN DAY.
Well, in the search for this elusive song, I stumbled across a lyrics site for .hack//SIGN, an anime I had only given a few episodes' worth of my time before I abandoned it in search of something more appealing to my thirteen-year-old sensibilities. It wasn't that I didn't like the show - from what I saw of it, I was sort of interested, but not enough to devote myself to it as I did, say, Inu Yasha or Rurouni Kenshin or Yu Yu Hakusho.
I went through the lyrics for the .hack//SIGN songs out of sheer frustration, knowing that none of these songs were MY SONG, the one I was exhausting myself in search of. But I did find "a stray child," another song from H's CD that I remembered listening to repeatedly, and to my great shock I saw Yuki Kajiura's name linked with the song. A quick scan of the page yielded several more mentions of Kajiura, and it hit with me with sudden clarity that in my research of Everlasting Songs I'd come across the fact that Yuki Kajiura produced, managed, or partook in several different musical groups, and that one of those had created the soundtrack for .hack//SIGN.
Floored at the coincidence, I resolved to listen to the anime's soundtrack in order to hear more of Kajiura's music - between .hack and Everlasting Songs, I was pretty much a fan in the newest stages of adorationg. A quick, fleeting thought hit me: You know, The Song from H's CD is pretty enough to be a Kajiura piece. But no, I thought with a smile. That would just be too easy.
Wouldn't it just. Wouldn't. It. Just.
Not thirty minutes ago, I went online to Grooveshark to listen to some of the .hack//SIGN soundtrack. I added the entire thing to a playlist and just sat back, content to bask in the beauty of the music and the lyrics. "a stray child" came on, and "Fake Wings," and a couple of instrumental themes that threw me way back into childhood. I was enjoying myself, relaxing to an evening of my peculiar brand of oldies.
And The Song began to play.
I about threw my computer off my lap, I sat up that fast. It couldn't be, I thought. Not after an entire day of driving myself insane, blazing trails all over the Internet, immersing myself in songs of my youth. Not after all that could I have found the object of my original quest.
It was. Oh, God, it was MY SONG, my beautiful, heartbreaking song. The longer I listened, the more I felt like I wanted to cry - from the music, from my joy at finding it, from fury at it having been just too easy after all. I looked at the title of the track playing on the .hack//SIGN playlist, intending on committing it to memory so I'd never have to torture myself again.
"B.T." - by Yuki Kajiura.
I cannot impress upon you enough the scope of my astonishment and disbelief. Easy? Had it truly been that easy? This string of so-called coincidences, this chain of increasingly more surprising events - had I been led a merry dance to their tune, all this time?
Through the joy at my find and the shock of it, I can only think this: when it comes to fate following you around like a younger sibling intent on annoying you to the utmost, I've got a damn good point, and you KNOW I do. QED.
This has often happened to me. It's such an odd and recurring thing that I've developed a theory about how thoughts can sort of linger around you and manifest themselves. It's bullshit, I know, but come on, it's spooky bullshit. Anyway, case in point: I posted a few days ago about a song by Yuki Kajiura that I had literally not given a single speck of attention in over two years. WELL over two years, in fact. It was just a stray thought that came to me as I sat in class one day, and I followed it until I discovered the crazy random happenstance about the song's lyrics.
So just yesterday I was overcome with the urge to explore the rest of the songs on the album "Kaze no Machi e" appears on: Everlasting Songs, done by Yuki Kajiura's group FictionJunction. Some of the prettiest Japanese music I've ever heard, let me tell you - I downloaded the CD and spent an entire night with it on repeat. I thought that would be the end of it.
Well. I was wrong. Today, for absolutely No Reason At All - the same No Reason, in fact, that made me wonder about "Kaze no Machi e" and FictionJunction - I remembered a CD given to me many, many, many years ago by my friend H. We were in eighth or ninth grade at the time, and she burned a mixed playlist for me of songs she'd heard in different anime. Because it was a self-made disc, when I played it the song info didn't show up, so unless I approximately memorized the lyrics and searched for them online, I never knew what the songs were called or who sang them. Of those songs, I remember listening to "Emerald Green," "Hiru no Tsuki," and "Alchemy of Love" a lot.
And then there was The Song - my favorite one on the CD. It was an instrumental piece for piano and violin - so sad and so gorgeous that I would just play it over and over and want to cry at its sheer beauty. Today, I thought of that song - and it WOULD NOT LEAVE ME ALONE.
I tried to remember what it was called, but as I mentioned, it was instrumental and thus had no lyrics which I could Google to find out the name. I played it - what I could remember of it - over and over in my head, wracking my brain to think of which anime it could have been in. Many of H's favorite anime were ones she subsequently introduced me to, so I had a comprehensive list to work from, but alas: I could not for the life of me think of any anime I'd watched that had the song in it. I Youtubed "anime violin" and "anime piano violin," but yielded no satisfactory results. To be honest, it's been on my mind ALL DAMN DAY.
Well, in the search for this elusive song, I stumbled across a lyrics site for .hack//SIGN, an anime I had only given a few episodes' worth of my time before I abandoned it in search of something more appealing to my thirteen-year-old sensibilities. It wasn't that I didn't like the show - from what I saw of it, I was sort of interested, but not enough to devote myself to it as I did, say, Inu Yasha or Rurouni Kenshin or Yu Yu Hakusho.
I went through the lyrics for the .hack//SIGN songs out of sheer frustration, knowing that none of these songs were MY SONG, the one I was exhausting myself in search of. But I did find "a stray child," another song from H's CD that I remembered listening to repeatedly, and to my great shock I saw Yuki Kajiura's name linked with the song. A quick scan of the page yielded several more mentions of Kajiura, and it hit with me with sudden clarity that in my research of Everlasting Songs I'd come across the fact that Yuki Kajiura produced, managed, or partook in several different musical groups, and that one of those had created the soundtrack for .hack//SIGN.
Floored at the coincidence, I resolved to listen to the anime's soundtrack in order to hear more of Kajiura's music - between .hack and Everlasting Songs, I was pretty much a fan in the newest stages of adorationg. A quick, fleeting thought hit me: You know, The Song from H's CD is pretty enough to be a Kajiura piece. But no, I thought with a smile. That would just be too easy.
Wouldn't it just. Wouldn't. It. Just.
Not thirty minutes ago, I went online to Grooveshark to listen to some of the .hack//SIGN soundtrack. I added the entire thing to a playlist and just sat back, content to bask in the beauty of the music and the lyrics. "a stray child" came on, and "Fake Wings," and a couple of instrumental themes that threw me way back into childhood. I was enjoying myself, relaxing to an evening of my peculiar brand of oldies.
And The Song began to play.
I about threw my computer off my lap, I sat up that fast. It couldn't be, I thought. Not after an entire day of driving myself insane, blazing trails all over the Internet, immersing myself in songs of my youth. Not after all that could I have found the object of my original quest.
It was. Oh, God, it was MY SONG, my beautiful, heartbreaking song. The longer I listened, the more I felt like I wanted to cry - from the music, from my joy at finding it, from fury at it having been just too easy after all. I looked at the title of the track playing on the .hack//SIGN playlist, intending on committing it to memory so I'd never have to torture myself again.
"B.T." - by Yuki Kajiura.
I cannot impress upon you enough the scope of my astonishment and disbelief. Easy? Had it truly been that easy? This string of so-called coincidences, this chain of increasingly more surprising events - had I been led a merry dance to their tune, all this time?
Through the joy at my find and the shock of it, I can only think this: when it comes to fate following you around like a younger sibling intent on annoying you to the utmost, I've got a damn good point, and you KNOW I do. QED.