Twenty Questions

I find myself, this lovely Saturday, with exactly zero resources. How convenient, then, that Molly has so graciously tagged me and solved my content crisis. 

• People who have been tagged must write their answers on their blogs & replace any question that they dislike with a new question. (note, you’ll need to pull the list of questions from Molly's site if you want to see which one I switched out. But I'll save you the trouble... I didn't change any because doing so would take energy that I do not have. My slug-like state also explains the fairly boring quality of my answers. Some days are like that.).
• Tag 8 people to do this quiz.
  

1. How many songs are on your iPod? 2796

2. What music would you want played at your funeral? Depends on my mood. Today I'd say "Goodbye" (Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle) "Court and Spark," (Joni Mitchell) "Tangled Up in Blue," (Bob Dylan) "Alison," (Elvis Costello) "Sleeping in Paris," (Roseanne Cash) and "Ventura," (Lucinda Williams). By the way, I have other genres and other decades in my repertoire; these just suit the mood.

I've had better weeks.

3. To what magazines do you subscribe? These magazines come every month and go unread: Vanity Fair, Texas Monthly, Food and Wine, Travel and Leisure, Gourmet, TNR (online). Recently Lapsed: New Yorker, Reason, BrainChild

4. What is your favorite scent? Lavender, sandalwood, cinnamon, Niven-Morgan "Gold" and Bulgari "the' vert"

5. If you had a million dollars that you could only spend on yourself, what would you do with it? Practically? Retire debt and start saving for a craftsman cottage in the San Juan Islands. Bitterly? Personal trainer, cook, plastic surgery, legal fees. Fantasy wise? That craftsman cottage.

6. What is your theme song? Probably "Left of Center," by Suzanne Vega or "Fruits of My Labors," by Lucinda Williams

7. Do you trust easily? Far too.

8. Do you generally think before you act, or act before you think? In action, it's often way too much of the former, and I miss the good stuff; in conversation, alas, it's usually the latter.

9. Is there anything that has made you unhappy these days? She laughs until she cries about this one, waiting for the world to shift on micro and macro levels.

10. Do you have a good body-image? Of course not. 

11. Is being tagged fun? Of course.

12. How do you spend your social networking (Facebook, etc.) time? Being geeky and hoping I do not appear so.

13. What have you been seriously addicted to lately? Email, iced coffee, and political blogs I find depressing.

14. What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is? Creative, smart, dedicated, and an outstanding mother. Oh, I forgot... she's lucky enough to live in America's finest city.

15. What’s the last song that got stuck in your head? A song Small Child and I created to celebrate Large Dog's propensity to uncover and consume cat poo. We are an alternative lyrics household.

16. What’s your favorite item of clothing? I don't like much of anything in my closet right now, thank you economy. The most reliable things, however, are a black jersey skirt that falls swingily just below the knee and my Dansko clogs... not together, of course.

17. Do you think Rice Krispies are yummy? No.

18. What would you do if you saw $100 lying on the ground? Pick it up. Get a massage.

19. What items could you not go without during the day? Laptop. Iced Coffee. Protein. NPR.

20. What should you be doing right now? I'm trying to change my thinking, to believe that whatever I am doing is what I should be doing. But I'm still a child of the western world. So here is my Should list. Facing Reality. Buying groceries. Tackling one of many organizational challenges. Working on my Beatnik costume for a party tonight. Checking on my mother. 

I tag Lori, What I Saw Today, Old Roman Symbol, Her Other Evil Twin, and Juvenesence. I know that's not 8, but I have a small circle. Participation is optional; no calamity will befall you if you choose not to participate.

Ego, Superego, and the iPod...

When Sigmund Freud arrived in America for a speaking engagement in the early 20th century, he uttered the following words: “I am bringing them the plague.”* This happy, joyous statement is one of my all-time favorite quotes. Years ago, a good friend who shares my sense of irony gave me a little pillow – crisp, pristine white cotton cover; a ruffle, edged in pink, all the way around; a minute sprinkling of tasteful pastel flowers in the corners – with those words embroidered in baby blue. I love to see people pick it up, expecting some sweet sentiment; it’s always amusing to watch their expressions change.

Freud’s terms are bandied about with great regularity by folks who have never read a word he wrote; I admit up front I’ve read only a small sampling of his work, enough to insure I didn’t appear stupid when discussing or reading psychoanalytic criticism and to insure that I would appear moronic to anyone with a serious grounding in Freud, Jung, or Lacan. But like Marx and Marxists, Freud and Freudians are separate things altogether. People have a tendency to take source theory and muscle it into their own agendas. They become infected with the plague of self-importance and groundless certainty.

But I digress. This isn’t an entry about Oedipus or how a foot fetishist (or a political extremist on either end of the spectrum) is born.

What is it about? Rorschach tests or iPod playlists, the 21st century version of the inkblot.

I’m a literal person. I am, to my knowledge, un-hypnotize-able. I have trouble with traditional forms of mediation. Am I a control freak? I don’t think so (although others who know me may disagree). Am I fearful? Maybe…fearful of misinterpretation. I tend to choose consciously. Or at least I think I do. Dr. Freud would likely disagree.

My iPod holds several playlists. Those of you in my age group may remember making mix tapes. Playlists are like that. I agonized over each of them, choosing songs very carefully, vetting lyrics. I once had a playlist ready to send to a friend, but threw the entire idea out because one song out of twenty - Billy Joel’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Light as the Breeze” - had the phrase “[t]here is blood on every bracelet” and I’d just learned about a suicide attempt in his family. I was terrified he might think I was making some kind of “statement,” when the truth was I’d just picked the song because I liked it and I thought he would, too.

A couple of months ago, however, I thought I’d try something different. I opened a playlist – I left it labeled “untitled playlist” on purpose – and began to scroll through my iTunes library, picking songs without much thought, simply because they appealed in the moment. Sixty-eight songs and a few weeks later, I decided to look at the songs and see what they told me.

I’ll keep my conclusions private (although I was, for a moment, surprised by the many lyrical references to water), but I will say that letting go of a script and letting my heart make choices led to an entirely different set of songs. They told an interesting story, a surprisingly accurate depiction of my current state of mind. For once, I saw a story in the blot of ink on the page.

In my last entry I wrote about my inability to create visual representations of things (more on this in a future entry). I’ve also mentioned the tendency toward self-censorship that has inhibited my writing. Not to overdramatize, but this particular playlist represents, I think, a tiny breakthrough.

It is nothing if not an aural collage. I had to cede control, abandon a plan, and merely move songs from one place to another as fancy directed. What resulted was beautiful. And, more importantly, fresh and liberating.

Which brings us back around to Freud’s “plague.” I know I’m guilty of the kind of theory appropriation I derided early in this post, but perhaps the plague is introspection. It can make you very ill. It can cripple you in a cycle of endless navel-gazing and prevent you from living. If you avoid it, you trap yourself in a surface existence. But if you use it, inhale awareness into yourself and exhale it into the world, you emerge from the illness stronger, with your immunity enhanced.

After all, the Black Death left some survivors.

* I am a stickler for documentation, so I am compelled to say that I no longer have the source document. My recollection is that Freud was speaking to a colleague in response to an American audience’s enthusiasm for his theories. The full quote, I think, is “They do not know I am bringing them the plague.” While I’m not sure on the year, I’m almost positive it was either 1909 or 1913. Mea culpa.