Tag Archives: music

Raising Them Right

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One of the coolest things about having kids is that, at least for a time, you are their window to the world. You show them how to do things. You expose them to music and food. It’s like they are your own little miniature. They’ll reject some of it because they have no class their taste is yet to be refined, but sometimes they’ll surprise you with how fun and cool they are.

Sometimes that music, those games, and those jokes just stick.

And then you’ll be sitting there with them while they’re eating lunch, and “Hey, Jude” will come on. This is how they will respond without ever having heard the song before, and you will be kind of amazed:

Just as you suspected, they are your kid, and they have inherited your sense of cool, man. You are raising them right.

PS: I hope you enjoyed my singing. Don’t worry, I won’t be appearing anywhere near you anytime soon.

How Pandora Made Me Cool It

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Parenting is an exercise in giving up. You thought you were in control? Don’t let your relatively easy pregnancy fool you into believing that you were ready for what was coming. The instant that baby comes into the world, you surrender it all. Not just the restful nights when you think you can turn it all off. Nope. Even if the baby is a sleeper, she still keeps you up worrying. Why is she sick? Does she have typhoid? Why isn’t she sick? She should have had at least eleventy billion colds by now. Something’s wrong because she’s well all the time.

Yes, that last thought was one that I have had.

There is a lot of truth to the statement “I was a better parent before I had kids.” Everything you think you won’t do, you do do. And that do do? It rules your life. But I digress. You said you’d never give them snacks with added sugar, but that was before you realize that it’s really hard to find snacks without sugar in them that don’t cost at least 50% more than the regular snacks. You said that you’d make time for your marriage. There would be dates. But where are those dates? It’s hard to get romantic when you think about the extra cost of babysitters.

That giving up is good, though. Take the Great Pandora Debate that’s been going on in our household for the last week or so. I’d make a Pandora’s Box joke but that just seems too easy. So we have Pandora Internet radio. Not the kind you pay for and have the ads removed. When you look down our list of stations when they are sorted by “date added”, you can easily see when C started really getting into music because there’s a break from “Passion Pit” radio to ”Ella Jenkins” radio. ”Schoolhouse Rock” radio. ”Disney” radio. She likes that stuff. Granted, she likes some of our music too, but she likes that kid music better, and that’s OK by me because I only make stations for her that I don’t mind listening to as well. Do yourself a favor and make a Schoolhouse Rock station. You’ll thank me later.

So we listen to the music throughout the day, and sometimes my husband will just switch the music mid-song. Such a habit can be filed among the minutiae of life that one only notices when s/he has settled into a routine with his/her family. Switching the Pandora station without asking is our family’s equivalent of my own father’s annoying penchant for channel surfing during commercial breaks when I was a kid. Both of these habits just annoy me. Let the song play to completion, dangit. It’s going to be hard enough to instill any degree of patience in C since she entered the world at a time when all she needs to do is Google a query when she needs to know something. I can only image how my own ADD would have been exacerbated had I been born 25 years later than I was. The invention of Twitter decimated all the focus I was able to accumulate during the first 29 years of my life.

But I chose my battles. I give up not out of exhaustion but because doing so helps me keep control of perspective. Pro tip: the only thing you need to control in life is your perspective because everything else is gravy. This is for my own good as well as that of my family. The baby is not going to be scarred for life if B cuts off the end of “Do Re Mi.” She will withstand the onslaught of hearing Grimes instead of Raffi. She is completely aware of how much he loves her, and that is something that she will never second guess. Thirty years from now, she may not remember the third verse to “The Wheels On the Bus”, but she will know that her father adores her and has been doing so ever since she was a baby. And that’s what matters.

Reason Eleventy Billion Why Being a Parent is Worth the Poop

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Before you start reading this, put on a song you love. If you want some suggestions, there are a few selections from my soundtrack I listened to when I wrote this here, here, and here.

I am not a dancer. Me not being a dancer goes hand-in-hand with me being self conscious. I feel like an idiot when I move my body to the music, and I have since my first seventh grade dance. Please please please don’t look at me. I’m that hippo in the corner doing yoga while wearing an Alexander McQueen-inspired getup.

I have felt like an idiot at countless weddings and parties when I started to sway. I’m not going to try to convince you that I look totally stupid because in all likelihood I don’t. It’s all in my head, I know that. But growing up means getting over yourself and just being a human who does things for the sake of doing them and not constantly checking yourself in the mirror.

So today when Wee Cee was in her high chair finishing lunch and The Reeling by Passion Pit came on and I naturally started doing Zumba moves to it because that’s what you do when that song comes on and I don’t trust anyone who suppresses the urge and says that it’s lame to move, well, she lost it and busted a move just as easily as I did. She threw her little fist in the air raise-the-roof style and swayed in her little baby way. We danced and swayed and laughed and moved together.

And then the song ended and I realized I had just danced without even knowing it. The above recounting of my moves are only corroborated by B who is home because the semester is over. How long have I been dancing without even knowing it? Probably since the moment this girl was born and I started getting over myself and started being a more human human. Being a parent means letting go of your lame self you developed the instant you hit puberty and forgot about being a baby. It means having fun because not only does it feel good but it makes your baby smile and it teaches her to embrace this glorious time in her life.

Uncomfortable Is the Way You Make Me Feel

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Let’s talk about Michael Jackson for a minute.

I love Michael. He was an entertainment god and his videos have a mythic quality about them. I mean, Thriller, seriously? It is justly considered the best video of all time. However, watching his videos requires a certain suspension of disbelief because they are often about as believable as a cartoon.

As evidence, I submit the 1987 video for “The Way You Make Me Feel.” Have a look:

So the video* begins with Michael screaming “HEEEY” at a girl as she walks the streets alone one evening. The timbre of his voice definitely reads “playful flirtatious encounter”, not “prepare to be stalked, beaten, and brutalized on top of a bunch of old boxes smelling of lo mein.”

*That is, the abbreviated video above. The full version 36 hours long.

Michael is dressed to the nines in an outfit that would be sure to receive a disapproving cluck from Michael Kors and Nina Garcia. Nothing says streetwise like a floofy white scarf holding your jeggings up. Also, am I the only person who feels like the more surgery MJ got on his face, the worse he smelled? I have always felt this way. Maybe it’s because he was a child trapped in a man-ish body, and kids don’t like baths. Or maybe it’s because he was lulu and lulus are prone to forget to practice basic hygiene. Or maybe it’s because this video was filmed in the Land the Sanitation Department Forgot.

So here in the LSDF, a young lady got all dressed in a diced up wet suit that night for her beau, MJ. Right. I guess she’s pretty good in the video, but for reals, she looks a bit too much like an emaciated Janet Jackson for me to be 100% comfortable with her role as Michael’s love interest. And could someone please feed her a pizza? For sers, guys, I think Miss C weighs more than her.

Michael usually has a posse in his videos, probably because he was always an outsider in real life. In this video, his posse is a group of middle-aged hobos. I think I even spotted the Hamburgler in there. His girlfriend has a posse, too, which is good because between the four of them, one of them is bound to have a rape whistle. Most likely the one who appears to be a man in drag. According to Wikipedia, one of the girl’s friends is played by LaToya Jackson, which I guess makes sense. Wouldn’t YOU want to be in a music video where your brother does pelvic thrusts towards the girl playing your friend?

Frolicking through the streets strewn with used syringes, the girl makes like Laura Winslow and brushes off the geeky advances of Michael, who is about as smooth an operator as the electronic jug band at Chuck E. Cheese’s. But by the end of the video, someone has popped open a fire hydrant and she is embracing MJ like her life depends on it.

And yet I love this video. Go figure.

Special thanks to Angie at Childhood Relived for allowing me to completely plagiarize her What the…Friday? idea for this post, where she resurrects an old YouTube clip and then points out that the drugs of the 80s were indeed potent. She’s pretty rad.

*****

And then there were four! Congrats to my friend Jells from I’ll Sleep When They’re Grown for the birth of A2! I am now officially not following any pregnancy blogs. I have a little hole in my heart.

Genius

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Listen to the full album here.

Pet Sounds, the Beach Boy’s eleventh album, was released in 1966 as a response to Brian Wilson’s enthusiasm for the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and his inability to tour sans drug-induced panic attacks. He focused his attention towards creating an album devoid of “filler” such as cover songs and comedy tracks, and perfecting arrangement and production. Even though it wasn’t a runaway hit when it was released, it is now regarded as one of the best rock albums in history.

For good reason, too. This is the stuff that dreams are made of. It’s sometimes called a “concept album”, as if each track needs the others in order to make any sort of artistic, cohesive sense. This isn’t the case, though. The album opens up with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” which is critically regarded as the track most akin to the Beach Boys’ pre-psychedelic work. From there, the album (namely, Brian Wilson) meanders into more pensive climes. This is a working album, because it’s work to figure out who you are, especially if you’re Brian Wilson.

The album makes little to no mention of cars, girls, or surfing. It’s just not that kind of machine. Is Caroline a California Girl like Rhonda presumably is? Maybe, but that’s not the trait that she is known for. You listen to the music and you know it’s the Beach Boys because of the unmistakable harmonies, but there is just very little tying it to their work from the early 60s. Tracks like “That’s Not Me” and “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” have an element of adolescence to them, but it’s the flip side of earlier tunes like “Be True to Your School” and “Little Deuce Coupe.”

I started out obsessing about this album a few weeks ago because of those stark differences between Pet Sounds and all the music of the Beach Boys that precedes it. I’m more a fan of the later music than of their early stuff. My thought was, if they had started with Pet Sounds and then shifted to their more bubble gummy surfer music, we would say that they had regressed or jumped the shark (an anachronistic way to describe it since the Fonz wouldn’t pull that feat until the mid-70s.) I wanted to write all about how I can’t waste my time listening to their older stuff when such goodness is there to be had in Pet Sounds. The idealism of Surf City is such a stark contrast to the reality that is Sloop John B.

I had these thoughts, but the more I dwell on them, it becomes clearer to me that the Beach Boys can be both because they were both. Their depth and versatility was what makes them worth listening to. It’s what allows people to toss around the word “genius” when describing their music, but in this case the word has merit.

Genius. What is it anyway? Is it the order of what you do? Is it anticipating the trajectory of your life or career and optimizing it, so Surfin’ Safari comes before Pet Sounds? Is it your versatility to make both? Is it the process of creating something palatable and fun that has timeless depth and resonance?

I’m not even going to attempt to answer that one. I think there are so many interpretations of what genius is, that it does a disservice to limit them. But I have no problem passing the question on to you. Thoughts?

Brushes With Fame

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I am a giddy schoolgirl when it comes to celebrities. I don’t care what they’re famous for: I am the same blithering idiot whether it’s Snooki or Madeleine Albright. When I am in close proximity to them, I get a little stupid. So you can imagine how difficult it was for me to resist the urge to wake B up last night at 3AM, when during Miss C’s midnight feed, I found this on my Twitter:

I have arrived.

I have no idea how or why he found me on Twitter (although I have a feeling it has something to do with this post), but LeVar Burton – of Roots, Star Trek: TNG, and (most importantly) Reading Rainbow fame – is now following me.

I am dumbstruck.

Before I even knew what a fan was, I was a fan of LeVar Burton. There was an episode of Reading Rainbow where he’s exploring Chinatown in NYC and he goes to a restaurant where the chef prepares Mongolian beef for him tableside. After seeing this, one of my favorite games was to play pretend Chinese restaurant in our backyard. I’d pull up monkey grass and mushrooms, mix them with water from the spigot, and serve them up in a Frisbee to my then-baby brother. Got your homemade Mongolian beef right here. I was four.

When I was teaching English in Korea, I taught from a series of American reading books and occasionally there were stories I hadn’t even thought of since I saw them on Reading Rainbow when I was super little. But whenever I taught them I would get so excited that the kids would notice and ask me why I was geeking-out over an Arthur story. I would then explain that it was on a show I watched when I was a kid, and the students would henceforth be bewildered that I was ever a child.

So yeah, LeVar Burton’s follow means a heck of a big deal to me.

I’ve had a few brushes with fame in my life. The first one that comes to mind is the time I met Billy Corgan at a book signing. I’m actually quite amazed that I haven’t yet devoted an entire post to my hardcore adoration of the Smashing Pumpkins when I was a teenager. I was an absolute, balls-to-the-walls, do-or-die superfan. And I loved Billy Corgan.

LOVED LOVED LOVED.

During college I grew out of my obsession to a certain degree, which I suppose was a good thing because I needed to start paying attention to reality a little bit and stop fantasizing about how I was going to somehow meet and marry Billy Corgan and have his awkward bald-headed children. I had been in Chicago for graduate school for about a month when I remembered that that was where he lived. I googled him and it turned out that he was doing a book signing at Borders that very evening. I was so there.

I went downtown to the Water Tower and took the escalator to the forth floor of the Borders where he would sign copies of his new book of poetry. I sat in line for hours. Even though this was when he was in-between Zwan and the “reuniting” of the Pumpkins, there was already a line three hours ahead of time before the signing. Billy Corgan fans are a devoted bunch, even with his more lackluster projects.

He finally arrived and I got my book signed. Just like that. It was pretty much one of the most anticlimactic moments of my early-adulthood. He was nice, I guess, but I don’t have any inspirational stories to tell as testament to his wondrousness as a human being or anything. He was just a guy, promoting his book, smiling at the fans, which is what almost anyone would do if they were in his position. The whole ordeal made me finally realize that celebrities are just people too. They drink water and breathe air and have crappy days just like everyone else. They just sign books and ride around in tour buses too.

I was also around famous people when I was an extra in Walk the Line. In both of the scenes I’m in, both Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix were on-set and performing. The first time each of them came out, I was a little awe-struck. There they were, pretending to be someone else.

And they were at work. It was their job to pretend to be someone else. That was what floored me. Don’t get me wrong, they were both good at pretending. Heck, Reese Witherspoon even won an Oscar for her performance. But what killed me was that for some reason, they were both born with a certain amount of talent, charm, or some other magical element, that made them rise above everyone else, get famous and then be adored and admired by people they will never even know. It’s just bizarre when you think about how the very nature of fame dictates that the famous person can’t possibly know all the people who give him or her that distinction.

When you do come into contact with famous people, it makes you remember that they’re just humans, plugging along just like the rest of us. In-between the tweeting, signing books, and making movies, they’re sleeping, eating, bathing, worrying, and living life. Every-so-often, they reach out like LeVar did to me and help you remember that they’re real and not just an image on a screen or a voice on a track. Pulling back that screen a little makes the world a bit smaller and safer.

The Soundtrack of Our Lives

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Thirty-two weeks. Eight weeks (give or take) to go. It seems like only last week we went to Walgreens to purchase the EPT That Changed Everything so I’m really beginning to comprehend how relative time is to this whole baby-making undertaking. Bebe’s going to be here very soon, and after that, everything will change. As if everything hasn’t changed already. In baby time, she may as well come this afternoon. We’d be ready. Kind of.

Maybe "the nursery is coming together" is a bit too generous a statement.

The third trimester has been full of all those hallmarks that come to mind when you think of  the Institution of Pregnancy. I’ve got the look: I’m a whale, having gained thirty pounds since the beginning.* The nursery is coming together. Enrollment in a childbirth class is in the works, and I’m beginning to iron out the details of my birth plan. B is giddy and talks to my belly several times a day.

*The doc said I’m right on track with my weight gain. I don’t believe this is possible, but what-evs.

So I’d say that Bebe and I are doing a pretty good job of fulfilling all the mandatory requirements of being a Mother With Child. We’re slogging through and playing the parts I suppose we should be playing. Face it, that’s what you do when you’re pregnant for the first time: you take cues from others and the media about what you should be doing because you have no clue yourself. At least I don’t. But I’m used to being pregnant now and here’s the thing that I love the most:

I’m mellowing out. 

I think back a few months ago and I shake my head at how I could get myself in a tizzy over the minutiae of what I assumed parenthood would entail. Luckily for me, I have a blog where all my naivete has been chronicled. Today I was reading topiclessbar’s post Odd Thoughts on Having a Kid and I was reminded of a post I wrote way back called Baby Mix where I freaked out over Kiddie Culture and my soon-to-be induction into the world of The Wiggles. With all due respect to my October self, I now have to tell her to calm the frick down. No one is going to force this stuff on you and your Bebe. Pregnant Me pantomimes parenthood and assumes that what I see other people doing is what I’ll be doing too once Bebe arrives, but there’s not a lot of truth to that.

No one ever said I HAVE TO listen to The Wiggles. And here’s the thing: no one ever said that I’m not “cool” anymore if I do. Our family will work itself out and we’ll develop our own little culture. A good mixtape always includes a bunch of weirdness that somehow meshes with itself, so B and I can play our stuff right alongside The Wiggles if we so choose. Our family is changing and so is its soundtrack.

Granted, Little Alex shouldn't watch The Wiggles. But I've gotten over it.

In the meantime, though, I am still going to think about all the music I want to fill our home with. It’s a lot more fun to do this than it is to interview pediatricians, yet another amusing duty of the third trimester.

Arcade Fire – Tunnels

Just because. I may be in the minority on this one, but I think very little explanation is needed on why children – nay, EVERYONE – should be exposed to Arcade Fire.

The Go-Gos – Our Lips Are Sealed

This song has always made me think of Bebe. I mean, way, waaaaay before I became pregnant with her or even met B, I would hear this song and think of the girl who I might have someday.

The Smiths – Panic

A playlist should have something for everyone. This one is for B whose fascination with Morrissey knows no bounds and would possibly concern me if I weren’t completely convinced of B’s well-established manliness.

The Rolling Stones – Jumping Jack Flash

We have made a decision, B and I have. It’s weighty and contentious and not for everyone. Given the choice between the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, we’d have to take the Stones. Don’t be a hater.

….And a lullaby….

The Smashing Pumpkins – Luna

The Smashing Pumpkins get me emotional like no other band does, and this song is just so sweet I can’t handle it! The theme variations from Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness are also extremely soothing and lovely and will be a mainstay in the nursery; we’ll wait a few years to expose her to the shredding. One day I will tell the lengthy tale of my affair with The Smashing Pumpkins.

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What would you include on your family’s playlist?