Overwhelming Power

I haven't seen this one going around yet this year, but I'm in the mood for it. Post the first line of the first (real) entry of every month:

January: I don't know what the new year will bring, but I know it's off to a phenomenal start.

February: "RENT" is out on DVD today, not the movie but the actual show.

March: I love going on grand adventures, and not-so-grand adventures, too. This weekend, we went to Lee, Mass., and went outlet shopping.

April: I got a presale password in my e-mail for NKOTB today. The presale is tomorrow. (Why yes, I am a dork.)

May: The boss gave me a special project today, the first one I've had since I started this job.

June: Yesterday, we went on a road trip to Massachusetts to see things that would bore the everloving crap out of a lot of guys.

July: Yesterday was probably the nicest Fourth I've ever had. :)

August: I went to see "Rent" today, with Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp, and it was AWESOME.

September: Had a lovely time at the rEtrEat this past weekend ... it was cool and rainy half of the time, but it's about the company, not the weather, and it's always nice to spend time with my ladiEs again.

October: OMG, I finally, FINALLY got to see They Might Be Giants tonight!

November: Here's something I don't understand: Why do we get to vote on other people's rights?

December: It's so hard to be jolly when the roads are a mess and your car's under a foot of snow, isn't it?

Looks like it was a pretty good year. :)

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

-E.B. White

"Twenty one years ago today your mother pushed you out of her womb. How do you feel about that?"

"Sometimes pretty good, sometimes not so much. But that's life, right?"

My favorite TV special is A Charlie Brown Christmas. The very first line is: "I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy. I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel. I just don't understand Christmas, I guess. I like getting presents and sending Christmas cards and decorating trees and all that, but I'm still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed."

Personally, I love Christmastime. I love buying presents and wrapping them and watching people open them. I love sending Christmas cards and putting up Christmas decorations. I love making Christmas cookies and getting to order peppermint lattes rather than vanilla lattes at the coffee place. But somehow I always feel depressed around Christmas, too, and I think everybody does. I look forward to Christmas so much and there's so much about it that I love, it can feel like there's something really wrong with me if I'm not happy all the time.

Since I don't think I'm the only one who feels this way, I've made a little mix of melancholy holiday/winter songs for everyone. Not covers of Christmas carols, but legitimately good indie pop/rock songs that are about the sadder or more detached side of Christmas. In the tradition of past mix CDs, I have a little listening guide with my feelings about each song and download links for each. Some are from my music collection, but some are downloaded from various sources, so I apologize if the bitrates aren't up to everyone's snuff.

1. White Winter Hymnal -- Fleet Foxes
   I know I also used this track for my Winter: Side B mix last year, so I feel like I'm cheating a little, but I really love it. It sounds cheery or maybe like a church hymn, and then you realize they're singing about scarves keeping people's heads from falling off and their blood turning the white snow as red as a strawberry.
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2. Winter '05 -- Ra Ra Riot
   I was on a big Ra Ra Riot kick a couple months ago right around when Brian and I went to see them in concert. They have one album and they also did a pretty great collaboration album with Vampire Weekend called Discovery. Several of their songs have a sad, cold, wintery vibe to them and I like this one a lot.
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3. Sister Winter -- Sufjan Stevens
   One of the hardest parts of making this mix was picking just one Sufjan Stevens Christmas song, since he's put out so many. I really love this song because it's about Christmastime without being about Christmas itself. I think it's a great capture of how the end of the year combined with the cold weather combined with the feeling that you should be really happy can make you feel really sad. And I love the chorus of apologies, as I also feel the need to constantly apologize to everyone I know for my perceived shortcomings.
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4. Cold December -- Matt Costa
   This is a very pretty song. A lot of these sad holiday/winter songs are sad because there's so much wanting in them. Instead of being with the people you love for Christmas, you're lonely and thinking about how much you want to be with the people you love for Christmas. Which somehow is so much worse than being lonely on the Fourth of July.
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5. Gospel -- The National
   The National is my favorite band, and I know in a minute I'm going to try to tell you Frightened Rabbit is my favorite band, but don't believe me. This is one of the couple songs on this mix more tangentially related to Christmas/winter, but it's so beautiful. The National has a cold sound to almost all their songs, like they're being played in a dark, empty ballroom or something. Even their happier songs are like drunk happy where you're all warm and fuzzy, but you know the rest of the world is still freezing.
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6. Merry Christmas, Not Xmas -- Arrah and the Ferns
   Arrah and the Ferns are such a cute little group. They put out one album and a few odds and ends, like this Christmas song, before breaking up last year. I like this song for being straightforward about its holiday feelings. You're sour and restless and you don't want to deck any halls, you just want to drink double whiskey eggnogs and open your presents.
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7. Christmas Song -- Chris Garneau
   Let's just say it. Chris Garneau really wants to be Sufjan Stevens. And his album that came out awhile ago suffered from the same problem of trying way too hard to sound like every other indie singer/songwriter out there. I came across a lot of little Christmas ditties like this while making this mix, but I decided this one made the cut. Its short and twee and got stuck in my head.
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8. The Spirit of Giving -- The New Pornographers
   Another song that's only tangentially related to Christmas, with a few lines about the holiday spirit and herald angels. I especially love how the phrase "the spirit of giving" turns out to be "the spirit of giving in" in the song. Sometimes it feels like that.
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9. Dead of Winter -- Eels
   In the two years between Eels' first album and Electro Shock Blues, the album this song is from, the lead singer's sister committed suicide and his mother was diagnosed with and died from cancer. This album is filled with songs about death and is really, really sad. A lot of people don't like the Eels, but I think they're really great, mostly their slow songs.
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10. The New Year -- Death Cab for Cutie
    Everyone loves this song. I had a copy of this album in my car when I drove to New York and back last weekend and ended up listening to it several times and thinking about this song a lot after having forgotten about it for awhile. I think it's become the standard indie song about knowing you should feel special or different this time of the year, but not actually feeling much of anything.
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11. Sixteen, Maybe Less -- Iron and Wine
    Iron and Wine is another one of my favorite bands and this is such a beautiful song. Most Iron and Wine songs have this nostalgia about them, like references to the seasons or religion or animals or some kind of a pastoral life. Like I don't think any of his songs mention television, but probably two-thirds of them talk about grass and trees and birds and the ocean. I love the imagery of snowy woods in this one.
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12. Splitting Up Christmas -- Kevin Devine
    I think this is the gem of this mix, so I cleverly buried it right near the end. There's such hope and happiness in this song, and it's so sweet and earnest and well-done that it actually makes me feel kind of terrible. I mean, "You're the star at the top of my tree"? You're going to kill me, Kevin Devine.
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13. Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime -- Beck
    This is the biggest stretch for inclusion on this mix, not mentioning Christmas or winter or anything like that, but still wanted to put this song on here. It's from the soundtrack to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and kicks in right after the opening section of the film where Joel and Clementine meet on a deserted beach on a freezing day in Montauk and then end up at the frozen Charles River that night. To me, this song is hardwired to those shots and to the larger themes of the film, so I've decided it fits with the rest of this mix.
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14. Holiday in Spain -- Counting Crows
    Be honest, you guys thought I was going to hit you with "A Long December" didn't you? I know Counting Crows are kind of lame. They were even kind of lame when I was like 14, but I've always really liked them. And I honestly love this song. It's another one that captures the feeling of being at the end of the year and looking back and realizing you're kind of a mess. And you think, next year, next year I'm going to get it together. I'm not going to make these mistakes. I'm going to start over and be completely different, be so much better. But it's probably just going to be the same.
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15. It's Christmas So We'll Stop -- Frightened Rabbit
    Frightened Rabbit is kind of my favorite band. Ok, ok, it's just one of my favorites and one I want everyone to love. I listened to their album Midnight Organ Fight so hard this year. No matter what season it was or what was going on in my life, I had a song on that album for it. This song would fit right in on that album. It's beautiful and sad, but still maybe a little bit hopeful underneath all of that. Maybe?
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Thanks for reading this, you guys.
I hope you like these songs.

i have not slept since monday night. i am now hallucinating.

It's so hard to be jolly when the roads are a mess and your car's under a foot of snow, isn't it? I started on my holiday spirit early this year, turning on the Xmas music a week before Thanksgiving, 'cause I just knew that as soon as the snow fell, I'd be feeling decidedly less merry.

This weekend gave me a nice lift, after the first snow of the year had me feeling glum, "oh great, here we go again, how long until May?" Sunday, we went to Empire State Plaza and walked around the chocolate festival a bit, then a craft festival in the concourse, and then made our way up and outside for the tree-lighting ceremony. I've never been to a tree-lighting before, but it was nice, a fun thing to do, especially with the fireworks show afterward set to holiday songs. It certainly gave my spirits a boost.

I made cookies Monday and Tuesday, four kinds, three of them edible (bad recipes do happen). One kind in particular keeps earning raves from everyone who eats them, so I think I'll have to keep those in the rotation from now on. Yay.

And then, there was today. There was a foot of snow in the driveway when I left, and despite a half-hour of shoveling, I still got stuck in the driveway, really badly stuck. If it wasn't for a neighbor guy just happening to drive by, then stopping and helping to get me out, I might still be there for all I know. It sucked pretty hard. But on the up side, it's over, and when I got to work, there was the annual holiday auction, and I won somebody a present. :D

I guess where we go from here depends on the weather. It's hard to stay upbeat when it snows. I sometimes wonder if it would be nicer to live somewhere warm, where the roads are always dry. Would I have more holiday spirit then? Or would my cheer still fade because there aren't white-draped branches all around me? It's hard to say.

"To take things one step further, it is worth noticing how the “almost
but not white” formulation remains crucial in the era of global capital-
ism, as the progressive “whitening” of the globe into undifferentiated
markets open for Western product distribution cannot completely
eliminate the otherness of the “third world,” if cheap, exploitable labor
is to be maintained. The world can be turned “white,” only if some
portion of it remains “black” in order to produce the whiteness that
the West sells back to itself."
--Eric Berlatsky

“In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: hit the line hard.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

Hagerstown's Hottest Men.


OH THE IRONY.