woo-hoo! (as damon albarn might say.)
11/22/2005 06:04 a.m.
you may be wondering what the hell is going on in this event known currently as my life. well, allow me to explain. i've spent a good chunk of my last few months wallowing in a cesspool of creative squalor; that is to say, i'm in one of those creative funks. it happens where i just stagnate, and i end up listening to a lot of pop music while at the same time becoming horribly depressed at the notion of anything in the future. i have two jobs now, and they both kind of suck.
in one corner, i am andrew, the name-tagless shift leader of hollywood video, where i make an obscenely small amount of money for an obscenely large amount of work. work that, granted, i enjoy perfectly fine- but still, low-wage jobs suck, espescially when the object thereof is to save money for school (more on that later). it is incredibly difficult to do at $7/hr. which led me to find myself in the employ of one marshall fields' corporation, a division of federated retail holdings, which more or less owns every department store that you'd ever shop at. long story short, their corporate structure is the most faceless thing ever. i started there last month in merchandising, which involved heavy lifting, an absent boss, and rising every morning at five AM. needless to say, i was not cut out for the work; and thus, i am currently in the process of transferring to foods, where i'm told the suck-factor is significantly less. the $8.25/hr is better. much better. still, i need to make more. not because i'm a greedy fuck who can't control his spending (the latter half of that statement may be true, but that's beside the point, really)- but i'm going to school next semester.
for those of you not really informed about my life (which i would expect comes to just about everyone), i do not currently go to school- but will be enrolling in the prestigious minneapolis community and technical college. (it's a start. i'm going to transfer later).

upon the music front (as it is a particularily large part of my life), i'm still madly in love with sleater-kinney's album, the woods. we're in the home stretch of the year, and it's been a pretty decent year, music wise. i'm going to withhold my list until the clock strikes midnight on dec31- but there have been some damn good albums this year. it seems so weird that music is such an integral part of my life; yet when you think about it, it's this completely benign entity. it's background noise when i'm not making it, and it's the most passive hobby one can possibly have. listening to music is not doing something. it is something that happens. and that is not to make music seem trivial or anything like that, i love music to death; it's just never much on it's own. at least, pop music. jazz and classical are completely different fields; but i don't nessecarily consider them music so much as i consider them a separate art form. pop music is a science. anyone can write a great pop song if you know two shits about theory and have any sense of musicianship (when i say pop, i am speaking of all forms of popular music, from rock [independant or otherwise] to rap to soul to standard top 40 pop). that's not to say that it isn't interesting, because it is easily the most interesting science there is. innovation comes at a snails pace; i'm not jaded enough to believe that pop music hasn't done any evolving since the beatles, though they were without question the last large step forward we've had. but progress has been slow. I think that this is out of necessity as much as it is has been out of lack of creativity. because to write a great pop song, you have to understand that no matter how much you think music is your own, it is always everyone elses. and music is, as much as anything else, a business. basically, you've got to understand that it doesn't matter if you write the greatest song ever if no one is going to hear it. this, this necessitates the slowness of progress; you can change peoples' attitudes over time, but a populace is, generally speaking, not going to accept it. the upswing of this whole stagnation is that, it makes it very easy to dissect why some things work and why others don't, which is why i both love and hate pop music. it's so easy for me, so i don't think it's worth much, but at the same time it knows how to push my buttons, and in doing so keeps me roped in. it's like the best enigma that has ever existed.
i'm going to shut off the music, but before i do, consider one of my favourite choruses ever:

woo hoo
and i feel heavy metal
woo hoo
and i'm pins and i'm needles
woo hoo
and i lie that i'm easy
all of the time and i'm
never sure why i need you
pleased to meet you.

it doesn't make any fucking sense, but it's perfect.

i listen now, to the silence so maybe i'll hear something brand new.
no one has ever heard the silence.
i'll leave you with that.
I am currently Random
I am listening to fiona apple:criminal