In Which an Upbeat Trend is Unimaginatively Continued

Do you remember how I said the other week that I’d lost my USB? Well, I found it at the traditional time, which is to say “immediately after purchasing a replacement” (also, it turns out to have a lost and forgotten and now wildly out of date post on it! Maybe I shall post from the past one of these days). This (finding it) is a good thing, since apparently I managed to lose that new one this morning, sometime between when I uploaded yesterday’s blog post onto it and when I got to the library and tried to upload it onto the actual internet. Although it’s obviously sad to have lost it, and annoying to have been delayed in posting, a part of me is amused. That’s the part of me that realises that that which is lost is inevitably found eventually, and when whomever it is finds that USB, they’re going to be really confused that all it contains is a document entitled “In Which There Are More Nice Things” containing 1,300 words of upbeat blather. This current high USB turnover mystifies me: until a month ago, I’d had the same USB for about 7 years; what’s changed recently? I changed which bag I was using a couple of weeks ago (because my Crumpler still smells strongly of campfire from the Farm), but only to the one I’ve carried since 4th year, and I never lost one since then. And it counts as being since 1st year, too, since I drafted the pattern of the current bag from the one I made in 1st year. Strange times. Oh well.

Today was somehow charming. The weather was so lovely and temperate this morning that I walked to uni from Moore Park just for the loveliness of it, and it was light (not just lightening, like usual) when I woke up. At uni there was some brief collusion, which is always interesting (this is not some kind of strange innuendo, I was colluding in a conspiracy to organise a birthday present). Then on the way home I listened to my awesome Tarzan playlist. When I got home, I spent the entire afternoon in the kitchen, baking strawberry muffins and hazelnut brownie-cupcakes, making mint lemonade and watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on my laptop. I defy anyone to have come up with a better way of spending the afternoon.

All this bakery and what have you is on the grounds that it’s my turn to bring food to my PBL tomorrow, but I haven’t the cash to buy chips and lollies or whatever it is that one might expect, whereas flour and sugar are cheap. Also, man, baking is a lot of fun, as well as being a more effective and impressive way to buy friendship. What with all these pastries and such (I made olive-parmesan pastry coils too, but they didn’t work out as well, so they don’t merit a mention) as well as the fact that tomorrow is the day chosen for James’ birthday thingy by Jenny and I (so I’ll be bringing in the present, which is also homemade, is my point here), I really feel like being awfully 1950s tomorrow. Unfortunately, being as how I don’t live with my parents and have a job (or have a job, even), I do not have so many pairs of comfortable-yet-stylish shoes that I can wear each pair about once a fortnight, which is the situation of someone I was talking to today. The upshot of this is that I have beautiful shoes and comfy-enough-to-wear-to-uni shoes and shoes that would go perfectly with a 1950s-feminine outfit, but no shoes which are all these things at once. So it’s jeans and joggers as usual.

What I was actually going to talk about, though, was my Tarzan playlist, which is awesome, mainly as an intellectual exercise. It’s called “Tarzan” because it swings along like Tarzan in the jungle, from lantana to lantana, with no idea where it’ll end up. The principle is this: each song (apart from the arbitrarily chosen 1st song, obviously) is picked because of some association with the previous song, but is not allowed to be from the same artist or album.

Thus, “Jeepers Creepers” a song by Frank “Ol’ Blue Eyes” Sinatra is followed by the Fratellis’ “Ole Black’n’Blue Eyes”, followed by “Ruby” by the Kaiser Chiefs, who, like the Fratellis, are a group of Scottish rockers. Cake’s “Never There” starts with a dial tone which (embarrassingly) is how N’Sync’s (hey, we were all young once, right?)”I’ll Never Stop” ends. It’s a lot of fun to put these together and try to be both randomly unpredictable and logically sense-making, so you don’t listen to it later and go “Why did I put Ben Folds’ ‘Still Fighting It’ next to ‘Meglio Stasera’, from the Pink Panther?” (answer: because I’d accidentally deleted Feist’s “So Sorry” from between them). Or maybe you listen to Jason Mraz’s “Wordplay” then Death Cab’s “Long Division” then Ben Lee’s “We’re all in this together” and go “wait, what?” and then realise that all three songs mention long division, which is uncommon enough that it’s satisfying to collect them in the one place.

I particularly enjoyed following “Smells like Teen Spirit” with a song from “High School Musical” about being in a basketball team (geddit? Teen spirit, team spirit from a tween movie? Oh nevermind.) (Hehe, geddit again? Oh, I’m on a roll here...) mainly because of how Kurt Cobain would so definitely have considered himself so, so much cooler than High School Musical.

Also it’s great because it never ends, but proceeds in fits and starts. For a while the other day it had ground to a halt at Nat King Cole’s exhortation not to let our eyes go shopping for our hearts, but then it became clear that that was neatly inverted when Lily Allen explained that she ‘[didn’t] care about clever, [didn’t] care about funny’ (more fool her) in “The Fear”. This naturally lead to The Smiths’ “Panic”, a song which suggests that we should hang the DJs because the music that they constantly play says nothing to him, Morrissey, about his life. So that leads us to The Crustaceans’ “The Ambulance Driver” (because if having ‘a diuretic conversation about the Doppler Effect’ in an Ambulance doesn’t happen to me in the next 7 years, I personally, will be surprised – that song says something about my life, if not Morrissey’s) and thus to Fountains of Wayne’s “Halley’s Waitress” for being another song reference so nerdy you could imagine an XKCD making the same comment.

... So, um that was incredibly boring to read, wasn’t it? Just a list of songs and weird connections. Sorry guys. But my point is that it’s fun to do, and you should try it (and then make me a mix tape!). Also that you should refrain from judging me for having boybands and the High School Musical soundtrack on my iPod (the latter was a gift, I totally swear).

Also, today, on my walk down Cleveland St, I saw a middle aged, average looking man wearing an XKCD t-shirt. I love that, when you see people from a distance and you think “you don’t notice that I exist at all, but I get the reference you’re making, and I think you’re pretty cool”. This was always how I secretly imagined it being when I used to wear my t-shirt that says “A city built on Rock& Roll would be structurally unsound.”

Ben Folds would have us believe that “there are people you meet who’re into something that is too big to be expressed through their clothes”, but quite frankly I don’t think that anything is impossible to express through clothes if you try hard enough (not that I would always recommend it, of course, usually “expressing” things is not a good primary aim in getting dressed of a morning). But what’s that big? The biggest thing I can think of that people can be into is religion, but that’s easily and commonly expressed sartorially (although politicians wearing cross necklaces are always to be regarded with suspicion: it smacks of being sent to prison and getting religion in time for your parole hearing, or some other kind of dreadful insincerity). If you’re into something more amorphous, it could still be expressed if you want, even negatively. Thus, if you’re into not being a douche, then you can refrain from wearing those “Hello Titty” t-shirts with a breast-ish Hello Kitty on it that you can buy from the Raben shop near Central. If you wish to warn people that you have Asperger’s and don’t quiiiiiiite understand how humour works you can wear those ones that say “I see dumb people reading my t-shirt”. I like baking and reading and history and geekery and Disney children’s movies and the BBC and absentminded positivity, and I have the badges on my lab coat to prove it. Maybe when I grow up I’ll just be Pauly Perrette, that lab chick from NCIS, that’d be pretty sweet.

What I’m saying here is (a) although you should never judge someone by their clothes, that doesn’t mean that people don’t ever tell you anything worthwhile about themselves through that medium, and (b) sometimes I really over-think innocent song lyrics. Well, um, most of the time, let’s face it. But at least that means I know to put the Spazzys’ cover of “My Boyfriend’s Back” after Dire Straights’ “Romeo and Juliet”, right? I mean, that’s got to be a life skill or something, right?