let's go down to normal town

Maitri might have been right. I am definitely suffering from a little sleep deprivation. Some of this is, unfortunately, unavoidable, when you’re working a daily grind while taking exams that break your brain. The last two days in a row, I’ve totally been in fire drill mode in the morning in order to get to work at the right time. Even though my work does not motivate me, I have realized it’s actually been counterproductive to blow it off. When I do that, there is this feedback loop that follows, involving massive waves of guilt and shame. I would rather get what I need to get done, take some small amount of pride in that, and keep feeling satisfaction.

I was thinking of a line from About A Boy this morning. I never went for Hugh Grant when he was playing a foppish, aw shucks bloke, but, wow, does he make a good cad. Anyway, there’s this line, as he’s walking through a store and hears the muzak, that goes: November the sodding 19th... Six weeks before bloody Christmas and they were already playing that song.. Even though the 19th is tomorrow, technically, this quote flashed into my head this morning because I discovered that there is a radio station here in the Bay Area that has been playing non-stop holiday music since the beginning of the month. And can you guess what song came blasting onto my airwaves this morning? Feliz Navidad, b*tches!

This song was so absurd that I snapped out of my frazzled senses, and burst out laughing. Never underestimate the power of absurdity. It changed my life. I was quite somber when I was young, but I can remember the very night that absurdity finally revealed itself to me.

I do not consider Boston my city- it isn’t a place I consider home, or that I feel I must one day return to. But I wasn’t anyone until I moved to Boston. I was amorphous. I was a sponge drinking in my surroundings. I was a child who was convinced she was an adult. And holy h*ll was I melancholy. I look like a cheerleader now compared to how morose I was before I went to Boston. Living there shaped me. Sometimes, it’s hard for me to think of that city without associating it with a hundred beautiful and miserable things I discovered there.

But, among the highs and the lows, there was absurdity. I had just spent a semester brooding, licking my wounds, in a cocoon of Pearl Jam’s Black among other unhappy songs. Then, one evening, the cocoon just would not hold me any longer. The sadness simply would not contain me anymore. I could not remember why I was in such an inconsolable state.

That night, there was much debauchery. On the way home, practically skipping along the cobblestone sidewalks, fuzzed and fading, I started singing, if you need me, let me know, and I'll be around. If you got no place to go, and you’re feeling down. Do you have any idea how hilarious this song is? Something about the lyrics was so incredibly pathetic that it launched me into a fit of giggles that I’m not sure I have recovered from to this day.

I find that whenever I am truly devastated, after an appropriate period of brooding, a solid splash of absurdity goes a long way to curing me of my ailments. In this case, it was Jose Feliciano. Whatever works.