I ended up working way too long again last night. I think I finished my forty hour work week sometime around lunch Wednesday. And then’ you know what?’ never mind. It’s boring whiny crap. Enough already.
I rushed home last night in time to catch Friends. Esteban had made a pizza run to our favorite deli for their bake-at-home thin crusts and had the oven hot when I came in. He presented me with a cold glass of Sugar Free Cherry Kool-Aid and turned the television on while I flung off the accoutrements of work.
It was Thanksgiving, Charlie Brown. CHARLIE BROWN! Friends’ forsaken to the Tivo. It’s been something like 12 years since I’ve seen the Thanksgiving Charlie Brown. So it went. I sat waiting in rapt attention for an adult to speak ‘Waaah waaah waah waaaaah wahg whaaahg’, which didn’t happen until Charlie Brown called his Grandmother at the end of the show.
Peppermint Patty always makes me uncomfortable. I’m terribly afraid that I’m actually a Peppermint Patty, strangely unfeminine, wearing strange clothes, those uncomfortable sandals and that striped green polo undoubtedly purchased in the husky young lads department, wandering around calling boys that don’t want anything to do with me ‘sly dogs’, unaware that I have a little lesbian love interest waiting in the wings. But honestly, I’m probably Lucy. I’d totally yank away the football and then go moon over the quiet musician, who also didn’t want to have anything to do with me.
One brief moment of delight: during the cooking montage, whilst Snoopy went through no less than five looped toast making montages, Esteban did a spontaneous Snoopy dance to Guaraldi’s ‘Linus & Lucy’.
That’s one of the few things I can still play on the piano from memory. That and Pachelbel’s Canon in D. I tried picking out ‘Imagine’ on Penny’s piano awhile back, but couldn’t find the bridge. Music is one of those things that it always seemed as though I should be good at, but I never really was. I can’t play guitar. I grew up in a house full of guitars, folk concerts were held in my living room, but I can’t produce a note. I took flute, piano, and bassoon for a combined total of 12 years, but looking at music makes me dizzy. And I still can’t read both the top and the bottom part of piano music at once. I just memorize it.
Even still, music is important. Every season has an album or sound. When the seasons change, I go through these musical moods. Right now, I’m all about the Squirrel Nut Zippers and classical music. I haul out the Etta James, the Cole Porter, the Frank Sinatra. It’s tradition, wide brimmed hat kind of sound, full of permanence, the aural weight of the brass. Just gotta love it.
When I was a child, I had a neurological syndrome called Synethesia, which is when the brain confuses one of the senses for another one. Taste for touch, sight for sound, etc. It affects about 1 in some thousand people (I’ve seen estimates between 1000 and 28000), primarily left handed folks (which I was by birth) who tend to be artists or creative types.
In my case, I would see flashes of color for sounds. It mostly went away in middle childhood (the theory there is that the neuropathways finally catch up with the rest of the brain growth) but I suspect that I’m a bit more sensitive to sound than other folks. When I wrote about Esteban’s clashing CD mix yesterday, I wasn’t kidding. It really did make my ears hurt. Just as something can be too sweet or too warm, sound can make me physically ill sometimes. When I have a migraine or a headache, the sound of cymbols, even quiet ones, can make me actually nauseated. Music is a powerful thing. It can please me in ways that I can’t even describe. Sometimes, when I find something that particularly holds me in awe, it’s all I can do to keep from getting as close as I can to the speaker, to block out everything else and just soak in it.
It seems odd that someone who finds such joy out of creating and reading what is essentially a silent medium, can be as attracted to sounds, but the sounds are still there. The way that words feel on your tongue when you read them, as though someone lighted the tiniest of spoons there and said ‘Here, just a sip.’
Today at lunch I purchased the Buffy musical and displaced SNZ’s Hot for the first time in days from its home in the Monte’s CD player. Then I spent my lunch driving around, bellowing ‘I’ll Never Tell’ and ‘I’ve Got A Theory’ as though it were the most normal thing in the world. And when things get particularly stressful at work, or I can’t concentrate, I stock WinAmp with a bunch of songs from my illegal cache that I burned just for my laptop at work. And it works. Someone asked me a few days ago why I always listen to music later in the day and I responded ‘Because I can’t take drugs.’ I think she thought I was joking.
So maybe what’s happening is I’m still trying to capture a bit of that fanciful brain fireworks that used to be as normal as breathing and giggling when I was seven. It does occasionally happen when I’m not thinking about it, when I’m not fully aware of my surroundings, when I’m a little wonky or out of it, suddenly–a flash or a pattern of something will accompany an unexpected sound. Fish scales, in pastels, superimposed over my living room at the sound of the doorbell; fibrous Orange Crush-colored haze at the sound of an alarm clock in a commercial. It’s always like the word on the tip of your tongue’ you know it’s there, you know that if you just tried hard enough, you could touch it but for right now, you just can’t. So sometimes you just wiggle your hips along with Snoopy and Woodstock and enjoy knowing that there are incredible colors you can’t see and lovely words you will use to describe them.
