STUFF I SHOULD HAVE ALREADY KNOWN ABOUT
When we were kids, doing well in school was something that was applauded by parents and held up to us, or at least to me, as a mark of intelligence. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to hear things like “he was just too smart to do well in school,” and “It’s never the smart kids that excel in classes, it’s just the pencil pushers.” Because I’m highly self-conscious and egocentric, statements like these have had the odd effect of making me feel stupid for having done well in school. Like, “If I were smarter, I would have dropped out and gotten into heroine, I just know it. I should just go into government and get the whole thing over with.”
I think it’s true to some degree. I’m a people-pleaser, and I am disciplined in that study. But I also think that I like to LEARN. I like to dig into a subject and learn about the ins and outs, the causes and effects, and then bore you with them at our next social gathering. Call me a nerd. Please call me a nerd. It will up my self-confidence at this point.
I started thinking about this — tendency — in relation to music. Music and I are just getting acquainted, and I am finding it to be a difficult relationship. How do you get to know something so big? How do you STUDY it? I can’t just listen to a song and then tell you my opinion about it. I need to listen to the album. And then listen to it again. I need to look about info about the band, and know what kind of music was being produced at the time that they were making music. I need to know what kind of music they made before and after the album in question. I need to look at the album art and decide if it’s cool or lame.
I need a tactic and I’ve decided to come at it with all of pencil-pushing might. I’ve decided I’m going to embark on a project of REVIEWING THINGS I SHOULD ALREADY HAVE KNOWN ABOUT. One album a week, I will sort through all of the stuff that surely shaped your adolescent selves, and give you my unique throughout time take on it. That’s right, readers (um, that would be you, Chad and Steve) you will be able to come HERE to get my unique take on Abbey Road, Pinkerton, and The Wu-Tang Clan. Why are the first two album names and the last one a band name? Because I don’t know the name of a Wu-Tang Clan album. That’s just how behind I am. I do know it probably has something to do with bees or Kung-Fu movies, though.
This is what blogs are for, right? Announcing fun projects?
