NaBloPoMo

To Hell With Poverty
Gang of Four – To Hell With Poverty

Last week, a bit reluctantly, my son and I attended a FAFSA night at the high school. They promoted it by saying there would be people from colleges there to help you fill out the financial aid form. I kind of figured I already knew what to do since this is not our first rodeo, but the prospect of having someone from a college, rather than the clueless high school counselor, on hand to answer questions made me think it might be worth it.

Now I’m not so sure. I kind of think we may have entered something incorrectly but when I tired to go in to verify it, the stupid form kept timing out after we logged in so I gave up on that for tonight. Instead I thought I’d get started on the CSS Profile. Oh happy day! We are broke enough to not have to pay any fees for filing that one!

It still amazes me that people can be so easily misled into believing that their problems are caused by whichever minority group the far-right would like to blame today. I mean, we all know how it has happened, but I can’t imagine being so willfully ignorant, so incapable of following basic logic, so completely incurious about the world, that you would look at the two ghouls pictured in this video and think yeah, I’ll trust them instead of my neighbors. I’m avoiding mentioning any of the current crop of fascists on election eve but Ronnie and Maggie really got that party started. Here we are, 40 years later, and I think they would be thrilled to see the state of things today.

World of Pots and Pans

Horsegirl – World of Pots and Pans

A friend invited me to take part in her Music League back in the spring. It’s an app/website where you and some number of other people are given a theme and have a few days to anonymously submit a song that fits the theme, then a playlist is generated (this all syncs up through Spotify) and you have a few days to listen to it before voting on the songs. You can leave a comment on all of the songs but at least in this league, you are required to up vote six songs and down vote one. Then the votes are tallied and there are weekly first, second, and third place finishers, as well as a cumulative total for the overall winner.

I can’t remember if I ever wrote about Turntable.fm but most of the people in this league are people I know from that app/website. Turntable was forced to shut down when it ran into problems with streaming and copyright issues, but it reemerged two years ago or so using YouTube as its streaming source. I loved the first iteration of Turntable. I have met up with several of those people in real life at concerts; they’re good people who listen to great music. But I don’t really have the time? energy? something, to keep up with it now. So when this friend (one of the original Turntable crew) texted and asked if I wanted to be in the Music League, she said up front that it wasn’t a huge time commitment, you have several days to submit and vote, I figured I could give it a try.

The themes have been things like post a song by a band with siblings, or a song with strings, a song released in 1989, a song in French, a song released since June 2022, etc. Someone in the league is the admin and sets up the weekly themes so you can see what’s coming up and plan ahead. If two people try to submit songs by the same band it will warn you that there has already been a song by that band submitted so try something else. There have been a bunch of times when my first, second, and even third choice bands were already used. But you can’t see what other people have submitted until the cutoff time (or all submissions have been made).

Anyway, it is a lot of fun, easy to keep up with, and I have heard a lot of new music that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have discovered. Like Horsegirl. They appeared a couple of times in the line up and were talked about in the accompanying chat in the app. Plus, it has been good to “see” these friends again, even in this very minimal way. I highly recommend it!

Night and Day
Johnny Marr – Night and Day

When the alarm went off this morning, I was in the middle of a weird dream. My husband and I were sitting at a kitchen table with Johnny Marr, all eating sandwiches. I guess we’d been talking about how things were going for him financially and my husband said, “Well, as long as you can take care of your aging parents, that’s good enough.”

Friends, we were Johnny Marr’s parents. He had just taken a bite of his sandwich and froze with this look on his face of total disbelief, as you might expect. I tried to soften things by making a light-hearted remark to the effect of, don’t worry, dear, he’s only joking. Sort of. Johnny Marr continued to stare, still not chewing that bite he’d taken. Then the alarm clock saved him from more of this awkward encounter.

I can easily see the combination of factors that contributed to this dream; I’d just talked to my mom last night and talked about our finances (hers and ours), a recent dinner time joke my husband made to our son, and Johnny Marr’s Instagram. Recently, he was out on tour with the Killers and would post stories where he’d turned up at some guitar shop or studio somewhere and play some classic riffs from a Smiths song. I just watched one yesterday.

I checked Instagram this morning and he posted a new picture, probably at just about the same time I was having that dream, and the look on his face is almost exactly like the stare he was giving us. The title of his most recent album is Fever Dreams Pts 1-4, so really, I think it’s his fault my subconscious has him funding my retirement.

We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings

The Smile – We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings

It has been a day. And a year. I don’t know if I am going to do NaBloPoMo this time but I thought if I didn’t post something today, some of you might have worried that I dropped off the face of the planet. Especially since the last post I made was at the end of last year’s run and was titled “Say Goodbye.”

What can be said about these last eleven months? And why would anyone want to read it anyway? I feel like everyone has just been going through it. Getting by. We’re still here but, eesh, the less said the better.

So, I hope you’re hanging in there, and maybe there will be posts but maybe not. We don’t know what tomorrow brings.

Say Goodbye

Throwing Muses – Say Goodbye

Well it’s November 30, making this the last NaBloPoMo post for 2021. I had some ideas and intentions of writing more but as is often the case, I ran out of steam at night. We’ve also made a habit of trying to get our teenagers to watch tv with us in the evening rather than retreating to their rooms and doomscrolling so that cuts down on my available time.

Anyway, tradition upheld. See you next year!

It’s Only Life

The Feelies – It’s Only Life

Things I remembered to bring to work today after a week off for Thanksgiving: lunch and my Happy Light, since it’s dark by the time I leave and I don’t get any sun during the day.

Things I forgot to bring: my ID, so I could get into my office, and my tools. On the Friday before Thanksgiving, I decided I wanted to try rearranging my desk but without a screwdriver all I basically managed to do was leave things in a disarray.

I’m sure I will forget something again tomorrow but oh well.