I really miss Amsterdam this week. It already seems unreal, like I saw a movie about it, but I never actually went. I should have taken more pictures. I took a lot in Paris, but I didn't develop the same kind of relationship with Paris. I didn't live there, I just visited.
I've been listening to the Guster song "Amsterdam" a lot lately. That, and the Tegan and Sara song "Where Does the Good Go?". What can I say, I love repetition. My neighbors haven't complained yet, and Danielle doesn't seem to mind, so I'm going to keep it up. That's the only drawback to live performances, especially impromptu ones, you can never hear it again most of the time. Sometimes there are youtube videos or concert dvds, but most of the time it's a one shot deal. I once heard these two camp counselors at Weona play their guitar and mandolin, and no version of "Colleen Malone" will ever compare. They were twins, and I entertained minor crushed on them both for the rest of camp after their performance. I still think about them, even though I barely knew them, simply because they played that song. It was that good. I love stuff like that though, there are hundreds of little live shows that I want to see again, a juggler in Maryland, a break dance show in Paris, a song about turning the radio on and getting in touch with God that was popular at the open mic bluegrass night in Tennessee. It's great that I got to experience these things at all, it seems ungrateful to want more, but...well there is not but I guess. I'm probably going to think about those twins every now and again for the rest of my life though.
I wonder if love songs are just made up, or people really feel that way about real people. That they're in a relationship with, not just that they're creepily obsessed with. I love reading the wedding announcements in the Sunday Times, because I like to be reassured that people do fall in love, and things occasionally work out. It seems unlikely that I'll find someone to love in college, but it would be easier to wait if I had some reassurance that it would happen eventually.
I had two tests in the past two days, so I'm giving myself the night off to read Les Miserables. I don't know what I was thinking starting a novel the size of a cinder block right as school starts getting all time consuming, but now I'm engrossed and can't stop.
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3 comments:
I feel like that all the time - whenever I have something nice I try so hard to be grateful for what I got and not just sad that there wasn't more of it. It's hard. The worst of it is when you are so preoccupied with the desire to keep something that it interferes with your enjoyment of it while you do have it - my current relationship is a bit like that.
I was watching a short doco about the Hunters & Collectors album, Human Frailty, in which, appropos of love songs, Mark Seymour and his band mates discussed how certain of the songs were a direct result of a new relationship he was in at the time, and the phases and events therein, and while the songs are a bit too Cure-ish for me, they are still quite good, complex in content, hard to sing in that you-know-he-means-it-if-he-fashions-the-phrasing-like-that way.
Everything is memory. I have some photos from my last great European adventure, for example, but I enjoy them for their composition, rather than for any particular episode of the trip, all of which will resurface from time-to-time to be cherished (even the more-or-less shaming stuff of my life).
Well, yes. Romantic love really does happen. The wonderful old love songs of my era capture it very often.
Romantic love, not to be confused with just plain lust, does not always last but when it does, it gets less heated but somehow more warming over time. And the really good songs still bring back the good memories and feelings.
Don't hurry it. You will find it.
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