My Playlist for the Melissa

Done just because.

We Used to Wait by Arcade Fire

Sometimes pop songs, despite their ephemeral nature, can really speak to me. This song, a love letter to writing letters to your love, grabbed both me and Melissa the first time we listened to it. Maybe it's just our generation's tendency to navel gaze, but lines like:



"So I never wrote a letter

I never took my true heart I never wrote it down

So when the lights cut out

I was left standing in the wilderness downtown"



and:



"It seems strange to think

How we used to wait for letters to arrive

But what's stranger still

Is how something so small can keep you alive"



seem designed to invoke emotions in us that we forgot existed. Especially since we both used to be big time letter-writers.

Dance Me to the End of Love by Leonard Cohen

The first song that Melissa and I danced to at our wedding. A love song from Mr Cohen that is without irony or cynicism seems pretty specially.

Move the Earth by Dr Theopolis

Melissa knows why.

A love song about Meridian, ID

James Joyce couldn't get away from Dublin fast enough and then he spent his whole life writing about it. Something similar attracts me to my old home town. I left a couple of months after graduating high school and it took nearly twenty years to return. In the intervening years, Meridian and Idaho in general sort of haunted me. I felt like a child who wanted to reject his parents but who realizes that everything he is today is because of them. Finally returning didn't help assuage this aching sense of nostalgia I felt because the town had changed so much. Where there had once been a sleepy farm town, I now found a cookie-cutter version of the mall-filled cities you find everywhere in this country. Driving through the city was like looking at a series of double exposures where I couldn't help but see what used to be superimposed on what is. Now that I know it's gone forever, I feel even more attracted to the Meridian I grew up in.

My advice

rows and rows by Steve Jurvetson (jurvetson)

Not advice for everyone, but advice for freelance writers. In reference to getting work, an editor and buddy of mine told me when I first started writing comics, "You can be better than everyone else, faster than everyone, or nicer than everyone else. No one can be all three, but if you can be any two of those, you'll never lack work." I always liked this because it admits that raw talent is not the end-all-be-all. And it reminds me of what Hemmingway said about his own writing: "I'm better than the guys that are faster than me and I'm faster than the guys that are better than me."

A real-life The guy who doesn't get the girl

I remember as a kid watching these movies in the theater or on HBO for the first time, I could never fully enjoy them. They were funny and all, but there was always that one character. If only he would say the right thing at the right moment, or not act so desperate, or pick up on the girl's signals. I wanted to jump up out of my seat and yell at the screen, tell the guy to wake the hell up and get with the program!


I realize now, of course, that I wanted to yell at that guy so much because he was me. Or I was him. Either way.


And it was no consolation that the film makers often made sure this character got a girl, but I wasn't going to be placated in such a way. Getting some faceless chick was in no way the same as getting Molly Ringwald, okay?


Thank God I grew up to be a guy who could get the girl. Or she got me. Either way.

Why I gave up on "The Expectant Father"

I've read a few books about parenthood now that I have a little one and one thing that bugs me to varying degree about all of them is that they tell me what I'm feeling at any given point. Not that they tell me what I might be feeling or even what I should be feeling, no they all say things like, "Now that your wife is five months pregnant you are experiencing anxiety about such-and-such." My feelings almost never matched up with what the books said they were and it bugged me. Basically, I wanted instruction manuals and what I was getting was "Iron John" disguised as a baby book. "The Expectant Father" struck me at the time when I was just getting fed up with all this touchy feel-y nonsense. So I set it aside and never got around to picking it up again.

In defense of my vice: bad pop music.

I think my love of pop music is well documented, but less well known is how much I love bad pop music.

Seeking Avril by amy-wong.com

I think that we can all agree that crap pop music has a place in the world, can't we? I mean, it's not entirely despicable that I own Avril Levigne's first album is it? And I love and appreciate what the rest of the world calls "good" music. It's like the difference between a gourmet $15 hamburger and a Quarter Pounder. They're almost not the same thing and sometimes you have a craving for junk that can't be denied. Sometimes you just crave the bubble gum. You know, the more I think about it, the less convinced it's even a vice...