Oh, That’s Good/No, That’s Bad: a Musical Retrospective

Photo by Timothy Lloyd.

An entire wall in my parents’ living room is devoted to my dad’s record collection. Yes, records, what The Kids These Days call “vinyl”–not CDs, although he has those by the hundreds too, a collection constantly in flux. He orders new CDs, makes room in tucked-away boxes for those he likes, sells those he doesn’t. But the shelves, heavy squares stacked two or three high, are reserved for records, a mostly static collection after forty years of sifting and winnowing, evaluation and barter.

He has all the classics that make my vinyl-collecting friends drool. His tastes are broad: rock, jazz, and blues are his favorites, but there is also space for zydeco, tejano, folk, a little big band, reggae, Motown, old-school country. There is some labyrinthine organizational system that only he can decipher; every time I think I’ve got it (“All the British Invasion artists are in the same place!”), something throws me for a loop and I give up again.

Now that my taste has matured beyond the stuff made by boys who wear girls’ pants and girls who don’t wear pants, my musical preferences and my dad’s have begun to converge. We trade CDs. My friends occasionally run into him at shows.

As a result of my father’s long-running love for rock history, my musical education is 27 years in the making–nine months before I was born, because it began in the womb. When I was yet to be born, kicking my mother in the stomach, my parents quickly figured out that playing Eric Clapton would put me to sleep. (Still does, actually.) At four, my favorite song was “Octopus’s Garden.” At seven, it was Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ “Oh, That’s Good, No, That’s Bad.” At nine, there wasn’t a Supremes song I couldn’t lip-synch to. At 15, I wrote a ten-page term paper on the history of punk. At 16, I saw Bob Dylan live and went to a jazz concert at the Village Vanguard. At 17, I watched Monterey Pop. For my 21st birthday, my dad took me to all the south-side Chicago blues clubs that he had gone to when he was my age and just learning to like the blues.

Bedtime stories.

Photo by bee boxes.

It starts like this: I crawl into bed, but just as I’m about to fall asleep, I get this tingly feeling in my lower legs. It grows and deepens until I feel like a million tiny bugs are crawling around under my skin. Twitching and wiggling helps relieve the antsiness, but it also wakes up my boyfriend and makes it impossible for me to fall asleep. So I get up and walk around and eventually read a book or watch a movie or play on the internet until I’m so tired I’m half-asleep in my chair. Only then–usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 or 5 A.M.–can I actually fall into my bed and pass out without fighting the overwhelming urge to squirm.

Fact: Restless legs syndrome is the one medical condition that people inevitably single out when trying to prove that doctors over-pathologize normal, everyday conditions in order to sell more medication. Restless legs? they scoff. I mean, come on. How does that affect your health in any way? How bad can it possibly be?

Fact: People who say things like this are idiots.

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I’ve been trying to fix my sleep schedule. I sleep too little, too much, at the wrong time of day. This has been a problem for me since high school, when my parents were alarmed that, despite the fact that I could never get up in the mornings and spent seven hours at school, two at track practice and two more at play rehearsals, I was never exhausted enough to fall asleep before 1 or 2 A.M. They took me to a doctor who mentioned it might delayed sleep phase syndrome–a fancy name for the fact that my night-owliness was not personal preference or laziness but a result of my circadian rhythms being inherently fucked–but mostly just told me to lay off the caffeinated soda. My sleep patterns only deteriorated once I got to college–during my freshman year of college, they gradually evolved into two four or five hour naps, one just after dinner and the other around 5 or 6 A.M., depending what time I had to be up for class. I pulled regular all-nighters, regardless of whether or not I had a paper to write or an exam to study for. My sleep patterns only normalized when I was waiting tables 30 hours a week in addition to going to school. Running around on campus and at work for twelve hours a day, I wore myself out so much that I could finally fall asleep as soon as my homework was done.

My stress level has been really high lately. I’m trying to modify my daily routines–sleeping, eating, drinking, running–trying to mold them into patterns that decrease my anxiety instead of upping it. But I’m starting to think I have the deck stacked against me here.

Kate the Great

Turner Classic Movies is airing a 1973 Katharine Hepburn interview. I love watching her talk outside of the movies. She just kicks her feet up on the table, spews no bullshit, and never doubts herself.

We Can’t Even Starve If We Want To.

“When I set out in my 20s I understood very little but I understood this much: Any educated white person in America is privileged, and no one is going to allow us to starve. We can’t even starve if we want to. People keep inviting us to dinner to talk about Robert Lowell.” – Cary Tennis

Why I Threw Out My Scale.

Photo by Lisa Brewster.

Why I Threw Out My Scale, or Body Image Issues Aren’t Interesting to People Who Don’t Have Them (So I Won’t Be Offended If You Don’t Read This)

Like every other 18-year-old going off to college, I spent one of those August weekends at Ikea, picking out cheap dorm decor. Unlike most other 18-year-olds going off to college, one of the things I bought was a scale. Since it was from Ikea, it cost three dollars and probably was not the most accurate model on the market, but it served me well through all of college and approximately six different kinds of disordered eating. (Name it and I’ve probably done it–compulsive overexercise, ED-NOS with anorexic features, bingeing, fasting, orthorexia. I’m like the hipster snob of eating disorders–I’ve tried everything; I’ve had eating disorders that most people haven’t even heard of . . . before they were cool.)  I would eat normally for a few months and gain a couple pounds; then I would try something new to lose them. No matter how positive my intentions were, how healthy I thought I was being, the end result was inevitably that I ended up with an increasingly hostile relationship to food and my body, always eating less and working out more than I should have been. And still never skinny.

Thanks to my Ikea scale, until this year I’ve never not known what my weight was.

I weighed myself at least once a day. I went through periods where I weighed myself 20 times a day. The number on the scale determined if I was going to have a good day or a bad day, because no matter how many other things happened over the course of the next 12 hours, that number was in the back of my head. In theory, it determined whether I was allowed to eat normally or not, but most of the time, both a number that was higher than I expected or one that was lower than I expected encouraged me to restrict. If the number was too high, I had to cut back on my food intake because I was too fat to eat like a normal person. If the number was on the low side, it was encouragement to not eat anything else.

This relationship with my scale exhausted me. I always felt too old and too smart for that kind of obsession, which only served to make me feel more stupid and immature for continuing to buy into it.

So when we moved, I got rid of it.