girly music

in the summer of 2002, i went to see weezer at the tommy hilfiger theater on long island. i took liz; i asked her before i realized i didn't have to try very had with her. one of the opening acts was this band i'd never heard of... dashboard confessional. liz liked them though, and she seemed to enjoy it. it turned out to be this one guy on the huge stage all by himself playing his acoustic guitar. raj has said how much he hates the tommy hilfiger theater, and for good reason - the acoustics are terrible. you can't hear shit there. plus it gets freezing after the sun sets. so i couldn't hear _anything_ from him. plus, some guy - strangely enough, a long island moronic jockish looking teenage boy - sitting fairly close to us was screaming along and drowning out any sound that might have reached us from the stage. but, there was something compelling about this man standing alone on stage with his acoustic guitar singing his heart out (you could tell he was, even if you couldn't hear a thing) to a mass of people who weren't even there to see him, and most of whom couldn't hear him anyways.

when i got back to school in the fall, mary was in a dashboard confessional phase. she went through periods of having as few as 4 songs on her playlist and repeating them for hours, and her newest kick was this band.

i don't know what it says about me (probably something bad), but i can almost always find something i like about any song, if someone else has told me that they like it. i don't know what it is, maybe i am some sort of musical parasite with no taste of my own. but what makes the most sense to me, and also doesn't sound quite so distasteful, is that i am really empathic. if i know that a song or a group means something to someone else, i usually feel something for it too. is that too weird?

and so, sissy music. guys hate it. i won't make an absolute statement here, because those are never (heh) true, but i think almost all guys really do like some of it, sometimes. i mean, there are always those scenes in movies where the guys start slowly singing along to the radio while driving along. there was one in harold and kumar, even. i mean, those come from somewhere. i remember joe mujalli, possibly the funniest kid in my high school, while on the physics trip to riverside (aka six flags NE), stopping midstride and cocking his head to listen to that six pence none the richer song in "she's all that," and shushing everyone. he was a huge football player, good enough to get into harvard (he was also decently intelligent). it was a joke, it was funny, but i bet he really likes that song.

i listen to sissy music. occasionally. some is borderline and does not make me an outright pussy. dashboard confessional has to be on the end of some spectrum, though. i even went to a concert once. i bought the tickets so i could bring mary. she couldn't go because she had a problem set. someone told me later that eytan was over there that night, but i'm not going to start in that direction. back to the concert... so many 14-year old girls with their hearts on their sleeves. way too much emotion and hormones for a small concert venue. why do they listen to this shit? it's depressing. it's sad. it makes me feel like shit, personally, whenever i listen to it. but i still do, sometimes. kinda like how you listen to counting crows if you feel depressed and want to feel more depressed.

mostly what i wanted to say when i started this post is how i hate the music, even though i really don't. which makes me hate it more. i like it, even though it is depressing and it reminds me of times when i listened to it because i was depressed, or maybe it's when i was depressed because i listened to it. who knows. what i'm saying is, for a good while of college, i was not happy, and now i am overall pretty happy and carefree, and i don't like being reminded of that shitty period.

i was in barnes and noble the other day, and they must have been playing an entire album by some girl, and i was listening to it against my will, almost. so i'd be browsing through the shelves, and paying attention to the lyrics, although trying not to, which made me want to punch something, or myself. i even looked up a snippet of lyrics that stuck out, and it turned out to be lisa loeb. god, i am such a sissy. stopping now. (the posting. the being a sissy too, if i can swing it)