"Moody's Mood For Love (Teo Licks)"
There I go, there I go, there I go, there I go Pretty baby you are the soul, snaps my control Such a funny thing but everytime you’re near me I never can behave You give me a smile and I'm wrapped up in your magic There's music all around me Crazy music, music that keeps calling me so Very close to you, turns me into your slave Come on and do with me any little thing that you want to Anything, baby just let me get next to you So am I insane or do I really see heaven in your eyes? Bright as stars that shine up above you In the clear blue sky, how I worry bout you Just can't live my life without you Baby come here, don't have no fear Oh, is there wonder why I'm really feeling in the mood for love So tell me why, stop to think about this weather, my dear This little dream might fade away There I go talking out of my head again baby won't you come and put our two hearts together That would make me strong and brave Oh, when we are one, I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid If there's a cloud up above us Come on and let in rain I'm sure our love together would endure a hurricane Oh my baby won't you please let me love you and get relief from this awful misery What is all this talk about loving me, my sweet I am not afraid, not anymore, not like before Don't you understand me, now baby please Pull yourself together, do it very soon My soul’s on fire, come on and take me I'll be what you make me, my darling Oh baby, you make me feel so good Let me take you by the hand Come let me visit out there In that new promised land Maybe there we can find A good place to use a lovin' state of mind I'm so tired of being without it And never knew what love was all about James Moody would you come on hit me, you can blow now if you want to, I'm through Repetition Rhyme Mental Breaks This song is about a woman who is crazily in love with someone. Her feelings are so strong that she has no control over them and the music and vocals contribute to this idea. She runs all of her lines together making the listener feel like they are suspended in her thought which makes you feel out of control. The music in the background keeps the tempo moving forward. The interesting part of this song is the discrepancies in what she is saying. In the beginning you feel like her and the person she is talking about is her boyfriend or that they are in a relationship. However she slips up and comes back to reality accidentally letting the reader know that she actually isn’t in a relationship with them. The more the song goes on the more mental slips or “breaks” she has. One reason is that she could be coming out of her dream and waking up to reality or is coming off of a trip (I mean we are talking about Amy Winehouse here). She hints at this when she says that she is “wrapped up in [his] magic” and that her “little dream might fade away/ There I go talking out of my head again”. She also could be laying down while this is all happening because she says “Bright as stars that shine up above you/ In the clear blue sky…” So she could be looking up at the sky imagining things. She also says “What is all this talk about loving me, my sweet” which blatantly contradicts what she has said previously making it seem that they were together and it is typically implied that if you are in a relationship that you love one another. Also the line where she says “Pull yourself together, do it soon” is not referring to her “lover” but she is talking to herself or “talking out her [her] head again” trying to tell herself to come back to reality. She falls back into her dream or high and she starts fantasizing about being with him more and more. She equates him with God in her dream by saying “So am I insane or do I really see heaven in your eyes?” Then at the end of the song she says what is the most recognizable mental lapse and says “I’m so tired being without it” when referring to love which lets the listener know that she hasn’t been in a relationship but is so lonely that when she dreams or gets high she makes up the perfect man.
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Dogman is a longtime friend. I see him often out on the street in his dog costume tossing his sign in circles to get drivers attention. He works in the heat, and the cold, he works long hours, and he works hard. Dogman is a young white male by the way he walks and the lack of rhythm in his dancing. He is the type of person who is willing to do any job so that he can support himself. He doesn’t have a girlfriend and he goes home to his small apartment every night. I don’t think he has a girlfriend because he twirls a sign and wears a dog costume most of the day, and he has a small apartment because of the same reason. Although he doesn’t make much money he doesn’t mind because he doesn’t value material things very much. He is very independent and doesn’t have too many friends because he doesn’t have much time to hang out with them but he is the kind of person to stay in on a friday anyway. He visits his family fairly often and gets support from them but he doesn’t like to ask for help. He is the kind of person who would rather suffer in silence so he doesn’t mention what he does for a living and doesn’t let his parents to his apartment so they won’t badger him more. He sometimes gets lost in the mix being the middle child and having a older sister and a younger brother but he likes being under the radar anyway. He want to make a better life for himself so he is starting off in his dog suit and plans on getting another job soon.
In Into the Wild the main character Chris McCandless goes on a journey getting rid of material possessions on the way to Alaska. He believes that without material things and societal pressure he can find the truth to life’s mysteries. I agree with him in this transcendental aspect of the movie. Without all of the outside influences of society and material things you can think clearly and more primal because you don’t have any distractions. Nature is pure and untainted and simply surviving and meeting your basic needs lets you get to the root of yourself and your problems. In nature you can explore yourself more than you ever could surrounded by other people because it is natural for humans to want to conform. Chris comes across obstacles and mountains but physically and mentally overcomes them throughout the course of the movie. He is reborn in the ocean and he dies in the nature that once gave him life and helped him to understand himself better. In the end although he did die his journey was inspirational and I loved how he went into nature purely without any material possessions and relearned himself.
Yes, all lives matter but why aren’t “all lives” being treated as if they matter then? The flaw in this #alllivesmatter” principle is that all lives haven’t been treated equally, and you can look at history to confirm that. The movement is diminishing the struggle of black lives by saying that white people have had it bad too. White people were never enslaved and never apart of a society where they aren’t the desired ones. If you watch any beauty commercials nine times out of ten it is white people with white beauty standards. Shampoo commercials feature straight hair as normal hair, makeup commercials are white women with red lipstick which would not look the same on a black women. These are just some examples of how our society thinks. So what is the white struggle? What is the injustice that we must support our white community in? Black lives haven’t been treated as if they were important so therefore there is a need to come together and support the black community because they need extra attention. Think about it, and how just 151 years ago slavery was abolished, and how Brown vs. the Board of education was 62 years ago, and how Jim Crow Laws were outlawed 52 years ago, and how the next year the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King happened, and how 51 years ago the Voting Rights Act was passed giving African Americans the right to vote, and how then our first black president came to office only 8 years ago. The discrimination against black people isn’t something that has happened hundreds of years ago, it's still is happening today. So again I ask the question: what is the white struggle? What injustices have white people been through that they feel the need to be heard and supported? White males aren’t being shot unarmed for little to no reason. Black men are being shot in a disproportionate amounts to white men because of how society perceives them as dangerous which stems back to how we viewed slaves in America which wasn’t that long ago. And the excuse of “Oh well actually if you look at the numbers white men are being shot more.” is irrelevant because obviously they are the majority. To make a valid argument you must look at the percentages which tell a different story. As Wesley Lowery from the Washington Post breaks it down, “According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers”. This information makes me feel highly upset and it’s offensive to me to hear about how white people say that white men are shot more and that black people are just doing it to themselves. I’ve seen and heard all kinds of things of that nature coming from the mouth of white people. The bottom line is that we aren’t treating black lives as if they matter, and don’t try to tell me differently. If I’m not afraid of my white dad getting stopped and pulled over but it makes me anxious to think of my black stepmom getting stopped by the police there obviously is something wrong. I don’t want to worry about her and her family in encounters with the police because it doesn’t make sense why someone’s skin color makes them dangerous. My stepmom, the woman who raised me, is the most amazing, motivated, and hardworking person I know. She’s been to college twice and has her masters degree. She’s funny, deep, and makes me a better person every day. She is the most important parental figure in my life and she has done so so much for me. So it breaks my heart that someone might just see her as a skin color and think “danger”. Tonight I looked up instead of looking down. I stopped suddenly and stood still in the brisk night air with my face towards the glowing light above me. I watched as the clouds formed a barrier between me and the moon while the light was trying to reach through to me. The whole sky looked like it was flowing as if it were water down a river. And then it happened. A crack in the curtain of clouds appeared and for a brief moment I was staring into the face of the moon, light shining down light onto my face. All of the worries I had and the exhaustion from my week melted away. The clouds washed across the sky and blurred it’s light once again and I resumed walking up my driveway feeling better than I had before. "When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars."
Ex luna, scientia - From the moon, knowledge Being without a phone leaves a person out of the loop. You're cut off from social media and cut off from constant communication and left in a kind of silence. Not a physical silence but a mind chatter silence without everyone’s input and the media and the news racing through your mind. Waking up the morning after the election I didn’t think to go on my laptop to seek out news of who had become president. I was running late perusal and I figured that everyone would be talking about it anyway. I walked with a purpose towards the front of my neighborhood passing multiple Trump signs as I thought to myself about the election. I knew that a decision had been made and the votes tallied. There was nothing that I could do about this election and that the world around me already knew what had happened. Who had won? Who did I want to win? How would I feel if it was Hillary? How would I feel if it were Trump? What would my life look like with each candidate? So as I briskly walked to the bus stop my mind wandered. I thought about how ridiculous it would be in Mr. Trump won and how he made the whole election a big joke with his wall and his lude statements, his lack of experience, his morals and how he stands for everything I am against in that sense. There isn’t much to do on a 45 minute bus ride without a phone so I sat and thought. I’m the first stop on the way to school and everyone on the bus is typically silent until we arrive at my friend’s neighborhood. We all sat in silence as more and more kids trickled in filling the seats. I knew that they all of them knew who had won the election and I couldn’t read any of them. About 25 minutes in we were at her stop and she ran up the bus steps and yelled out “Trump is President!” and my heart dropped. I couldn’t believe her and my bubble of blissful ignorance was torn apart. I was overwhelmed with emotion and the only words I could find were “no you’re kidding, you’re kidding” my jaw dropped and I was smiling in shock. If I wasn’t smiling I might have started to cry. I laughed at how I couldn’t believe he won and everyone on the bus was doing the same. When we walked into school the whole atmosphere had changed. The air was heavy and the energy was noticeably off. The lunchroom was loud but it was a low rumbling sound as everyone's voices had changed. People didn’t bustle around as much and everyone looked tired and disappointed. I was determined that coffee was the answer and after I had some I would feel better. The coffee was bitter, the air was bitter, my face was bitter. Pre- Calc broke my brain but distracted me from the election. My mentorship period was me mindlessly grading papers as nothing passed through my thoughts. I was numb to the election by the time lunch passed and I walked into Ap American Lit almost having forgotten of the whole ordeal. As soon as I walked in all of the emotions came back but the denial had faded. Questions poured into my head. What does this mean? What does he stand for? What is he going to change? Could he really change the vote on same sex marriage? Will I ever get married? Will I get denied a job? What rights will I loose? How can someone who is against the LGBT community benefit me in any type away as president? There has to be people who can stop him on things like that right? Do I even understand the government enough to worry about this? All I felt was a sense of fear. How much harder had my life just gotten? People noticed how sad I looked. My friends tried to cheer me up but I felt scared about the future. I thought about how I had imagined going off to college and becoming an adult, but now I had to think about how I could even do all of the stuff I wanted to do if somehow our country regressed in progressiveness. I want to go out on cute dates with the person I’m dating, I want to hold their hand in public, I want to run errands with them and kiss them goodbye, but how can I do any of that if Trump supports giving store owners the right to deny me service because I have a girlfriend. How will I get married if he elects Supreme Court judges to overturn the marriage equality ruling. What if I wanted to adopt a kid with my wife and we couldn’t because Trump’s plan to pass laws making it harder for us to do so. I look like a typical straight female who is white but not always perceived as white because of my skin and my hair. Should I use that to my advantage and not tell any of my employers about my sexuality? Should I act like best friends if I go out to dinner with my girlfriend? Will I not be able to post on social media about it so I can more easily have a job? What would my life look like if I hid that part of myself away. Would it be worth it to not live as my true self? Maybe I’ll fall in love with a man one day and I won’t have to worry about any of this. The reason I’m being personal is because it wouldn’t make sense if you didn’t know some personal things about me. In trying to be a more confident version of myself I refuse to hide a part of me that is such a big factor in my life. I don’t want to live in a country that would regress to discriminating against the LGBT community even further and I don’t want to live a life where I can’t be myself. How can I be confident when I feel like even the President thinks I’m somehow going to hell because of who I’m attracted to? It's taken me long enough to accept myself as it is. The silence in my head has been filled with loud questions and now I have plenty of time to think.
My mom is a very interesting person. Although I don’t live with her I know her very well perhaps because I am always analyzing her. She embodies a socialite and a recluse at the same time. She knows everyone and I mean e.v.e.r.y.o.n.e. She can get references and recommendations in less than 5 minutes, she can walk into any job and become the manager, and she has a person for “that” whatever “that” may be. She also stays in on the weekends and watches movies and Netflix with me. She doesn’t like this time to be interrupted because she spends so much of her week putting up a facade. My mother likes to be perceived a certain way to the world and she works very hard to keep it that way. When we are out and she feels uncomfortable in a group she laughs too loud and she smiles too big. She twirls the back of her hair when she feels anxious and she bites her lip when she’s thinking hard. She has the power of persuasion which is affording her well in law school and has helped her throughout her life. She puts on the charm when she talks to you and every word she uses in calculated. You could be having a normal conversation and then realize what she is actually asking you halfway through. She has a way of manipulating her words to convince you of anything. I’ve grown aware of this so I am able to realize when it is happening but I recognize it when she talks to my step dad because he hasn’t caught on yet. We’ve gotten to the point where we only need to use facial expressions to communicate. She says that she wants help around the house with keeping everything clean but she feels like she is the only one who can do it right. How do I know? Every time I try to put the dishes up she takes over because I’m not putting things where they’re supposed to go. She says “I’m being a mom.” when she feels insecure about not seeing me. She breathes in hard and catches her breath when she is about to cry. She lingers in the kitchen to eat some of my food when it’s done cooking. She will listen to the same album on repeat for months if she really likes it. She takes a long time to get to know but I have many more years to catch on.
As I lay in bed I looked at the light hitting my wall. Blunt bright lines in diagonal stripes shone off the wall as one ran across my face which woke me up. The light was surging through the cracks in my blinds and flooding the room. When I rolled over some time later I looked at the wall again but this time the light had faded and the slants had changed. Thin wispy lines shaped in a V went across my wall. They made my room feel as if it were underwater and I was a fish looking up towards the sky. I returned to my room later in the day and sat down on my bed. I looked at my wall but this time light was barely shining on it. Soft and short strokes of light were skimming the wall with less energy and made the wall look as if it had stretch marks. The sun set and outside the light had disappeared. Still artificial light from the lamppost intruded through my blinds much weaker than the daylight but still enough to appear on the wall. This light stayed constant and it did not change as the hours of Netflix watching continued into the night. The light had died but it was still present though it wasn’t the same as daylight. Much like people we start out healthy and strong bold and daring and as we age we still shine but we get weaker and weaker until it is time to pass and then once we are gone we never really fade away. Our imprint on the world is still alive and our spirit is still with our loved ones but we aren’t physically here on this world. It isn’t the same as the real deal but we are never left by those who have passed.
Today in class we went on a nature walk which consisted of letting the students in American Studies roam free. Initially I was afraid of walking out by myself so I waited for my friend on crutches and we made our slow journey outside. We were joined by another friend who helped us and carried my friend on crutches up a steep hill and through part of the “woods”. We walked through the path that I hadn’t even known existed and we looked for trees that were the right distance to set up an eno between. I setup my eno and we all got situated inside trying not to hurt each other as we were squished by gravity. Initially everyone was on their phone’s except for me and there wasn’t much conversation. Me and my friend on crutches started to talk about the recent homecoming dance and the people we saw, the people we thought were cute, and the things that happened at the dance. Then somehow my other friend brought up how there were a lot of things that he wants to do before he dies. Me and the other girl started to press him about what he wanted do and he was very vague. So I asked him to tell us about the bad stuff and the good stuff. Me and her questioned him until we finally got him to open up and explain the stuff he was referring to. It wasn’t anything crazy as we had initially thought but things about what he would do if someone broke into his house or if someone hurt his family. These examples didn’t have to have any moral compass but he still justified his actions with morals whether he realized it or not. It made me realize that a lot of people sit and make up scenarios in their heads and fantasize about how they will save the day. My question is why? Why do we humans think about ways to get all of our fantasies out but we rationalize them and justify them. No one in the world can know what anyone is thinking at this very moment so what is to stop anyone from thinking about beating someone up for no reason at all? Do we rationalize things for ourselves or for others? This unsuperficial communication and quality time stuck in the eno in the woods, with random kids coming over to offer us crab apples and daring each other to eat it was refreshing. It made me realize how much I crave human connection and how I think everybody craves human connection. After our conversation we laughed at a really funny story from his childhood and how the Oreos we were eating make our mouths look dirty. And ironically he was the most quiet in the beginning and then he was the one with the most to say. We packed up and stumbled out of the woods and made our trek back towards the school and I felt happy and content.
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