Sarabeth Tucek's Get Well Soon is a very good album for a down kind of night, or any kind, but if you're not careful, you can get sucked into it beyond what is healthy. That's how beautiful and sad it is. And there are traces of Karen Carpenter in her voice so that doesn't help the sadness factor any. But, definitely, this is worth giving a listen.

It's also one of the most painfully honest and exposed albums I think I've ever heard...especially on songs like "At The Bar" and the title track. A really great review for it follows here:

...Signing off with the title track, Get Well Soon and its creator's state of mind during the making of this album could perhaps be summed up by her own grief-stricken admission: "I knew I was sad, I'd recognised it was bad, but now looking back, I see my mind it was cracked". Where some records are maybe just too personal for public consumption, it's the uneasy fragility contained within Get Well Soon that renders it such a fascinating experience, highlighting Sarabeth Tucek as one of the most candid songwriters of her generation.

http://drownedinsound.com/releases/16211/reviews/4142617

 

I think it's going to be a long night. Insomnia both blurs things and makes them sharper. I think I liked it better when I was listening to the birds earlier. There was definitely an air of optimism in their singing.

It's like my iPhone is mocking me."So Like A Rose" shuffled onto my player just a few minutes ago and I haven't heard it in a while and I forgot how painfully gorgeous it is...it took me by surprise.

Shirley Manson's actually more detached-sounding on this than even her usual (to me, she always either sounds angry or indifferent) and yet it's that detachment that really gets to me here. Sometimes, a lack of passion is really hiding a lot.

This is one of the most oddly beautiful songs from the 2000s. It's from the album Beautiful Garbage.

 

 

So Like a Rose

Song by Garbage

Baby thinks he's dying
Lost inside his bedroom
Mommy won't stop crying
And daddy's always working

There's no going back
There's no going back
There's no going back
On this one

Baby wakes up with the sun
While everyone is sleeping
He thinks he's going crazy
But this could be the big one

There's no going back
There's no going back
There's no going back

Sleeping with ghosts
It's such a lonely experience
The stars are out tonight
Only they can hear you breathing

You're so like a rose
You're so like a rose
You're so like a rose
I wish you could stay here

 

Shuffle just put this on...I first discovered "My Fallen Angel" when I did a search for songs heavy on string instruments. I love the cello best of the string instruments (it's the most like the human voice) but the violin (featured here) is lovely too, of course. This is a simply amazing song, no matter the genre, but if you were searching for one, I guess you'd say "symphonic metal":

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphonic_metal

 

 

as seen on Pinterest

It's been a very quiet day, except for the birds singing outside. If it weren't on Kindle, I'd toss Dune to the ground, immature as that may be. The birds are taking the edge off that inclination.

There's a huge tree outside my window and with it open, I can really hear them. They actually have helped me feel better...I wasn't really in the mood for music today, but somehow their sounds are helping. They actually sound cheery. :)

Even when I hear them around 4 in the morning (they can be so loud, at times) I almost kind of like it then as well. I feel less alone with them around and you just got to admire their pluck. I could never be perky enough to sing like they do so early in the day.

Not too long ago, Wired ran something on their website about birds and their singing, specifically...in the morning:

http://www.wired.com/2014/03/birds-sing-morning/


This actually made me smile>>>

"One idea is that in the early morning, light levels are too dim for birds to do much foraging. Since light levels don’t affect social interactions as much, it’s a great opportunity to sing, instead."


Dune (and an easily distracted mind) is absolutely driving me bonkers so I just had to take a break.

I feel like I could tolerate homophobia (at least, a little better) if there were certain rules involved, like say, an anti-gay person has no right to speak out against gay marriage if they are divorced or ever cheated on their spouse or been a player (I'm not sure if people still use that word anymore, forgive me if they don't) their whole lives.

Anyone who has never loved someone else with all of their heart and soul (whether returned or not) should also not have a say in who should be "allowed" to love and who shouldn't. And, please, before you speak out against gays marrying, be sincere about whether you are a bigot or you truly feel your religious rights are infringed upon in some way.

If only we lived in a society where how much sex or how little sex or having had no sex at all, ever, would matter less…if we lived in a world where sex’s relation to love could be kept in better perspective (as in you can have love without sex, but not sex without love) and the players of the world realized there is most definitely nothing casual about it and the haters realized love is not just more important than sex, it's not about sex at all.

I’d also like to live in a world where we are more defined by whether we have loving hearts than lovely bodies. I know I'm rambling, maybe not even making sense, but I had to get that off my chest. I get so tired when anti-gay people say "homosexual" instead of "gay," drawing out the former word so that the 'sex' part is especially emphasized. and said with complete disdain.



Occasionally, Dune comes with some good advice...like:

• I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

So I chose to read Frank Herbert's Dune for a class I'm taking through work and I simply cannot stand it.

I have tried to get into it at least half a dozen different times and have only managed about twenty pages during each attempt and now, two days before I'm supposed to have finished, I am less than half way from the end.

It's a hard book to read no matter how you feel about it, but even harder when your concentration level is not so high and you could care less about the characters and plot.

I thought looking to see what other people think about the novel (especially those who don't care for it, either) might help and there is a lot online (both good and bad).

Here are few things that jumped out at me:

-from a positive review (Jo Walton, Tor):

It’s an easy book to make fun of—ultra-baroque, ridiculously complex plotting, long pauses while people assess each other.

-On the Urban Dictionary website someone has defined "Dune" as a book that is overrated.

-This review is mostly in praise, but it does capture something I don't like about Frank Herbert's style:

George RR Martin’s hugely successful Game of Thrones novels clearly took some inspiration from Dune, right down to presenting each character’s inner thoughts as italicised sentences. It’s a style that makes Dune easy for infrequent readers to digest, but equally hard for literary readers to stomach.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/30/frank-herbert-dune-at-50-sci-fi-masterpiece

Oddly enough, despite how I don't like Dune, there are some quotes that are really speaking to me right now in my life. This is one of them:

“Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it. But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, these things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.”  

I really dislike quitting things so I am going to do my best to finish this today and tomorrow, but oh, what a slug-fest it feels like.

...

So, it's hours later and I'm still reading Dune (yay for reading 20 more pages and surging on) and I'm thinking wow, I still detest this book but it reminds me of "Star Wars" (which I also am not a big fan of...sci-fi sacrilege, I know) and so I go searching for that theory and find this:

http://dune2k.com/Community/Articles/StarWarsAndDune

I think it may be because I'm a little punchy from not sleeping last night and still being up now, but it felt like this big discovery, which of course is not...tons of people already knew this before me!