Momentary

Song of the month: "The Girl" City And Colour
Listen and/or watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy_7gNnbFUQ

ugh that SONG. It makes my heartstrings flutter and my brain tingle. I could listen to it on repeat for hours and lapse into a state of sweet and somber nostalgia or wistful, pensive musing. I don't know why I particularly like it so much, it's not unorthodoxly profound nor does it hold any special merit in my memories -- I kind of just found it while looking for some new songs by City And Colour with the exception of "Hello, I'm in Delaware" on youtube.

It's just another love song.

When I was younger, my parents would force us kids on random and sporadic road trips to some arbitrary national park usually sparked by my mother's insistence and domestic boredom. My father would play along, probably to repair the already deteriorating semblance of a happy "marriage" to the children. What seemed like a happy and joyous family outing only meant to us a couple of things: exploring the resistance of hotel bedsprings when jumped on, enduring parental bickering, eating junk food in the car (Doritos and Costco goodies), peeing on the side of the road, and oh yeah, being bored out of our minds. We didn't appreciate anything. Then again, we were kids. Spending over half your day confined in a car as a kid tends to spark plenty of complaining.

When I wasn't whining about how tiredthirstyboredhungryhotcoldwarmmad I was, I would lean my face against the glass windows and stare at the painted landscapes. Deserts, oceans, forests, plains -- I've seen them all. . .dusk, sunset, morning, midday, sunny, cloudy, rainy. On rainy days, the glass would fog and I would draw pictures of pandas or linear happy faces, my finger leaving a clear halo between the surrounding grey fog. KOST 103.5 would be on repeat for hours on end because my father enjoyed singing nuns, my mother enjoyed close to nothing, my sister enjoyed violent rap, and my brother vied for the musical stylings of Weird Al Yankovic. Love songs on the Kost seemed like a happy medium at the time (oddly enough, still does to this day). So for hours on end, Cindy Lauper's "Time After Time," Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On," and Seal's "Kissed by a Rose" painted the anthem of my childhood. My little 8 year old mind conjured up a thought during this parade of songs. "There's a hell of a lot of love songs in the world." Yeah, I knew and used the word "hell" as an 8 year old.

If there are so many love songs in the world, why has no one experienced it?
Why are so many people still looking? Are we really ruined by Disney tales and Norman Rockwell paintings? Why have there been so many callers into Love Songs on the Kost over the years named Ludivine or Darrell professing their undying love or publicly begging for forgiveness? Why can't people just say what they mean to the people they claim to love the most? The French version of a fairy tale "happily ever after" is "ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants." And so they married and had a lot of children. Is that happiness? It doesn't seem like happiness to me. In grade school, more than half of the kids in my class had single parents, the rest were miserably together for the kids or getting there.

Truthfully it seems to me that we're all ruthlessly selfish. I am ruthlessly selfish. I really can't stand myself when I'm with (not like Biblical "with" as in the promiscuous term, just the plain old slang "with" as in "in a relationship with") someone. I become dependent, expectant, disappointed, hurt, jealous, at times, downright bitchy -- all selfish emotions and character flaws, by the way. This may seem like a pre-mature Valentine's Day vent post, and it probably is -- in a less magnified manner (oh, trust me. You'll see), but it's more just what I've been thinking lately. We're all incapable of handling broken relationships because we've been taught selfish love. "You're pretty and you have a rather lovely singing voice, let's get married -- nevermind that you're sixteen and a mermaid." Um. Excuse me, where is the core-crippling fighting, where are the catty comments, where are the manifested insecurities? WHERE ARE THEY? OH YES, THEY EXIST IN REAL LIFE.

Ha. I think I'll always be waiting for my fairy tale, but if I plan my whole life around it, how will I catch those fleeting moments when God is trying to show me something inexplicably magnificent?