#2 Song in my Ipod

I guess I'll never freakin' know--Fran's already grabbed it and claimed it for her own--no doubt filling it with Sarah McLachlan sappy stuff, Enya, and Sheryl Crow--if one stinking Celine Dion thing ends up on my playlist, I'll spontaneously throw up.

Now comes the real challenge--it's really a test of your true likes to prioritize playlists. I mean, I like Rush (can't dance to it, but it's still okay--who the hell ever heard of 11-14 time?), but do I REALLY like Rush that much? I think to myself "Of course, you love Rush--put them on your 'favorites' ", but when the songs come on I always skip over it. Hmmm. something's up there.

Not sure I really want to get into this and display my absolute idiotic taste in music. Especially to Don the Music Snob -- and yes, you are!

So the challenge arises to build the perfect Ipod, so when I die they can bury it with me because it will be pretty much crap to everyone else in the world.

There's a great Woody Allen movie, Radio Days, in which he tells a short story with an ongoing cast of characters associated with each song. It's a fantastic movie about him growing up. It has been occurring to me that I get the same mental flashes with different songs--

Here's an example: Right now, I'm listening to U2's "New Year's Day". It brings to mind 2 different things: The first is that U2 came to Dallas at the beginning of school when I first went to public high school in the middle of my freshman year--up to that point I had been going to Christian School, where no one was allowed to wear anything that didn't feel like a straightjacket. Well, on one of my first days at the public school, a bunch of the kids came to school wearing concert shirts to the U2 concert from the previous weekend--it said "Smell the Flowers" in flowing script. Well, being naive, I was very curious if there was something that I should know about and didn't know (I had no clue it was a concert shirt). I had to check out about 20 shirts as discretely as possible to figure out what the writing said, and I'm sure more than one of the girls thought I was checking her out (okay, damn it, maybe I was). The second part of this flash memory is riding in the bus back from church camp later that year--this weird dude was singing New Year's Day very loudly and off-key, and everyone was laughing. I had no clue who he was, but it wasn't very funny and I was wondering why everyone was laughing so wholeheartedly.

During that year, I helped organize a group to sell refreshments to help raise $$ for medical bills for some kid named Jody, who was dying of bone cancer--we worked every Saturday for 3 months or so, selling hot dogs, candy, and drinks at church basketball games. I later found out that Jody was the kid on the bus. Every time I hear that song, at least for a split second, I remember Jody.

Boy, that movie would suck if it was written by me, huh?!