All the cool kids are doing it...

And by that I mean Katie has shown me the light! I, too, am making the jump to Wordpress since I have now been converted and firmly believe it to be vastly superior.

So please update your links and note that I am now found at http://corrance.wordpress.com. It'll be fun, I promise! And, if that were not enough of an enticement, my newest post (only on Wordpress!) delves into the murky Mac vs. PC debate. Drama!

Thinking Buses

This morning I took the bus to work. Normally, I am a strict subway girl and I only revert to the bus when the subway breaks down and I don't mind being late to work. Today I had a spare twenty minutes and couldn't really justify not taking the bus to myself. Bizarrely, the bus is a kind of a luxury to me. It offers me space, new sites and fantastic people-watching, but, most importantly and most splendidly, it offers me time. The subway is merely a way to get from A to B as quickly as possible and with as little human interaction as possible. But the bus. The bus is a time machine. The bus is affected by weather and other people and madcap taxi drivers and traffic and stop lights with the result that the bus is going to take as long as it's going to take no matter your hurry or your deadline.

To some this may seem a trifle inconvenient or even frustrating. But not to me. To me, the bus gives me the gift of this time spent in traffic that the subway so neatly avoids. On the bus you simply can't do anything other than await your stop. And this gives me the ultimate luxury: time to simply sit and think.

I always get on the bus with the absolute best of thinking intentions. I'm going to finally plan out the plot to that novel I've always wanted to write or I'm going to make a mental to-do list of things I need to buy and errands I need to run. But I never do. I've been (magically!) given an hour to just think, it hardly seems appropriate to waste it on mundane topics I could think about anywhere and anytime. So my mind inevitably wanders over topics that I wouldn't get to think about otherwise: my future life-plans (real and fantasy), my personal life, places I’d like to live, people I know, interactions I’ve had, animals I’ve seen. This doesn't make any of these topics unimportant. No, oftentimes what I think about on the bus is the most important thinking I'll do all day. It's a beautiful thing, watching the city blur by as it shifts from the residential pre-wars of the Upper East Side to the midtown glassy high-rises and back down to the low-scale of the East Village, all the while thinking about your life and the things that actually matter, not the insignificant things like errands that you must do in a day.

So I’m grateful for the bus this morning and the time it bestowed upon me and the thoughts I therefore had time to think.

Moments of Music

My friend Emily recently took an education class wherein she had to write about the books that changed her as a reader. This got me thinking about all the things that make us who we are: books, music, speeches, television and conversations; they all change us in some way and form us into the person we have become. So, while I’ll probably do a book-version of this (and probably over at Literary Transgressions), here is my musical life-moments and how they made me the musical creature I am today.

Pre-1989: I don’t remember a lot before 1989 (musically or otherwise), but I do remember my mom singing “You are My Sunshine” to me a lot. This is substantiated by a story she likes to tell about a cross-country all-night flight we took when I was two or three. The plane was filled with a bunch of crabby businessmen and, as Mom and I were the only two people on the plane who didn’t care about the stock market, we apparently got a lot of glares throughout the night. But as the plane came in for a landing and the sun rose over New York, I apparently started to sing, in the middle of the hushed quiet of the airplane, my own little rendition of “You are My Sunshine.” Needless to say, I won the businessmen over.

1989: Following the success of my one-night-only engagement singing on the airplane, I proceeded to write my first song, featuring such Dylanesque lyrics as “Well, a desert is a desert, but you’ll never see a desert/Whysackyergone!” The infectious tune proceeded to be stuck in the confused heads of my devoted fans for years to come, almost all (myself included later) wondering what the heck “whysackyergone” was.

1991: A family vacation to Yosemite National Park provided five-year-old me a perfect opportunity to be quintessentially my generation when I spent most of the vacation plugged into my tape deck Walkman (heck yeah!) listening to “Little Mermaid” soundtrack. To this day, “What do they got? A lot of sand!/We’ve got a hot crustacean band!” often reminds me of Sequoya trees, pine needles, and the beginning of an ongoing and beautiful relationship with Disney soundtracks.

1995: By the mid-90s, I was listening to soundtracks and (oddly) Cat Stevens almost exclusively. It was 1995 and I was goofing around with my cousins in their basement in Indiana. We were lip-syncing to some music and just generally being silly. I didn’t know most of the songs, but that didn’t stop me from being a goofball, until the song changed and “You know you could have been a candle…” (1) boomed out of their speakers. I was completely entranced and from that moment on, I was hooked on Motown and oldies music from the 1960s. The Beatles, the Monkees, the Fifth Dimenson, the Mamas and the Papas and Oldies 104, the local oldies radio station, followed. To me, it seemed like I had discovered a magical new world of music that resulted in me knowing absolutely nothing about pop culture or the music the rest of my age group was listening to, but having a precocious knowledge of Beatles trivia. (“Hey, Dad, wasn’t that song on ‘McCartney,’ not ‘The White Album?’” “Um, yeah, I guess it was…”) This was beginning of the era when I thought people talking about Marc Anthony, meant the guy who loved Cleopatra and when they said “Leo,” they meant “da Vinci,” not “Di Caprio.”

1998: A few years later, I was increasingly frustrated by the fact that there were never any new or different songs on the oldies radio station and started rooting around from something else. Fortuitously, the late 1990s were a veritable golden age of alternative rock, so it didn’t take long before I discovered Alice 92.9 (still, in my opinion, the best radio station ever created). Just like it had been with the Temptations in my cousins’ basement, “If you would step back from the ledge my friend” was all I needed to hear of Third Eye Blind’s “Jumper” before I was hooked. I went from being the girl who, when someone laughingly explained a word association game as “We went from Seth Green to Savage Garden!” and I densely wondered how a garden could be cruel, to rocking out to the Goo Goo Dolls, Third Eye Blind, Matchbox 20, the Barenaked Ladies and almost anything on the Canadian radio stations we got because we were so close to the border.

2000: By 2000, alternative rock on reached its zenith and I was entrenched in love for “Bent” by Matchbox 20, “Everything You Want” by Vertical Horizon and “Absolutely (Story of a Girl) by Nine Days. We had cable by then and I spent every morning before school glued to Vh1 watching all the latest “You Outta Know” artists and videos. Frankly, it was all musically downhill from here.

2004: In 2004, I went away to college and, like most first years, was immediately struck by how adult I was and how much mature I felt as compared to high school. I saw “Garden State” a week before classes started and I immediately began pretentiously referring to it as “the movie of my generation!” I got the soundtrack almost directly after seeing it and proceeded to immerse myself in the indie rock of Zach Braff’s choosing. I was delighted that there was this whole new genre out there for me to discover and tried to poke around and find more music I would like by the indie rockers I was now constantly listening to: the Shins, mainly, with some Colin Hay, Cary Brothers and Nick Drake. I ended up sticking mainly to the “Garden State” soundtrack and its chill tunes came to define my first semester at college.

2005: By spring, a roommate détente allowed my roommate and I to amiably spend a lot of our time listening to the “Almost Famous” soundtrack. It was one of her favorites at the time and it introduced me to a world of oldies I had never explored. Indeed, there was something beyond the 1960s and she opened the door to me into the 70s rock of Led Zeppelin, Yes and Thunderclap Newman. That spring, to me, will always be defined by the easygoing, semi-drugged out chillness of the Beach Boys’ “Feel Flows.”

2006: As I went through college and actually matured, rather than just being a week in and thinking I had, I finally started coming around to the music my parents had always loved. Summer 2006 was the peak of this, when I discovered James Taylor and, to my surprise and pleasure, my newfound study abroad friends loved him, too! Who knew? This came after the discovery of Carol King (earlier, in high school), Joni Mitchell and Aaron Copland and a resurgence in popularity for my old favorite Cat Stevens. Summer 2006, my summer in England, will forever be associated in my mind with “Mexico” by James Taylor, a new-found favorite and something we listened to endlessly in various stairwells, buses, dorm rooms and gardens. It was something everyone could agree about and I loved it.

2008: In the autumn of 2008, I had been out of college for a few months and had got my first “real” job in New York. It was at the beginning of this new life-phase that I discovered “The Darjeeling Limited” soundtrack. Like the “Garden State” soundtrack before it, I listened to intensively and it came to define that moment in my life. Maybe it was because everything felt so foreign that I felt compelled to surround myself with Hindi music or maybe because the Kinks felt comfortingly familiar even though I’d never heard their songs before. Either way, it defined me for a season. I also spent a lot of time listening to really mellow stuff as I tried to acclimate, get through personal issues and not freak out all the time. Iron & Wine, old Sheryl Crow stuff (“Strong Enough” mainly and obsessively), Jack Johnson and slow rock all comforted me, particularly as I stood on the roof of our building, wind tearing at my hair, thinking hard and feeling both the community of a big city and terribly alone.

Today what am I listening to? Well, after a brief Beatles kick prompted by a subway singer who only did Beatles music, I am now back on the Goo Goo Dolls’s “Dizzy up the Girl” and am increasingly convinced that the late 1990s was the best music ever recorded. It has become what the 60s were for my parents and that provides a nice kind of symmetry.

The Decline and Fall of NBC: A Rant

I read an article today on IMDb about how NBC is continuing to fade away as they failed to place even one show in the Nielsen top ten this week. Well, jolly good I say! I like to think that this is much-deserved comeuppance for all the poorly-managed, meanly-served and high quality television shows NBC has screwed over in the past.

"Examples, please?" you say? Well, my favorite example is also my favorite show, "The West Wing." After six seasons of critical acclaim (okay, maybe not the fifth season, but bear with me), NBC ousted the show from its Wednesday night slot to Sunday nights, aka the place where television shows go to die. Unsurprisingly, viewership dwindled and NBC soon had a network-created reason to pull the plug on the show. This was infuriating enough (as many critics and talking heads alike rightfully pointed out: it was just starting to get good again!), NBC then widely advertised a farewell retrospective to be played before the final episode. Unexpectedly and about a week before this retrospective, NBC axed it too and ended up playing the pilot episode directly before the series finale. "West Wing" gets no love from the network it brought millions of viewers, a record number of Emmy awards and some much-needed class to.

Along a similar vein, "West Wing"'s Aaron Sorkin then pitched a new show, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," about all that was wrong with SNL and NBC eagerly won a bidding war to get it on their network. After only a few episodes, it was clear NBC had lost all faith in the show and it was put on hiatus for five months. Having successfully scared off any viewers who might have been watching it the first place, NBC then canceled the show but semi-graciously (and rather ridiculously at this point) aired the remaining episodes through the summer months late on Thursday nights. Ironically, those summer episodes were by far better than the original few aired by NBC, proving that had the network simply allowed the show to get its groove, it might have had another great dramedy on its hands. Mais non.

"Scrubs" has been similarly mistreated by the peacock network as it has been jumped around in various timeslots and has been put on hiatus more times than are plausible for a show that hasn't been canceled. NBC kept a death grip on the show for the last few seasons as everyone from the star, Zach Braff, to the creator, Bill Lawrence, stated that they very much wanted to leave and were sick of making the show. Instead, NBC stubbornly kept the show on the air (sort of, in between all those hiatuses) before finally releasing it into the wild this year. (Unfortunately for Braff, Lawrence and everyone else who wanted off, ABC picked it up for another, primarily unwanted, season.)

So I'm a little bitter.

In any event, I have been personally boycotting the channel for two years and I'm glad to see the rest of the nation has taken up the cause as well! (Probably unknowingly, but, hey, a girl can dream.)

Cursed book, cursed subway or cursed me?

I started reading a new book on Monday that calls itself “a history of collective joy.” Since starting this presumably joyful book, the universe has done its best to prove that collectivity is anything but joyful.

Tuesday morning I got on the train as usual. As a first insult, it was unusually crowded and I was obliged to stand the entire way. Since my collective joy book is so handy and far less unwieldy than my Rutherford, I was pleased to discover that was able to read the book while standing and proceeded to do so for a few blissful stops. Somewhere around midtown, the train pulled up to a stop abruptly and this slovenly-looking man lurched into the subway car and stood next to me, gripping the metal railing in one hand and a Dunkin’ Donuts cup in the other.

On any other day, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed him and I would have gotten to work unimpeded. On any other day, I probably would have been seated and thus even less aware of his presence. On any other day, I wouldn’t have been reading standing up. As it was, all these things combined with a brake-happy conductor and, as the train lurched abruptly to a stop at the next station, the man next to me also lurched forward and sloshed a good deal of liquid on me, my book and the man sitting down in front of me. “S’okay!” he informed me and the other man in a chill, beatnik kind of voice, as if we needed to be told that it was quite all right that he had just spilled his drink on us. “It’s just water!” he added with a dirty smile at us. The smell of coffee permeated the area. I sniffed my wet hand. Coffee. I glanced at the newly-damp pages of my newly-purchased book. A brown stain and numerous brown splotches stained the open pages and had started to seep down onto others. If it was just water, then I was most certainly the Queen of England. I glared at him, a gesture to which he was utterly oblivious as he took a swig of his coffee.

He got off before I did and the rest of the ride was crowded but without incident. This morning, I got on the subway again. Admittedly, I had quite forgotten about the “water” from the morning before and was happy to give the MTA and the citizens of New York a second shot. So I got on the train, again as usual, and was again oblivious to my seat-mates, only noting them in so far as to notice that they were not very large and that we all fitted comfortably in the space allotted without anyone having to squeeze. So far, a good commute day.

This brief idyll lasted less than a stop. As I sat there, reading about collective ecstasy in ancient Greece, the woman next to me pulled a can of Crush out of her bag and—fitzzz—opened it. Unsurprisingly, it went everywhere (who in God’s name opens a can of soda after it has been sloshing around in your bag for who knows how long?!). Orange splatters flicked my face and my book’s pages. I couldn’t believe it. This sort of thing has never happened before or defaced any of my books in this way. Was the universe sending me a message?

Meanwhile, the woman stared, clearly at a loss as to what to do, at her can of soda, which was still oozing, and at the pool of sticky orange liquid that had gathered at her feet. Her friend laughed. They got off at the next stop. The next stop. She couldn’t have waited to open what she could have realized with just a little common sense would be a messy soda situation after she got off the train?! I glared after her, too, but she was long gone and all that remained was a trail of that sticky liquid on the floor to mark her presence. Someone else sat down immediately and squished me into the side of the woman on my other side. Great.

Clearly, tomorrow will be the judge of the curse. If it happens again, I’m going to assume that a) the book is cursed and there is no such thing as collective joy; b) I am cursed and the universe is telling me to stop looking for happy endings in a cruel, cruel world; or c) I should not take any deeper meaning from the situation and simply be more mindful of my surroundings and those carrying liquids around me. We’ll see what liquid the universe throws at me next!

Feminism?

I recently spoke to my dear, feminist mother about changing your name. This conversation started out very generally about name-changing and quickly morphed into a minor rant on the absurd inability of men to change their names upon marriage compared to the relative equanimity with which women do so. My mom bemoaned the fact that my father stoutly (in a rather “oh but I wish I could!” kind of way) refused to change his name to hers when they got married, even though hers was by far a nicer name. And this got me thinking. So I decided to ask a male friend of mine his opinion on the matter. The resulting uncomfortable conversational shimmying that he displayed was singularly impressive for its attempt to dodge the bullet alone, but also because he illustrated a definite difference in the way men and women view their last names.

Men seem to view a last name as a legacy, as part of who they are and what their family stood for, and something that (like their freedom!) can never be taken away from them. More basically, they tend to be more plain old attached to it. Women, I find, seem to have a more fleeting relationship with their last name. It’s there, it’s nice but when that right guy comes along, it should be easily given up and traded for his name, bizarrely used here as a symbol of their unification as man and wife. (It seems to me that something that inherently requires one partner to give something up and become the same as the other hardly shows a unification so much as a hostile take over.)

Why is this? Is it simply society once again impressing something different upon little boys versus little girls as they grow up? As a female, I must say that changing my last name has always seemed inevitable if a little strange (why should I be forced to deal with the weird feeling of having a different name from my own?). Perhaps it is a generational shift that while I do assume I will one day change my last name, I still firmly insist upon “Ms.” My mother’s generation unthinkingly changed their names upon marriage and hopped on the “Mrs.” bandwagon and perhaps the next generation will not be so eager to do so and will equally unthinkingly use “Ms.” Maybe we’re just in the middle of a shift, but even if that’s the case, it still seems highly unlikely that the opinion of men regarding last names will ever be changed, judging by my dad (previous generation) and my male friend (new generation, same old protests).

The Internet's Opinion is Moo

Did you ever do one of those “- is” Google searches? Well, it is simple and endlessly entertaining. One might say it is the perfect way to wile away a few purposeless minutes at work. Anyway, all you type is type in “[your name] is” with the quotes and everything into Google and see what the World Wide Web as to say about you. I did mine, of course, and here’s what I got:

Corey is the Master of Brilliance
Corey is a lifelong upstate New Yorker who recently took the plunge and moved to the city
Corey is an excellent choice for professionally-oriented student groups
Corey is keeping his or her particulars a secret
Corey is underappreciated
Corey is not a member of any Causes
Corey is a cultural clown, a parody of literacy
Corey is a great competitor, as well as a positive role model for the youth of America
Corey is top-billed as an idealistic soul who doesn't believe in killing

You try it! What will the internet have to say about you? (Yes you!)

Incidentally, if you get the reference in this entry’s title, I will…well…I’ll think highly of you for lack of a better prize. Cyber-hugs!

Also: In a move of cross-pollination and in keeping with my new title of Master of Brilliance, I direct you most humbly to Comics by Corey for some good times and great oldies.