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 |   A journey of self-improvement - or not. |
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Sup? I'm Char. You may know me from timeless classics such as
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[Embed For Use By Upgraded+] Believin' all the lies that they're tellin' ya Buyin' all the products that they're sellin' ya They say jump and ya say "how high?" Ya braindead, ya got a fuckin' bullet in ya head |
Artist: Panic! at the Disco Song: High Hopes [Embed For Use By Upgraded+] ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** Day 2 - New to me "We.are.fucked." I'm sitting on a windowsill several stories up in the university library. From here, students scurrying between buildings below look like insects. Nate is sitting across from me, feral-eyed with an empty Red Bull crushed on the table in front of him and another in his hand. He leans back and throws his hands up repeating himself, "totally. fucked." I shake my head and tell him that we're not fucked, but this only serves to further annoy him. Between us, dust floats in the late afternoon sun rays. He starts interrogating me, like, "Dude, how are we not fucked? We have less than 7 hours. We haven't started building the report, we stocked out during the last round, and we don't have enough capacity to meet demand. Amin isn't even fucking here. How are we not fucked??" He leans forward then and runs his hands aggressively through his dark waves like he can shake the agitation out that way. I'm dwelling on things I wish I could do. Like go back in time and convince myself to do this entire thing alone before the due date. Or at least talk to our professor who has disappeared from campus just in time for last-minute questions. Or convince myself to not care in the first place and let things fall where they may. But this isn't the time to throw our hands up. So I say that. "This isn't the time to just throw our hands up, man." Nate snaps his head up and looks at me with dark, red-rimmed eyes. “Gee, ya think??? Ya think 3 weeks before we’re supposed to graduate might not be the best time to throw our hands up? Genius.” I’m physically biting my lower lip to keep my mouth closed. My part has been done for weeks and I’ve been reminding my group mates to work on their parts every other day since then. But going off about it now serves no purpose. “Alright. Let’s just break down what we need to-“ “Everything. We need to do everything,” he interrupts. “We don’t have enough time to-“ I interrupt more forcefully, “Okay. You’ve gotta chill for a minute, bro. Let me just-“ “You’ve just been sitting in the window for like 45 minutes. We’ve done fucking nothing.” He’s not wrong. And if we don’t finish this, we don’t graduate. I can’t even fathom having to come back during the spring semester to redo this class. But I can’t think about that now. I stand up. “Okay, I’m going to pull the financials and see what we can get from long-term debt and mess with the marketing to promote the products we do have capacity for. You start pulling the data from the last round into the spreadsheet.” And for once, there’s no argument. Had to have high high hopes for a living Shooting for the stars when I couldn’t make a killing Didn’t have a dime but I always had a vision Always had high high hopes |
Artist: Chris de Burgh Song: Don't Pay the Ferryman [Embed For Use By Upgraded+] ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** Day 1 - New to me I'm so happy that Soundtrackers is back!  That's what Februarys on WDC are for.  I also really like the theme this month:(RE-)NEW TO YOU I want to know what songs you've either discovered or rediscovered in the past year. The songs can be new or old, as long as they're something you personally discovered (or discovered all over again after not hearing or thinking about it for ages) since the last Soundtrack of Your Life Challenge. Take us on a journey through all the music - both good and bad if you want to! - that's shaped the past 12 months of your life. A trip through the (re)new songs that shaped my senior year of college? Don't mind if I do. I have a lot of fodder for this for a couple reasons. First, I worked with my professor from April until I graduated in December and she always insisted on listening to music when we were grading papers or writing exams. Second, I started my post-grad job and the office plays music 24/7. I've learned a lot of new songs this year, not all of them songs I liked, but still new to me. That being said, all the songs I choose this months probably aren't going to be songs I love, but they're the songs that I think of when I think about the last year. I'll try to keep most of them as tolerable songs so that the giant playlist at the end isn't too annoying.  Also, I'll probably go vignette-style in my usual Soundtrackers tradition. It's just boring for me to write, like, "Oh this is a song my professor listened to when we were in her kitchen..." Vignettes force me to use my words to be more creative. With that being said, Day 1... Laura is sitting cross-legged in a zip up track jacket, blonde hair blocking her face from the sunlight filtering through the breakfast nook window. "I used to run. I actually got a track scholarship," she once told me as I was slipping on my Vans in her vaulted ceiling foyer. When she sees me, her mouth goes from a tight straight line to the whisper of a smile curling up on the left side- but not quite. "How are you feeling?" she asks. I can't remember what was wrong with me the last time we spoke, so I hope she'll clarify, but she doesn't. "I feel okay." "Good! Here, let me move my stuff." She scoots around the corner of the breakfast nook bench, back to the window now and I slide my legal pad and pen across the tempered glass tabletop. Laura prefers to use paper and pen. "No laptops. Why do you have your laptop??" she asked the first day I showed up on her doorstep to go over the summer syllabus. "I got you a salad. Well, Dave got you a salad..." she admits sheepishly. "I said no food," I remind her. "You should eat more." This conversation is ironic because Laura is rail thin and eats some combination of berries and nuts for lunch every day after skipping breakfast. In the center of the table sits a round, polished sandstone Amazon Echo Dot that she speaks to regularly. The Don't pay the fairy, man song is playing again. It must be one of her favorites because I hear it at least once every time I'm over. "You know that thing's recording everything you say," I tell her. "No she's not." "Yes it is." "She only listens when you say her name." Laura demonstrates now, "Alexa, what's the temperature?" Then proudly says, "See!" when it responds. "It's listening even when you don't say its name." "Nuh uh." She tucks her hair behind her ear and furrows her eyebrows at me. "Okay, fine, it's not," I concede. Then amend, "except it is." "No it is not! Try not to be a jerk today, okay? We have a long day." "You being a jerk again, Charlie?" her husband asks from the kitchen island. "Probably," I admit. "Did you have your salad yet?" He knows the answer, clearly, because he opens the stainless steel refrigerator door and pulls out the monstrosity. He places it in front of me. Purple cabbage, weird seeds, and what looks like a giant dollop of mayonnaise on top stares back at me. Dave tosses me a wrapped plastic fork. "Go on, eat." "You guys know you're not my parents, right?" "Yep, he's in a mood today," Laura confirms to her husband. "I'm not in a mood," I object. Dave laughs and points at the salad in front of me. "Eat." He makes his way back to the living room where CNBC is discussing the Dow Jones. Laura and I sit in silence then while she hums along to the song, singing a couple words every now and then, "...trouble ahead... from beyond... don't pay the ferryman." Don't pay the ferryman, Don't even fix a price, Don't pay the ferryman, Until he gets you to the other side |
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