elbows - darren hanlon

I never think of myself as someone who's changing jobs all the time, but I've managed to go through quite a few in my relatively short time as a member of the workforce. My first was in a bakery. On my first shift the manager told me everything there was to know about every single variety of bread we sold. That night there were Vienna loaves and breadsticks floating through my dreams - quite literally. Later I learned it was a kind of initiation. Every time we had a new staff member, the manager would explain each loaf of bread to them in unnecessary detail. I'm still not sure if she really thought we'd remember any of it. Most of the kids who worked there were like me, just making their first foray into employment, still struggling to put on their uniform correctly. In hindsight I wonder if it was more for her own benefit, to prove to herself how good she was at her job and validate her existence. She was probably the most bitter woman I've ever met, though, so I don't think it was working.

After that there were a few office jobs, from which I mostly learned that there are lots of jobs in which you don't have to do much work and that most of them are chronically boring. I also developed a love/hate relationship with stationary. Most of it is so arbitrary, but some marketing genius has convinced every business/student/entrepreneur in the world that they can't live without it. Like post-its. You can achieve the same thing by sticky taping a square of paper, but no one does. (My favourite pseudo-neseccary piece of stationary is the staple remover. They're addictive. I used to staple things together just so I could remove the staples again. I also like tiny bulldog clips. Why use a regular paper clip when you can use a smaller version of a clip designed to do jobs too big for paper clips?)

At work yesterday I was handing change to a customer and my hand brushed theirs and I thought of this song. I love Darren's songwriting. It's just so clever.

Why I felt so alive I can't quite determine
There could be a word to explain it in German
Some take others home waking up to regret it
We only touched elbows but I'll never forget it 

orinoco flow (sail away) - enya

Whenever I order takeaway for dinner I sing Enya’s Orinoco Flow (Sail Away) to myself and replace the lyrics to the chorus with “takeaway, takeaway, takeaway”. I think it’s the first sign I’m turning into my father, who’s repertoire includes such classics as Helen Reddy’s lesser known “I am mower, hear me roar”.

In kindergarten, my teacher would always play Enya during naptime after lunch. I never wanted to nap, and me and my friend Kate would get in trouble for whispering and playing games together. We did most things together. On mufti days we used to call each other in the morning to co ordinate outfits. (Once the school scheduled a mufti day for April 1^st and my parents thought I was having them on when I came downstairs in non-uniform clothes. It took all my powers of persuasion to convince them I was telling the truth.) One time in kindergarten, Kate couldn’t hear what the teacher asked her, so she got told to move to a spot closer to the front and when I tried to go with her the teacher told me to stay where I was and that we didn’t have to do everything together. It was pretty lonely, sitting on my own up the back.

I didn’t like Enya for a long time after kindergarten. For naptime, we had to bring a pillow from home, and mine was an ugly brown and green one. In high school I stole the filling from it for a pillow case I sewed in Home Science, and now it’s on my bed. I’ve grown to appreciate naps more than I did when I was five. Music, too, I’d like to think.

picture window - ben folds & nick hornby

I've been thinking about starting a music blog for awhile now. I really like talking about songs; where I first heard them, what they mean to me, why I love (or hate) them. I tried doing this facebook thing a few months back where you post a song every day for a month in response to the criteria they give you - stuff like a song that describes you, a song from your childhood, a song you want at your funeral - but I found the categories cliched and boring. I tried making up my own, but lost motivation pretty quickly.

My idea for this blog came from Nick Hornby's book 31 Songs. (Incidentally, Nick Hornby is one of my all time favourite authors. I first realised how brilliant he was when I was reading High Fidelity at the age of 17 or 18 and noticed myself feeling an affinity with the main character, a 30-something year old male rehashing his sexual history in an attempt to decide whether to settle down with his current girlfriend.) Basically, 31 Songs is just Hornby talking about songs that've meant something to him. It's less about the songs and more about the stories. (I wish I had it here to quote, but I lent the copy I nicked from my parents to a friend.) So that's kind of what I want to do here, although unlike Hornby, I am a musician, so a little more musical analysis is bound to creep in. I can't remember if there's any significance the number 31, but I'm not awarding it any. If I get to 31 - great. If not - these things happen.

I'd never really listened to much Ben Folds before reading 31 Songs. I knew Brick and Rockin' the Suburbs from the radio, and I had a few others collected off various mix CDs people had made me. But that was about it. Anyway, Hornby talks about the song Smoke, and I loved the lyrics so much I went and got myself acquainted with a bunch of Ben Folds' music.

I decided Picture Window was an appropriate choice for this first post because it too was born of Smoke's inclusion in 31 Songs. It's from an album for which Hornby wrote the lyrics and Folds wrote the music. And I'm pretty sure 31 Songs was the reason they decided to collaborate. And it's my favourite track from the album. And that's the whole story. The next one will be more profound, I promise.