The purest little part of me

This afternoon, as I turned onto the sidewalk that runs along the street that crosses my own, I saw a school bus rumbling down the road. In a matter of the seconds it takes to walk a few feet down the sidewalk before crossing the street, I was taken back to those years when, every afternoon, I filed through the gym of the elementary school with all my bus-riding peers, all of us with backpack straps twisted hastily over our little shoulders. (There was also the slung-over-one-shoulder style, but we weren't that cool yet.) We would spill out onto the sidewalk with the canopy where the smell of diesel exhaust reigned, and we would scatter with the excitement of going home and with the anxiety of accidently boarding the wrong bus. But I would eventually find number 9114 among the buses lined up like a row of grungy rubber ducks and settle into my sticky faux-leather seat for the long ride home.

What astonishes me is that I am the same person who rode Karen Frederick's school bus every afternoon, swinging my little feet over the dirty bus floor and watching cornfields zoom past my window. Somewhere deep inside me, there is a self that has not changed one bit from that little girl. It's not quite as hard to comprehend that I am still that kid as it is to understand that that kid would become me. (Yeah, I'm not sure that makes sense, either.) I had in me then what it is that makes me me now.

When I think back to when I was younger -- even to my total ignorance -- I see those memories through my eyes. Not through "my eyes now" or through "my eyes then." Just through my eyes. Maybe hindsight is 20/20, but it's the circumstances that change, not us. Not the real us.

As I turned onto my own street, I was met by three boys who looked to be between the ages of seven and thirteen on bicycles. They rushed past me with their shaggy little-boy hair brushed back by the wind and with sufficiently mischievious looks on their faces. They barely acknowledged me, and even if they did take notice, they probably looked at me like I was some stodgy, old semi-adult with whom they could never relate. But I felt something different. Kindred, almost.

See, inside of them are twenty-two-year-olds that they don't recognize yet. And inside of me there is a seven- and a twelve-year-old that has never and will never go away. And inside all of us is that wizened adult who, although we'll never believe it until we reach that age along the timeline, really does understand what it's like to be us. Because we never age, really. Perhaps we understand more about the world around us, but we are who we are, forever.

It's the only evidence I have, intangible as it is, that our souls are eternal.

Twice as much ain't twice as good

Back when I was a groupie -- we'll pretend I'm not now -- I used to write what I called the "obligatory concert post" (see 1, 2, and 3) after a John Mayer concert. Maybe this is it. Maybe not.

Well. I guess it is.

In a way, this was the least exciting concert yet. coughcoughmoreconcertstocomecoughcough That is not to say anything negative at all about the experience. Part of it is that I hadn't had the chance to psych myself up for it. I was more concerned with safely making the 400-mile trip to Muncie, IN. With that finally behind me, it was less than twenty-four hours until show time, and it still hadn't sunk in.

The other factor contributing to this lessened sense of excitement, I think, is a sheer sense of maturity. Holly and I have individually done a heck of a lot of maturing over the past two years since we dropped off the tour circuit. Of course, John Mayer had dropped off the tour circuit, too, to do himself some maturing, which is so incredibly evident -- through his musical finesse and his lyrical explorations -- in the new album that went on-sale today. Like he says in the improvisational introduction to "Something's Missing" on the John Mayer Trio album, "It's only music now." If you need concrete evidence, he's played fourteen shows thus far on the tour and not once has "Your Body is a Wonderland" appeared on a setlist.

I think he's trying to say something. And I like what he's saying, too.

Anyway, the show was beautiful. And I'm not going to pretend that I didn't scream like a twelve year old -- or a trashy forty-year-old woman with rose tattoos, alternatively -- every time he went into jam-mode or announced a set change. But this was the first time I wasn't holding a camera in front of my face throughout the whole show. (Though I would have if I could have. And Holly did the picture-taking this time, anyway.) I just held onto my twelve-dollar beer with one hand and tapped the beat out on my chest with the other as I sang along.

He didn't play one of my favorite songs, though, one he has played on every show of the tour except ours -- "Gravity." (It just made a very poignant appearance on the wonderful show House, by the way.) When that track started playing this afternoon after I bought the record, even though I've heard it a hundred times, I had cold chills. It's that powerful, and I was quite disappointed when he neglected to play it. However, he did dazzle us -- and redeem himself -- in the encore with surprise performances of the throwback tunes "Victoria" and "Love Soon," albeit a fragmented jumble of forgotten lyrics.

There are two types of love. The one that fades in the event of prolonged absence, and upon rekindling, there is no hope because the flame has gone for good. Then there's the one that endures separation, and when one returns to the ashes, the flames jump up and dance just as wildly and even a little bit more brightly, as if no time had passed at all.

Call me crazy for likening the last one to music. That's okay.

Self-importance

Is it just me or is Facebook getting out of control? All of the little features it adds almost semi-daily are becoming a bit unwieldy. And I officially don't like it when everyone can see that I wrote on Such-and-such's wall three minutes ago, edited my profile two hours ago, and visited the restroom half an hour ago. Getting personal, don't you think? Soon, we'll all have a FacebookCam that we have to tote around with us so that our friends can have full accessibility to the minutia of our daily lives -- because it's interesting! I'm just waiting to install a GPS chip in my wrist.

Then again, we have become a reality television and blog society. After all, here I am. I know there are analysts out there trying to make sense of our newfound curiosity in the details of each other's lives, so I am sure my musings are rudimentary. But it is quite strange, don't you think, that while we are becoming more and more interested in each other, everything is becoming more and more impersonal. We have fashioned a two-way mirror for ourselves. We can watch people's lives from the anonymity of our computer screens and television sets. We have become more comfortable divulging our personal lives to the anonymous masses than to real people who are able to reciprocate tangibly.

I have to say that it scares me. It calls up some spine-tingling philosophy that claims reality is nothing more than self. With all these means of seeing each other through detached lenses, I can imagine a society of isolated individuals who can only imagine that they themselves are real and everyone else is a specimen to be studied for entertainment. I don't know. I know it sounds crazy, but I think all these silly little time-wasters like Facebook and blogs and the majority of television are indicative of a disease our whole generation is suffering from and we're too distracted with ourselves to see it.

It's hard to see the hole when you're at the bottom.

I miss my digital camera.

A lot.

So, Rand...

I actually just made myself laugh out loud. I felt like a crazy, old cat lady -- minus the cats -- alone in my little apartment laughing at myself.

See, I've been listening to both the Jimi Hendrix original "Bold as Love" and the new John Mayer cover of it -- you know, for analytical purposes. Well, I was sitting here at my computer, wasting time by looking at Seattle Weekly online, and singing the song. (It wasn't long before I realized that I could have been listening to the real musicians sing the actual songs via iTunes.) The end of the chorus goes, "Yeah, they're all bold as love / Just ask the axis." Now, honestly, I wasn't even aware I was singing. You see, that's what happens when you're the cat lady. You start performing socially unacceptable behaviors without any cognition of it. But a little something jolted me out of my neurosis: I sang the lyrics like this, with every ounce of sincerity that I have, "Yeah, they're all bold as love / Just ask the atlas."

Okay, I realize that it's not that funny. After all, I think the atlas is more capable of answering any kind of question than the axis. It's just, well, that my subconscious self wholeheartedly believed that those were the lyrics. I guess you had to be there, but of course you weren't or I wouldn't have been singing to begin with. I hope.