day 18: a song that makes you laugh

I hate mornings.

Hate is a strong word, so let me clarify.

I hate mornings.

It doesn't matter when I go to bed: 8 pm or 4 am... that 7:00 alarm goes off too soon. Darren is laughing his head off right now, because I NEVER get up with the 7:00 alarm. Here's my confession: during the school year, he gets up first and wakes the kids, then gets their breakfast. Usually he's up way earlier than that for his morning run. Freak of nature, he is.

Once the boys are chowing down on Cap'n Crunch, he heads back upstairs and reminds me that it's morning time. I sometimes hear him, I sometimes don't. Check that. I always hear him, I rarely care. Most of the time, I can't bring myself to move or even open an eyelid. Mornings make me want to say bad words and hurl insults at fluffy kittens and stomp on freshly bloomed tulips. I lie there for a solid 10 minutes before I can will myself to snarl and kick the sheet off. During that ten minutes, I'm concocting amazingly creative excuses for why I can't get out of bed today. Sometimes, I come so close to using crazy excuses (I'm sorry, I can't come in to work because a rogue raccoon broke into my house last night and destroyed everything we own and ate my cat and stole all my Christopher Radko...) that when crazy things DO happen - and they do happen - I wonder if people will believe me. I fantasize about sleeping another 10 minutes.

By now, Darren's had his shower and is gently shaking my shoulder with the end of a broomstick, careful not to get too close to Sleeping Beauty lest she wakes up as The Incredible Hulk and rips his arms out of his sockets. I open an eye, but only a slit. I scowl. I burrow my frows. I swim through the fog until the red numbers on the clock come into focus, then I growl at them for it. I plant my feet on the hardwood, stab my right eye with the left earpiece of my glasses, then stumble half-baked-from-sleep to the bathroom where I again growl at Darren for good measure. He says something along the lines of, "Good morning, sleepyhead." In turn, I tell him to choke on his toothbrush.

I don't speak. I don't smile. I go through the motions until everyone's out the door. My children are cautious around me, and leave a wide berth. I usually drive, but I drive like an old lady. Sometimes, Darren says, "Are you sleep driving again? 'Cause the speed limit's thirty on this street, and you're going... 12."

By the time I've been awake for an hour or so, I return to human form, and I'm Happy Me for the rest of the day. GO GO GO GO GO GO GO! Until that alarm goes off the next morning. And then....

This song is hysterical. The first time I heard it, I was in the car and I cracked up laughing, out loud, all by myself. It was written for ME, y'all. Every single morning, I don't feel like doing anything. Nothing at all. I came home later and YouTubed it, and the video is hilarious. Those monkey suits crack me right up. At least tonight, they do. Tomorrow morning, I'm likely to tell them to .... well, you get the idea.

day 17 - a song when you're sad

I don't often feel sad. I can't remember the last time I cried.

Wait. I cry often, but at the silliest things. Case in point: I was watching Chopped on The Food Network the other day, and the freaky looking chef with the huge red plugs in his ears really, realllllllly wanted to win, and when he did, I had to wipe away a tear I was so happy for him. Seriously, the whole show had been grossing me out (they had to use eel and duck hearts and other narsty ingredients), and the chef himself made me curl my lip (those long, hanging earlobes kept flapping in the breeze as he chopped and stirred and whipped and sauteed), but that dude needed the $10,000 for his poor stay-at-home-wife and kid. I don't know, it got to me.

So this challenge is to write about a song that I listen to when I'm sad. I happened to be listening to Coldplay when I looked up the challenge. Every now and then, there'll be a nuance or a lyric or even a drumbeat that reminds me of U2. And when that happens, I at once feel disdain for Coldplay (who can never be U2) and affection for Chris Martin, whose musicianship really is astounding. I love his falsetto voice. It's haunting, yet can be playful, too. It's hard to tell when he switches registers - it just seems so effortless. Coldplay is easy to listen to. There's not a song of theirs that I dislike, but at the same time, none of their songs really stand out to me as all-time favorites, either. Their sound is just pleasant. Pleasant isn't bad - the world needs more pleasant, in my opinion.

Recently, I became obsessed with the song Fix You. It's an oldie, but was resurrected on NBC's latest singing show "The Voice". I was mesmerized. A few days later, Dani showed me a dance interpretation of the song, and I cried. Seriously, it was so beautifully interpreted that I had to wipe fat, hot tears from my face. Clicky to watch it for yourself. I'm not a dancer, but I would imagine that this is pretty close to technical perfection - and WOW, what a beautiful, beautiful love song. Coldplay's sound on this song is like velvet around my shoulders, or warm sand on my toes, or a shaft of sunlight caressing my face on a cold, winter day.

But that's not the Coldplay song that I'm highlighting for this challenge. A song that makes me sad when I hear it is The Scientist. I've never understood why it's called that, but what a sad song. Still pleasant enough to the ears, but... gollygeewhiz sad. It's a song of regret, and what-could-have-been, and deep yearning to go "back to the start". How many of us have felt that at one point or another? And yet, as sad and broken as the lyrics are on their own, they're given new meaning when you watch the video, which I had never seen until tonight. Watch it. You'll keep wondering what the heck it all means, but at the end, you'll be left with your mouth gaping open and with big, fat tears dripping off your chin.