Friday, March 25, 2005
Post In Which I Am Nerdy
Now, I'll bet you didn't know this, but I used to be a big ol' dork. You're probably saying "But Rowan, you're a dork now." And you're mostly right. But the thing is, right now, I'm the cool type of uncool. My geekiness has swagger, and you know what? That band you're listening to - I knew they were cool before you. That kind of cool uncool.*
*maybe.
But it didn't used to be like this. No, back in high school, I was uncool uncool. And to really take a trip down memory lane, I'd have to experiment with those memories. There are three things that I really, really liked in high school that are really, really uncool: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, They Might Be Giants, and Babylon 5 (hey, at least I wasn't predictable nerd and loved Star Trek. Even then, I had some bizarre kind of standards.) Anyway, my relationship with Holy Grail has turned noticably sour - I refuse to watch it - and I tend to pretend They Might Be Giants don't really exist, though I maintain that they put on a mean live show, and one that ruined me when I started going to other shows. "Why don't they talk to the audience? This song sounds exactly like the album show. Only one encore?" etc.
Babylon 5, on the other hand, I don't think I'd like anymore, so I don't do anything with it. I try to avoid it, because I liked it so much in high school and think I'd hate it now. I could be wrong. But on the other hand, the CGI probably has not aged well. At any rate, I remembered that I still had two vestiges of my former love for B5 in the form of the first two soundtrack CDs. So I put the second one in to listen to as background music as I played another game, and the memory tricks did wonders.
Here's how it worked. I watched the hell out of B5 when it was on, but after it finished, I gave up. I haven't seen it in 8 years (part of just realized that since I started having sex, I haven't seen B5, and I want to make a snide comment about that). So my mental connection with specific scenes attached was gone. Second of all, I listened to that CD a baker's shitload. It's scratched to all hell, but more importantly, I have memories of it attached to other things - like video games that I played with it as background music. Finally, it's superb background music. I have realized well after the fact that the music was perhaps the most important aspect of me liking the show.
Therefore, it called up unspecific memories of very cool and dramatic things. I was basically able to separate the bad or uncool memories from the music, while maintaining good emotional memories attached to it.
Unfortunately for further experiments, the CD is scratched to all hell and will annoy me far more than be listenable from now on.
Now, I'll bet you didn't know this, but I used to be a big ol' dork. You're probably saying "But Rowan, you're a dork now." And you're mostly right. But the thing is, right now, I'm the cool type of uncool. My geekiness has swagger, and you know what? That band you're listening to - I knew they were cool before you. That kind of cool uncool.*
*maybe.
But it didn't used to be like this. No, back in high school, I was uncool uncool. And to really take a trip down memory lane, I'd have to experiment with those memories. There are three things that I really, really liked in high school that are really, really uncool: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, They Might Be Giants, and Babylon 5 (hey, at least I wasn't predictable nerd and loved Star Trek. Even then, I had some bizarre kind of standards.) Anyway, my relationship with Holy Grail has turned noticably sour - I refuse to watch it - and I tend to pretend They Might Be Giants don't really exist, though I maintain that they put on a mean live show, and one that ruined me when I started going to other shows. "Why don't they talk to the audience? This song sounds exactly like the album show. Only one encore?" etc.
Babylon 5, on the other hand, I don't think I'd like anymore, so I don't do anything with it. I try to avoid it, because I liked it so much in high school and think I'd hate it now. I could be wrong. But on the other hand, the CGI probably has not aged well. At any rate, I remembered that I still had two vestiges of my former love for B5 in the form of the first two soundtrack CDs. So I put the second one in to listen to as background music as I played another game, and the memory tricks did wonders.
Here's how it worked. I watched the hell out of B5 when it was on, but after it finished, I gave up. I haven't seen it in 8 years (part of just realized that since I started having sex, I haven't seen B5, and I want to make a snide comment about that). So my mental connection with specific scenes attached was gone. Second of all, I listened to that CD a baker's shitload. It's scratched to all hell, but more importantly, I have memories of it attached to other things - like video games that I played with it as background music. Finally, it's superb background music. I have realized well after the fact that the music was perhaps the most important aspect of me liking the show.
Therefore, it called up unspecific memories of very cool and dramatic things. I was basically able to separate the bad or uncool memories from the music, while maintaining good emotional memories attached to it.
Unfortunately for further experiments, the CD is scratched to all hell and will annoy me far more than be listenable from now on.