Wednesday, February 04, 2009

We Need Help

Josh Ritter: wolves :: Counting Crows: rain

This is my insight for the day. Maybe insight is too strong of a word; thought is more like it. The other day I was thinking about public education while my teeth were getting drilled. My teeth were getting drilled today as well, but I was not thinking about education. 

Speaking of Counting Crows, the other day (and by that I mean some random day several months ago) I realized that a group of crows is called a "murder," and the song title "A Murder of One" made much more sense. That's the song with the lyric "I dreamt I saw you walking up a hillside in the snow/Casting shadows on the winter sky as you stood there/Counting crows." 

You'd think I'd been thinking about Counting Crows a lot recently based on this post, but the opposite in fact is true. The song lyric revelation made me think of a similar moment I had with Sheryl Crow's "If It Makes You Happy," but I was unsure of just what lyric was revealed to me after years of listening to the song. I did remember, however, that I had mentioned that moment it in the brief autobiography I wrote in a junior year writing class where I picked ten songs through which to tell my life story. (Yes, it was as bad as it sounds.) It was not worth mentioning, but I did proceed to spent a good half hour reading through miscellaneous pieces of old writing, coming across this gem. It was in a folder labeled "Memoirs," which I opened hoping that I would find a substantial body of work I could perhaps use. There was a single document named "March 10 (06)" and it consisted of a 3,000 word stream of consciousness, excerpted below.

Ok I’m going to write 1000 words right now without stopping to punctaute or anything so that I can take a shower and feel like I accomplished something– again we are going to go for quantity since measuring by quality these days makes me sad and like I want to cry. That was a little overdramatic, as was the part when I said I would not stop to punctuate. I feel that Lynn Truss, author of “eats, shoots, and leaves,” which is on my floor right now as we speak, would be disappointed in me. I also wasted precious time deleting to make sure that the comma went inside the quotation marks, even though I could just pass it off as british, it did kind of annoy me. I am on some level meant to be a proofreader but proofing these math papers makes me depressed since they are so badly written.

Three years later and not much has changed, eh?

3 comments:

laura said...

au contraire my dear... i see the changes. good changes. i'm just dying to know what the other nine songs were.

i'm sure if i were to make a list, at least one of the many josh ritter wolves songs would make it on there.

Kenli said...

I second the request for the rest of the songs!

Caroline Dixon said...

wait, british people put the comma outside the quotes?? oh man, that is really going to mess me up now.