what I think

These are the categories that most occupy my thoughts these days, and this is what I am thinking about them all right at the moment.

Music/Culture: Certain songs on the radio make me want to run, not because they're stupid or lame, even though lots of them make me want to run for that reason. But some make me want to run because they have an ugly spirit that sort of jumps out at me and hates me. I can't think of any specific example because don't keep track of them. Figuring this out is sometimes not very high on my list.

Countries/Travel: I miss London, and the countryside around it. I really want to go back there and spend a long time. And I love remembering Paris. Having been to Paris really does change your life!

Languages: Studying Latin is a fascinating new activity I've discovered. It's history is so interesting. Spanish is fun and easy compared with German and French, and it makes me feel good in the hot summer.

Passions: Having a burden for the lost is not the most fun sometimes, but things happen to build your faith.

Me: I like being tan and having glow-y white, sparkly fingernails to go with my lovely diamond ring and my Juicy Couture charm bracelet. I'm missing the thing in my brain that's supposed to get rhythm and translate it into my body. Still wondering what to do about that, as I practice and practice dancing.

Piano: I like sight reading Chopin nocturnes, now that I can. Practicing doesn't really scare me anymore. That's a relief. I can play jazz now. I work very hard at the rhythm, but the chords finally come more naturally.

Food: I want sushi, and to go to the Tipperary soon.

Family: We are all getting together soon.

Friends: I am about to take a break for a while.

Husband: We are so happy and finally unstressed!

Theology: Reading a lot, as always. Realizing that you can only learn from someone if you trust and respect them, and it takes a long time to find a preacher, writer, philosopher,theologian, etc. who can be trusted and respected.

God: He is faithful. All the time. He comes through. His Word means what it says to me.

scary music

The new Harry Potter came out this week, but since I'm not going to see it until this weekend, I have been watching all the old ones. Sometimes, I just listen to them while I clean the house, or paint our dirty, chipped, embarrassing stair rails a clean, glossy white. I'm doing that a bit at a time, in a relaxed, this-isn't-a-big-project way, so watching a movie and having tea during painting doesn't seem that out of place. But with Harry Potter on in the background, I hear lots of scary music. Every day, hours of scary music. Well, almost.

Scary music sometimes has a pounding beat that makes you feel like something is about to happen, sometimes the soft, sharp, high pitches make you feel creepy, sometimes it just sounds like how it feels when something really scares you all of a sudden, and you feel that adrenaline rush. (But not in a very good way. I guess some people like it. I like sugar.) That last kind of music describes having a scary feeling, rather than creates, I think.

But what makes scary music scary? It's just a bunch of sounds. What if it's only scary to us because we have been conditioned to think it is, just like we are conditioned to make sense of all music based on the scales that western music uses. (Not country, for those of you who were thinking that. By "western" I just mean, not far east or Asian and all that. Their music only sounds "weird" to us because it is based on an entirely different pitch system than ours. So, if we were used to their scales, their music would sound normal. I've probably over-simplified it, but yeah. Speaking of over-simplifying, this whole parenthetical explanation probably over-complicates what I was trying to say in the first place.)

You know, we've all seen scary movies, and maybe it's what is going on when the music happens that makes us scared. If the music were out of the context of the movie, it might not really be scary. When you hear some modern "classical" music, it can sound really strange. Even Stravinsky when you think of the rhythm in Rite of Spring, could be used as "scary" music; you could make it work in a movie, if it were not distractingly familiar. Of course, it was written for a scary sort of ballet, I guess, anyway. But some sort of dissonant symphonies or string quartets would sound scary, but if you're just sitting in a concert hall listening, they just sound strange or itchy or beautiful or whatever. They just sound like music.

I don't know...