Cold Feelings

It's been suggested to me that I should blog songs of the day and I decided it was a good idea, but rather than starting fresh I'm going to take a nostalgic look back at the songs of the day e-mails I sent. To start with, you should know that I didn't actually do the songs of the day on a daily basis, I sent them weekly, sometimes more often than that but never actually daily. I probably won't blog them daily either both because I'm lazy that way and because I'll have other things I'll want to blog about. Also, not all of the previous songs of the day had significance. Sometimes I just put my Zune on shuffle and used the first song that came up and that won't make for a very interesting blog entry.

To kick things off, I'll tell you how the songs of the day began. It was the afternoon of December 31, 2006 and I was sending out an e-mail to all my close friends and family telling them that, though I'm not usually one for new years resolutions, I was making one that year, and the resolution was to try to keep in touch with them better. Then I thought about someone I'd just met that quarter in school. We weren't that close, but in the run up to finals we'd spent a large amount of time in GChat and not all of it was spent discussing our final. We spent a fair amount of that time talking about music. I'd had a crush on him all quarter, and after talking to him about music and politics and stuff I started to really like him too (you know what I mean, and if you don't then read my archives). Shortly after finals he left the country (for study abroad among other things) and I knew he wasn't going to be back at school until after I graduated. I thought I should make an effort to keep in touch with him too, but I'd already sent the new years resolution e-mail, and I knew that we weren't already close so if I failed at keeping in touch it would close the window completely on that friendship. It wasn't like the other people I'd resolved to keep in touch with who I was already close with and if I failed at keeping touch better I'd still pick up just where I left off next time I see them. I needed something to push me to actually keep in touch. So, I decided on the songs of the day, and I sent him an e-mail explaining it all. I said that sometimes they will be songs to fit my mood that day, sometimes just my favorite songs, sometimes songs that I think he'd like or that remind me of him, and sometimes completely random songs.

The subsequent e-mails just contained song titles (and artist names), but I included a song for the day in that first explanation e-mail too. The song that day was Cold Feelings by Social Distortion. The significance with this song is actually the band, not the song.

I'd been getting interested in punk rock around this same time. Historically I shied away from punk rock out of a deep-seated resentment towards my brother. You see, my brother is four and a half years older than me and my mom let him, as far as I could tell, do whatever he wanted when he was a teenager. He didn't have a curfew, he was allowed to go, alone, into the big bad city to see punk rock shows and she said nothing. In fact, he had a fake ID which my mother found and then returned to him when he explained that the only reason he had it was to get into shows, not for drinking (which apparently was the truth but that's beside the point really). My mother told me at the time that when I was his age I too would be allowed to do such things. Of course that turned out to be a lie and when I called her on it 4 years later her only justification for it was that he's a boy. My cries of sexism (from my mother the lawyer) fell on deaf ears. She didn't even try to deny her sexist double standard. Now, of course, I do go to punk rock shows but I never go to them alone, or let my friends go to them alone, because the idea that girls can't go to punk rock shows alone is so ingrained in me. But for years, I just stayed away from punk rock because it reminded me of the unfairness that is being a girl. However, just before I met the songs-of-the-day guy, I'd been getting interested in punk rock, Social Distortion in particular. So, the first thing I noticed when I met him was that he was wearing a Social Distortion shirt.

In January that year I'd gone to Austin and seen a show at Stubbs as a result of which I ended up on their mailing list and I now get monthly e-mails about who's playing there. A couple months prior to starting the songs of the day e-mails I'd posted a note in facebook lamenting that I didn't live in Texas because both Social Distortion and Joan Jett were on the Stubbs calendar for that month. He posted a reply to the note commenting on my good taste (for liking Social Distortion) and letting me know that Joan Jett was playing that very night here in Seattle. I ended up not being able to go to Joan Jett because I didn't get off work until 8:00 and by the time I made it down to the Showbox it was sold out. The whole thing made me realize that Seattle has almost as much live music going on as Austin and I should be out there seeing some of it. Actually, Seattle doesn't have nearly as much live music going on as Austin but that bar is set unbelievably high; Seattle has a lot of live music. I still haven't seen Social Distortion or Joan Jett but I've been to a lot more shows since then.

The point being that a love of music, and Social Distortion in particular, was, you might say, the foundation of the friendship and that's why I chose a song by them for the first song of the day.