guess you don't want me to repeat it

well, my day sucked. my water bottle somehow leaked in my bag and now my ipod is very unhappy about floating in an inch of water for who knows how long. who would guess that ipods don't like water?!? how am i supposed to survive my morning bus rides without the frames or pearl jam?!?? someone at work told me i let it air-dry for a couple of days and it'll magically start working again. i'm not going to hold my breath, though.

plus, today was parent-teacher conference day (as is tomorrow). i enjoy those, for the most part, they're just really draining for someone like me who is not very good at talking. i don't like to talk about work on here much because that's something i like to (theoretically) leave behind at 5:30, but today i didn't have my ipod to calm me down on the bus ride home and that's thrown off my entire night i think.

this is another thing that sucks: ray lamontagne is playing in seattle on sunday and i didn't buy tickets and now the show is sold out. i do that a lot. i think of a show i want to go to but not enough to buy tickets to right away, and then i just forget and forget about it and when i finally remember, tickets are sold out. i'm really irresponsible, i think sometimes. this video is awesome:



i love his voice, and this song just seems to fit with the weather and my mood tonight. much as i love this time of year, i also hate it. it gets dark so early, and it seems like my bus has been late every night this week. and i don't even have my freaking ipod to entertain me. and i can't read my book because it's dark.

2 weeks till twilight and minus the bear! not that those two things have anything at all to do with each other - i'm just excited about both. in fact, i think i'll go to bed and read twilight right now. that sounds like fun.

livin' on a prayer

have i mentioned that i love carrie brownstein's blog at NPR? it's become one of the sites that i check every day. last week, she wrote what i thought was a really interesting post about the ways that people listen to music. i guess it was inspired by a friend's grandfather who had a really expensive audio system; she asked readers to send in pictures of whatever they used to listen to music the most. people sent in pictures of ipods, boomboxes, headphones, computers, televisions...

her newest post is about song lyrics that somehow become part of popular culture, particularly how words can make you want to sing certain melodies. the comments readers made were hilarious - after someone wrote that they always came home with livin on a prayer (bon jovi was my favorite band during middle school) in their heads, i am now singing that song (woah oh we're halfway there/ woah oh livin' on a prayer/ take my hand and we'll make it i swear)

three years ago, there was a boy in my class who always used to say "hey ho, let's go" before he put his nap mat away (this was also a boy who wore little death cab for cutie and KEXP t-shirts) so now i sing that little line in my head every afternoon when i come back from lunch. (and that's also why i laughed a little when i noticed that glen signed my ticket "hey ho!") everytime i make myself a cup of tea (which is actually often now, since shannon introduced me to a kind that i love), i sing to myself: "tea, a drink with jam and bread." and then i usually sing the rest of the song too. when someone asks me something that i find stupid, i think to myself "oh well, whatever, nevermind." does anyone know what that is from?

her post also got me to thinking about music and education. when i worked in tacoma, the other kindergarten teachers and i went to a workshop by a woman who put all of her lessons to music; we got a few of her cd's and i still have them. she also had a cd of self esteem music, and there are a couple of songs that the kids in my class love (i haven't played them in awhile actually, maybe i should tomorrow) - i'm a grump and wonderful me. i've noticed that the kids (and me) are in much better moods when we sing and listen to music. sometimes when they're not listening i just make up a stupid song and it catches their attention.