Posted on by crystal · 23 Comments

♫ The beat goes on da-da-dum-da-dum-da-da ♫

I’ve noticed an interesting shift in my personality lately. I’ve become a lot more … aggressive. As opposed to passive aggressive. I don’t know if it’s a good thing, but Mr 3CB approves, and I trust his opinion. He says it’s cool I’m finally standing up for myself, and it’s great that I’m letting out the pressure. I’d hate to blow up one day and stab him in his sleep. When people vent and flip, it’s the people close to them that suffer, and no one is closer than Mr 3CB.

A few weeks ago, I read this article about Eminem. It got me really curious, and I went rifling through my hard drive to see if I had any. I found about a gig’s worth, so yay! I didn’t actually listen to it until today. I’m still surprised at how much I’m enjoying it. A week ago, I would have been traumatised, but lately it takes odd things to disturb me.

A few minutes after I started Eminem, I clicked on this tweet and found some sickly sweet song by Bruno Mars. Just the fact that I called it sickly worried me. It’s a cute puppy dog song about how all girls are beautiful and have awesome hair and we should value ourselves blah blah fish cake yadda yadda yadda. All I could think was Bieber-Twitter-Song-Britney-Spears-Sucky-Cotton-Candy-Blergh. In that order. And while I like cotton candy, nothing in there is a compliment. I literally wanted to retch, and that’s really, really sad.

Meanwhile, I’m listening to angry Marshall lyrics and bopping my head. I wince a lot less when he’s tasteless to women, though I’m skipping  a few songs and deleting others. The ones about effing Kim, killing his mum, and shooting random people are way too angsty for me, and some of the songs are a bit to Snoop-y.

Aside from [mostly] liking Eminem, I’ve noticed I’m censoring my curse words a lot less. I should probably work on that, because I can’t write eff then tell my princess not to use it. I suppose this could be the latest stage in my delayed teenage. I’ve done cool skin, crazy hair, and puppy love, so bad music was bound to follow.

I always sort of liked Eminem – his style, not his lyrics. He’s very clever with his rhyme schemes, and his word play is unequaled. He’s got some killer tracks too – the instrumentals are all Valhalla. I used to say if he could replace the words with something clean, he’d be brilliant. There’s Christian artist who did that in the 90s. He sounded just like Eminem, except he was on Holy Ghost train. His name was KJ-52.

Marshall sounds pretty smart during interviews sometimes, and on 8 Mile, I saw that he’s capable of being – you know – not Eminem. I think that’s the first time I ever took him seriously. Before that, he was just the idiot who sung Slim Shady. The movie showed me his human side, and songs like Mocking bird affirmed the idea. I think I’d actually enjoy a conversation with him as long as he didn’t go all Em on me. I’ve just found a song called Stimulate where he says:

My

Music can be slightly amusing.

You shouldn’t take lyrics so seriously, it might be confusing.

Trying to separate the truth from entertainment

It’s stupid ain’t it?

I get sick of trying to explain.

Like Sean says, it’s amazing how he rhymes words that shouldn’t rhyme and still makes them sound so good. He’s deep too, if the songs are anything to go by. The proper songs, not the ‘My name is’ songs.

As I listen to Slim, I find that even the lyrics don’t bug me. It could be that it’s background, so I can’t really hear it. Or maybe something came loose in my brain and let the demons out – who knows. Maybe I just need to watch 8 mile again and get it out of mys system, coz that was a really good movie.

♫ Stimulate ♫ Eminem ♫

Posted on by crystal · 4 Comments

♫ Battlefield ♫ Jordin Sparks ♫

Every once in a while, a song finds me, grabs me, and shakes me till my teeth rattle. I will play said song back to back to back to … well, you get the idea. I basically put it on my iTunes and play it endlessly until the mood passes. I’ve been known to play a song nonstop for five weeks in a row. Scary. I call it musical OCD, and my daughter has it too. If she plays ♫ Shorty is like a melody ♫ in my head ♫ one more time, I’m going to scream.

Meanwhile, my song for the season is Battlefield by Jordin Sparks. According to iTunes, I’ve played it 113 times since I discovered it a few days ago.

I’ve had this song for a while. I recently downloaded about 20 gigs of music from my brother’s hard drive, then largely ignored it. So on Wednesday night, I was looking through my files to empty space for more torrents when I bumped into some Jordin. I’ve always liked Jordin, and Tattoo has previously featured on my OCD list. She has this wholesome thing going, and she has pretty hair and a Janet Jackson smile. No air was cool, and I’ll even forgive One step at a time for being annoyingly peppy. That song is like a cheerleader on a sugar high, and I can’t stop singing it.

I didn’t immediately realise why I liked Battlefield song so much. I gave it some thought after fifty plays, and decided it must be the strings. I LOVE rock, and I’ve noticed that any non-rock song that I like secretly has some subtle stone influence. Apparently, I have in-built affection for steel guitars.

A few minutes ago, I decided to shut my ears and listen to the song, to really listen to it. I thought maybe I could figure out the draw. I was surprised that after 100 listens, I still noticed new bits of music – and I guess that’s why I like it so much. It’s layered. Each playback has more gold to discover.

The song starts with drums, a nice catchy beat that makes you sit up and pay attention. For some reason, it made me think of neon-coloured Spandex, punk haircuts, and MC Hammer.

Next comes some cute piano [yes, piano can be cute] and vocals. I didn’t notice the piano until my eyes were shut. Weird. At the bridge, some deep strings are introduced, and that distracted me for a bit. They have this awesome sliding effect, and after 16 years of academic music studies, I really should know what that effect is called.

Suddenly there’s a chorus and everything just explodes in a rainbow of sound. It feels a bit like that advert where a kid puts some candy in his mouth, and suddenly his head bursts and hair flies everywhere and it’s all animated melodies and things.

The chorus ebbs into the verse two and everything disappears except Jordan, the drums, and the piano. The cycle is repeated, but it’s no less awesome the second time around. Turns out there are background vocals somewhere, and like the piano, I didn’t notice them until my eyes were closed. Now that’s what I call background vocal. They do a nice humming thing, and I like nice humming things.

I don’t know the lyrics of this song. There are few words that slipped into my consciousness, words like ♫ I guess you better go and get your armour ♫. But those only snuck in because I’m a total control freak, so I like armour. Also, when she sings it, it sounds more like gecheraama, and that sets off endless fits of giggles.

My brother came by a while ago, and as I was walking him out, I started humming. It was totally subconscious and I didn’t even know I was doing it until he said, ‘You’ve been singing that song for the last five days.’ Oopsie.

So now that I’m done analysing, I’m going to close my eyes for a bit and listen to the words. I suspect it’s a sad song, but I can’t help smiling when I sing the few words that I know, and I’m not really sure why. Depressing songs seem to touch me way deeper than happy ones, and for some reasons, sad songs often make me smile. Yoohoo? Where are you Freud?

Posted on by crystal · 111 Comments

Manifesting money and other secret nightmares

Note to self: Ditch the long titles. They look really weird on the home page.

I’m a big fan of The Secret. I’ve the read the book a few times and watched the DVD enough to scratch it. Luckily, it’s an original, so it doesn’t scratch.

On some days, I wish I hadn’t discovered The Secret. It’s too much pressure. See, religion is easy. When anything good happens, we thank God. When anything bad happens, The Devil must have done it. I don’t need to make a decision, I just follow the writings in a big Holy Book, and if I do it right, or get saved, or perform virgin-earning services, I can scrape past the firey gates. Easy peasy.

But when you have no religion, things get a little … tricky. On one hand, it’s cool that I pick my own right and wrong. On the other hand, so does everyone else. Which means there’s no standard, and I can’t complain if my right is someone else’s left wrong. If, for example, my best friend’s morality says it’s okay to sleep with my husband, then I can’t really complain. Similarly, with The Secret, everything in my life is entirely up to me. I can’t look to higher powers for voodoo hexes or miracles. It all happens within my mind. And that’s scary.

I take my baby to Sunday School every week. It’s a great excuse to bond with her grand-dad, and I don’t want her to rebel against nothing. When she finally starts to question her faith – because at some point, we all do – then it would help if she had some basis of faith to question.

But I’ve never liked church, and I don’t quite have faith anymore. It took all of last week to decide who to pray to, since I can’t call on deities whose presence I doubt, and ‘Dear Powers Of The Universe’ is a bit of a mouthful. I settled for ‘Mr Universe’, because it can’t be inanimate, and I’m not enough of a feminist to call it a Ms.

In my own mind, I’m really lazy, but mostly I’m an overachiever. I set my bar so high that I have to stand on a ladder and tiptoe just to see it, and I don’t like to tiptoe. I can’t even do high heels! Which is why I think I’m lazy.

But if I step back for a second and look through other [people’s] eyes, I realise I’ve done a lot. In one year of working with The Secret, I’ve managed to get my soulmate, my dream job, a cool flat, a good school, and perfect hair. Sweet!

But one thing I have trouble with is money. I was able to manifest stuff that wasn’t urgent, because I could leave it to The Universe and its perfect timing. But when I need a set figure on a set date or else, it gets a little harder to let go and let God The Powers Of The Universe.

Every time I watch The Secret, I learn something new. Working the Law Of Attraction is a three-step process: Ask, Believe, Receive. To ask is to make a wish. To believe is to accept that it can happen, and to receive is to act like you already have it. I realised that while I was okay with asking, visualizing and thanking, I didn’t have the ‘believe’ part down. I’m so intellectual that it was hard for me to stop analysing potential ‘hows’, and that stifled my magnetic ability. I had no mental concept of how the stuff would happen, and therefore I couldn’t see it happening.

Once I got over that hurdle, I realised that the timing sucked. In the video, Jack Canfield says how he manifested $100,000 in a year [though it ended up being $92,327 or something like that]. Joe Vitale says, ‘Intend to have $25,000 in thirty days, but pick a time and scope that’s believable for you.’ Well, I’ve been trying for X amount of money in two weeks, and it sucks because with every day that passes, I get much closer to panic.

The thing with LOA is that when you panic, you kill it. The more you get afraid, the more you build resistance, and the more you weaken your own magnet. Yet with every day your wish doesn’t appear, you get more and more panicked. It’s classic FCT – Fox Chasing Tail. Yes, I like abbreviations.

Last week, I was able to manifest a tortilla. A tortilla for f***s sake! But I can’t quite manifest the Xsh I require because I want it too badly and need it too much. There’s has to be some way to focus on this with passion and not scare it away in the process, but I don’t know what it is.

Joe Vitale says there isn’t a specific timetable for exactly when you’ll manifest something. It could take 3 minutes, 3 days, or 3 years. I’m cool with that for some manifestations, and I guess the relaxed attitude will help them come faster. But sometimes, you only have two weeks!

Lisa Nichols says The Universe knows the quickest shortest way to manifest, so you have to just trust its timing. She says its not your job to change the world or the people in it. You just have to flow with The Universe and celebrate its parameters.

Now that’s all very nice … but I still have that two week deadline that I’d like to beat, and patience is not my strong suit. Help!