Song shuffle meme

Ah, I said I wasn't going to do it, sice my mp3 player is mostly Beatles stuff, but I ended up getting a surprising amount of Sting, and all from one album. I don't have an iPod, I have a Samsung Juke, and unlike apparently a lot of others who've done this meme, I've not given it a name. I also don't believe I am forced to interpret these responses, so I simply present them without much comment. Many of these songs do have lyrics that express a different sentiment than their titles, however.

1. What do you think of me, iTunes Juke?

I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Cyring by Sting

Seven weeks have passed now since she left me
She shows her face to ask me how I am
She says the kids are fine and that they miss me
Maybe I could come and baby-sit sometime
She says, "Are you O.K.? I was worried about you
Can you forgive me? I hope that you'll be happy."
I'm so happy that I can't stop crying
I'm so happy I'm laughing through my tears

2. Will I have a happy life?

Tomorrow We'll See by Sting

Don't judge me
You could be me in another life
In another set of circumstances
Don't judge me
One more night I'll just have to take my chances
And no it's just not in my plan
For someone to care who I am

3. What do my friends really think of me?

Helter Skelter by The Beatles

Do you, don't you want me to love you.
I'm coming down fast but I'm miles above you.
Tell me tell me tell me come on tell me the answer.
You may be a lover but you ain't no dancer.

4. Do people secretly lust after me?

Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash

I bet there's rich folks eatin',
In a fancy dining car,
They're probably drinkin' coffee,
And smokin' big cigars,
But I know I had it comin',
I know I can't be free,
But those people keep a-movin',
And that's what tortures me.

5. How can I make myself happy?

Tonight by TV on the Radio

Don't keep it silent and tortured
Or shove it unto the floorboards
Your busted heart will be fine
In its tell tale time
So give it up tonight

6. What should I do with my life?

Wait by Sarah McLachlan

Pressed up against the glass
I found myself wanting sympathy
But to be consumed again
Oh I know would be the death of me
And there is a love thats inherently given
A kind of blindness offered to appease
And in that light of forbidden joy
Oh I know I wont receive it

When all we wanted was the dream
To have and to hold that precious little thing
Like every generation yields
The newborn hope unjaded by their years

7. Why must life be so full of pain?

Soldier Jane by Beck

Stars they strike the darkness from a room
Knives they take the poison from the wound
Cars they drive us down into the ruins
Sweep away our cares away with dirty brooms

Soldier jane
Don't be afraid
Take your heart out of the shell
Take your heart out of the shell
Don't be afraid

8. How can I maximize my pleasure during sex?

Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart by Johnny Cash

In the garbage disposal of you dreams I've been ground up dear
On the river of your plans I'm up the creek
Up the elevator of your future I've been shafted
On the calendar of your events I'm last week

I've been washed down the sink of your conscience
In the theater of your love I lost my part
And now you say you've got me out of your conscience
I've been flushed from the bathroom of your heart

9. Will I have (more) children?

Fill Her Up by Sting

You gotta fill her up with spirit!
You've gotta fill her up with faith
You gotta fill her up with heaven!
You've got the rest of life to face
You've gotta fill her up right away
You've gotta fill her up with faith
You've gotta fill her up with babies
You've gotta fill her up with this way
You're gonna love that girl forever
Your gonna fill her up for life
You're gonna be her loving husband
She gonna be your loving wife
You've gotta fill her up with gladness.
You gotta fill her up with joy!
You gotta fill her up with love,
You gotta fill her up with love,
You gotta fill her up with love!

10. Will I die happy?

Come Together by The Beatles

Here come old flattop he come grooving up slowly
He got joo-joo eyeball he one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker he just do what he please

He wear no shoeshine he got toe-jam football
He got monkey finger he shoot coca-cola
He say "I know you, you know me"
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free
Come together right now over me

11. Can you give me some advice?

She Came in Throught the Bathroom Window by The Beatles

She said she'd always been a dancer
She worked at fifteen clubs a day
And though she thought I knew the answer
Well I knew what I could not say.

And so I quit the police department
And got myself a steady job
And though she tried her best to help me
She could steal but she could not rob.

12. What do you think happiness is?

Mother Nature's Son by The Beatles

Born a poor young country boy -
Mother Nature's son.
All day long I'm sitting singing songs for everyone.
Sit beside a mountain stream - see her waters rise.
Listen to the pretty sound of music as she flies.
Find me in my field of grass -
Mother Nature's son.
Swaying daisies sing a lazy song beneath the sun.
Mother Nature's son.

13. What's my favourite fetish?

Get Rhythm by Johnny Cash

Hey, get rhythm when you get the blues
Come on, get rhythm when you get the blues
Get a rock 'n' roll feelin' in your bones
Put taps on your toes and get gone
Get rhythm when you get the blues

14. What is my significant other thinking at this very moment?

While My Guitar Gently Weeps by The Beatles

I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps.
I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps.

I don't know why nobody told you
How to unfold your love,
I don't know how someone controlled you
They bought and sold you.

15. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?

Girl by Beck

I saw her, yeah I saw her with her black tongue tied
Round the roses
Fist pounding on a vending machine
Toy diamond ring stuck on her finger
With a noose she can hang from the sun
And put it out with her cheap sunglasses
Walking crooked down the beach
She spits on the sand where their bones are bleaching
And I know I'm gonna steal her eye
She doesn't even know what's wrong
And I know I'm gonna make her die
Take her where her soul belongs
And I know I'm gonna steal her eye
Nothing that I wouldn't try

Bloggers Gone Wild

Dangit, Marauder has tagged me again, this time on his livejournal page, which I should have known better than to read.

Place in bold things you have done, and italics things you would like to do.

1. Started your own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity
7. Been to DisneyWorld or other Disney theme park
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitchhiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied (don't know what this means, so I guess so)
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had your portrait painted (does a sketch count?)
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie (I did a voice-over for a Japanese documentary once)
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookie
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job (yes, I'm saying I ought to have the experience some day)
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car (no desire whatsoever)
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible (I've done somewhere around 75%, I'd say)
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had Chicken Pox
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby (As M said, my wife did the hard part)
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swum in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a lawsuit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Read an entire book in one day (I once read seven books in a week, even.)

I tag Alec, Daniel, William, and Stephen Baldwin just because they were the first to pop into my head.

It's the network

I'm worried about the Internet. I'm starting to wonder what effect it's having on us as a global society. That is to say, the Internet seems to have made us into a global community, but is that a good thing or not?

I still remember after all these years that night I managed to hear Timothy Leary talking about the great wonder that the World Wide Web would be, and how it would allow us to all come together and communicate in a new and better way. There's a certain sense in which I think this is true. The Web has continued in the decade and a half it's been in existence to make great strides forward in increasing the ways we can interact. I wonder...does increasing the ways of and opportunities for interaction with other people actually increase the quality of that interaction?

There was a phenomenon that I noticed about the very portions of the Internet that are designed for ease of interaction. I'm sure I'm not the first one to notice and comment on this by far, but in the Internet age, we've redefined the word "friend". I think the thing that I'd seen that did it for me was a short article in the newspaper sometime very early in the election cycle. The article informed me that certain candidates had such-and-such thousands of "friends" on their MySpace pages, and that if the number of "friends" a person had was an indication of their likelihood of winning, then so-and-so surely had the election in the bag.

Thousands of friends? I suddenly realized the silliness of it. Nobody has thousands of friends, but there are probably many who have thousands of "friends". Professional and amateur philosophers have discussed throughout time what friendship means, and how deeply one needs to care about another before they can be considered a friend. How deeply do I need to care about someone to call them a "friend"? Enough to click a button next to their name on my computer to add them to a list.

Actually, you don't need to care that much; I'm sure all these politicians who collected thousands of "friends" on their MySpace pages didn't even actually take the time to even click buttons, but simply had a staffer set up a page, and told them to click on anyone who indicated interest in becoming "friends". Heh, I did that once. In eighth grade, when I got my yearbook and it was time to go around to friends and have them write "Your a grate friend. Have a cool summer." I actually hired a seventh grader to circulate my yearbook for me. It was a sort of social experiment. I told him I'd give him a penny for every signature he collected, and I probably got the signature of three-quarters of the school (which lucky for me was a small school). How many actual friends did I have though? Probably about half a dozen, and I made no new friends in the process, not even the kid who did the legwork for me, whom I chose at random. The truth is, I didn't regret not having as many friends as I had signatures. The few friends I had were great guys, and really, who could sustain relationships with a couple hundred kids?

There really is an inverse relationship between quantity and quality when it comes to interpersonal relationships. I'm not a member of any social networking sites, but I do have a free account on Classmates.com, a site that really illustrates this concept best to me. I went to a small-town high school, and so when I look up my Classmates links for my high school graduating class, there are around fifty people, and at one point, I knew them all. Conversely, when I look at the graduating class for my college, there are several hundred people, and I don't know a single one of them.

It's interesting to me that I did go to a small enough school that I knew my entire graduating class. I went to high school long enough ago that the World Wide Web wasn't even a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee's eye yet, and while the Internet and e-mail were beginning to show some prominence, I'd never heard of either one.

Now, I'm not saying that it's impossible to have real friends on the Web; I have a small handful of people that I know only from online interaction, yet consider them my friends. (Heck, if Steve Wells were in my neighborhood and called me up, I feel close enough I'd invite him out for a coffee, even though to call him a friend would probably be a stretch.) Yet consider, if I'd had access to the Internet during my high school years, and I'd occasioned to spend as much time using it as I do today, would I have had the time to make as many "IRL" friends as I did?

There's something really cool and culturally powerful about being able to reach out and make contacts with people from across the world. Sitting on the floor of my living room in California and chatting with some guy from Finland is incredible, but am I really likely to make anything like the sort of connection I will make from talking face to face with a family member?

This is why I worry. In many aspects the dreams of the two Tims are alive and well: the ability to communicate globally with just about anyone at any time opens us up to culture in a way that was never possible before, but we have to pay for the opportunity with the valuable resource of time. We have to choose between the world at large and the world "at small" if you will. When the Internet is sometimes the thing you end up with more time to devote to, there can be a sadness to it. At least, I know there is for me. As the economy globalizes and the information we deal in globalizes, people become much more mobile and physically disconnected. Marauder seems to be one of my closest friends these days, yet he lives on the opposite side of the country in a state I've never even visited. He's a great guy, but what sort of friendship can that really be? When all of your close friends live hundreds of miles away, it's hard for them to feel "close". Through the Internet, I can communicate with all my friends every day, but still feel profoundly lonely, as I wonder whether, without physical proximity, they may just be "friends".