Things Nobody Warned Me About my (Late) Twenties

Inspired by the Freshly Pressed post: 10 Things Nobody Warned Me about my Twenties | Doctor Quack, I’ve decided to compile my own list of things nobody warned me about before I hit my twenties.  As Doctor Quack said, I am “projecting my personal experiences onto my fellow twenty-something friends and colleagues who are themselves possibly struggling with the same things I struggle with.”

I was sort of planning a post along these lines anyway, so here goes…

• My body hasn’t stopped changing: - When you hit your teens, there’s a whole league of people offering you advice on how to deal with the changes to your body. This is right and proper, as your teenage years are a time of major growth and change. However, the impression that I got from all these people when I was younger was that once you’d gone through puberty and all those hormonal teenage moods, your body would settle down a bit and further changes would be slow.

  This may just have been a mis-comprehension my part, but I feel like my body hasn’t slowed down its rate of change that much. Ok, so I’m not getting any taller – but my body and the way I see it has changed a lot over the past 9 years. I’m older, thinner (well, a bit) and, despite the differences, more comfortable in my skin than before.

• I can’t handle my alcohol:- I used to drink much more than I can these days. I just can’t do it now (trust me, I’ve tried). Not that I am tee-total by any means, it’s just that it now takes an entire day to recover, and that’s time I could be putting to better use. Which is a shame – I have far fewer entertaining drunken stories to tell.

• My friendship group is more diverse: - When you’re at school, you mostly hang out with your school friends. When you’re at uni, you have home friends and uni friends. I used to have a few core groups of around the same age that I’d see regularly. These days I am lucky to say that I’ve got a lot of friends from many areas of life; work friends, old school friends, friends I’ve met through organising different stuff, friends of my husband and more. This is great, and as I said, I am lucky to have such lovely people in my life. The one drawback is this: it’s much harder to get together with friends – we’ve all got stuff going on, so pinning down dates to catch up with everyone can be very tricky. Especially considering my next point….

• My friends have kids now: - Again, this is a lovely thing, but an odd one to get used to. A lot of my friends who are the same age as me have children now, so they have to do things like ‘take responsibility for them’ and ‘make sure they’re alright’… which means they don’t get to come out and play as often.

  When I do get to spend time with them, it’s in a different way to when we were younger – we spend more time at people’s houses and in cafés, not pubs or clubs, and the conversations have changed too.

• Time goes faster, and there seems to be less of it: - Even with long drawn-out days at work, the weeks just seem to whizz by. Time seems to be slipping away much too quickly for my liking, and it’s getting faster too! Suddenly, time management seems much more important.

• You concentrate more on the important stuff: - These past few years I’ve really come to appreciate my family and friends more. They are what’s important, and I hope I manage to show them how much I care.

  And things that used to bother me, like what other people think of me, or whether I ‘fit in’ doesn’t worry hardly at all – as long as I can make time for family, friends, pets, and music, I’m happy. That’s not to say that I don’t ever sweat the small stuff, but I know what’s important and when trival things are getting me down, that’s what I concentrate on.

They say that school days are the best of your life, but they’re wrong! Despite some of the negatives I’ve reflected upon in this post, my twenties have been great. And who knows, my thirties might turn out to be even better…

6Music’s Milkshake

I love BBC 6Music – not least because they interviewed the lovely Barry Dolan (a.k.a. Oxygen Thief) and played his single Mestle and Porter the other night… But I love them mostly because they play a variety of music that is constantly different, interesting and, most importantly, good.

Nevertheless, I was still a little surprised yesterday morning to hear Andrew Collins play Radiohead’s Idioteque followed swiftly with Milkshake by Kelis. Even on a station as eclectic as 6, that’s a big jump in style.

Image from Wikipedia

But, as I was dancing round my bedroom while trying to find suitable work clothes, I was struck by something just a little odd in the lyrics. And because I am pedantic (or pendantic, as Shaun Keaveny would say) I thought I’d point it out.

The lyrics are (as if you didn’t know):

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, And they’re like, It’s better than yours; Damn right, it’s better than yours,  I can teach you, But I have to charge

I know you want it, The thing that makes me, What the guys go crazy for.
They lose their minds, The way I wind, I think its time.

La la-la la la, Warm it up,
La la-la la la, The boys are waiting

Wait a second? Warm it up?!

I thought we were making milkshake here… Seriously, who warms up a deliciously cold ice cream and milk-based beverage?

Warm milkshake? No thank you, Kelis. No, thank you.

Why Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ Makes Everyone Cry – WSJ.com

One for my fellow music geeks out there: – I recommend a look at this interesting article on the psychology of Adele’s Someone Like You.

Why Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ Makes Everyone Cry – WSJ.com.

For me, this confirms what I knew all along – music makes you feel awesome. So, I suppose it makes sense that a particular type of audio stimulation causes your body to release dopamine.

Which is a cue for me to crowbar in this joke: Yay!

Serotonin and Dopamine (source toothpastefordinner.com)

 

P.S apologies for the short post today – it’s the start of a busy weekend, you know. Next weeks posts will be longer, I promise.

Self Help and The Seaside

I was chatting with my work-mates the other day about a self-help book that one of them was reading. One of the positive reinforcement exercise that she explained involved picturing yourself at a time or place where you feel completely relaxed, happy and stress-free.

This, combined with my recent trip to the Gower in south Wales with hubby, really put home a point for me:

The only place I feel really worry-free and at one with myself is at the coast.

Whether I’m scrambling over rocks at the bottom of cliffs in the freezing cold or  gently strolling along a sunny sandy beach doesn’t seem to matter – I can’t help but feel good; relaxed and alive.

So there we go: I’ve found my happy place – where’s yours?

A Virtual Kick Up The Backside (Or Burn Your File of Song Ideas and Start Over (I Dare You))

I owe Nicholas Tozier a thank you for his post Burn Your File of Song Ideas and Start Over (I Dare You).

While I don’t advocate burning old song ideas (and if you read it, you’ll know that what Nicholas is suggesting isn’t as extreme as the title suggests), what this post made me do was actually look through my old song ideas.

And what I found was a scrappy collection of bits and pieces that I’d forgotten about, dumped in folders and notebooks and files on my PC.

Mostly I found lots of terrible lyrics which deserve to be binned, but – and it’s a bit of a big but – one or two were little gems that I had merely mislaid amongst the clutter. Yes, they were unfinished and rough in some cases, but with a little work they could become fully fledged songs.

Do nawt throes me out! I are good idea. (Image from Flickr by Harry R)

So, the moral of the story is this: Do keep your old notes and scraps of ideas, but make sure you actually review them from time to time so that you don’t get bogged down in too many unfinished works.

If the idea is awful and should be cast into the doomed depths of the bin, make the call and do it. If it has merit but needs more work, keep hold of it – but don’t let it linger, forgotten and unloved for months or even years.

I haven’t properly cleared out all my song scraps yet, but I’m planning on having a proper clear out and working on the worthy few this weekend. Hopefully, it will be a cleansing and productive process – and I have to say that I’m really looking forward to it, which is great. I’ve been struggling to get excited about songwriting lately and really struggling to get anything finished, so thank you again, Nicholas, for the virtual kick up the bum. I needed it.

It’s Ok to Be Neither; A Reflection on Gender Variance

I read this article, It’s Ok to Be Neither by Melissa Bollow Tempel,  yesterday and was surprised by how much I was affected by it.

Growing up, I’d never classed myself as a child with ‘gender variance’, but by the definition provided by Ms Tempel, that’s exactly what I was.  I had short hair for years. I wore trousers, sweatshirts and grungy t-shirts with men’s shirts over the top (what? it was the 90′s!). Like Allie, the little girl mentioned in the article, I often received gifts that I could never wear because they were too girly.

When I was younger, the only ‘girl’s’ toys that I liked were animal ones, Sylvanian Families and My Little Pony (but not the pink ones), never dolls. Well, alright, one Barbie, (or possibly Cindy?) doll; she had all her hair cut off, and I wasn’t really bothered when the dog chewed her head. I always wanted to be like my brother and make cool things with Technics Lego, and was always subsequently annoyed that I wasn’t as good at it as he was.

I remember the embarrassing moment on the second day of secondary school when I had to stand up and say “errr, no. I’m a girl, actually” when we were doing an introduction exercise in drama class, and the person who introduced me said “This is Ellie and HE likes…”.

But the thing is, apart from not being recognised as a girl on more than a few occasions, I never felt different, (well, not for liking boy’s things anyway, but that’s another story). I was a girl who didn’t like pink, but I was still a girl.

These days we all seem to have so much marketing, advertising and pop culture thrown at us that reinforces gender roles, that children who don’t conform to these ideas are facing as many, or even more problems than I did when I was growing up. You just have to walk into any large toy shop and you’ll be confronted by a massive display of pink things ‘for girls’ and a massive display of guns, cars and soldiers ‘for boys’.

And that’s why I feel that breaking down gender stereotypes at a young age is an important step, as  Ms Melissa states in her article. Encouraging a school environment where everyone feels comfortable to express themselves surely can’t be a bad thing. Nor can recognising when gender issues are causing problems for a student and addressing them.

However,  I’m not sure that labelling children with ‘gender variance’ is particularly helpful in this case. It makes it sound like a condition, not just a person expressing who they are.  I wonder whether the label here reinforces the stereotype – to be ‘variant’ suggests that you are deviating from the norm, when really, what is normal?

The truth is we all have a feminine side and we all have a masculine side – how much we choose to express each side of ourselves at any one time is entirely up to personal choice and what feels right.

Are Albums Really a Dying Artform?

The word ‘dying’ is bandied around a lot when talking about music and how the way we consume it is changing. I had a rant about this a while ago – I forget what sparked it, but my point was that music itself will always have cultural value (as it has for hundreds of years), regardless of the state of the industry around it.

This argument however, as much as I believe that it is true, doesn’t address the way that new technology has had an effect on how we as music fans actually go about listening to music: We are told that albums are in decline, and that consumers these days will only ever download the particular tracks that they want to listen to, and will disregard the rest.

Physical album sales are on the way down, digital sales are on the way up;  ergo, albums are dying.

Everybody knows that, right?

Except, I think that this under-estimates the modern music fan, and how much they care about the music of their favourite artists.

More casual fans may well download just the tracks that they like or have heard on the radio, and not be bothered about checking out the rest of the artist’s work. Dedicated fans who feel that they have a connection with a particular artist, however, are likely to seek out as much material as possible – both new releases and back-catalogue – and the feeling of ownership over the music remains whether it is obtained via digital download or through the purchase of a physical release.

This kind of fan wants to understand the concepts that the artist is trying to put across and are prepared to dedicate valuable time to the listening experience.

Now, let us consider the album itself for a moment. Back in the day, the length of a record was defined by the physical medium on which it was printed. Early recordings were limited to 3 minutes, giving us the classic ’3 minute pop song’. As technology moved on, artists were able to add more songs to their records, giving us the now traditional album format.

Over time, and with the advent of new technology and innovative approaches, the album has, in my opinion, become an art form and not just a format. They can tell stories, explore a theme or concept, or link several themes together through the music and the cover artwork; they are  not just a collection of tracks, but a piece of work as a whole.

This is why I don’t believe that the form will ever really die off completely: people like the experience of listening to a ‘whole’ work. I know I do: I love opening up a CD or record for the first time, looking through the artwork and turning up the volume, sometimes listening again and again until I know the order off by heart. It’s all part of the listening experience for me. I would never consider myself a ‘fan’ of an artist unless I owned at least one of their albums.

Perhaps in the future the market for albums will become a more specialist, but I suspect the album itself will be with us for a while yet. Whether it will still be on disc or another physical or digital format in years to come I don’t know – there are already plenty of creative artists pushing the boundries of what an album is and how it is available – but I think it’ll be fun finding out. Remember, changing isn’t nesessarily the same as dying.

So, that’s my opinion – now I’d like to hear what you think. Let me know in the comments!