Walls, Names and Things to Do

1. Paper checking season has officially started. I usually have a stack of CDs with me when I hole myself up in the office. Just my way of measuring how many hours it takes me to finish a particular stack. The longest I've gone is 11 CDs. Mostly it's house or trance or extended/Vol. 2 OSTs, a lot of chillout, dance music. Trippy happy stuff.

You wouldn't want to check papers while listening to, say, Chicosci, Wolfgang, any Lito Camo composition. Or even girls who like to punish their vocal chords. They're fun to listen to any other day, but not checking day. I once made the mistake of popping in a mix CD and then Hole's "I Think That I Would Die" came on in the middle of a research paper on BT corn. There were like five papers on weird corn that term, in different classes. Why people insist on writing about genetically modified corn is beyond me. But I'm digressing. Not that I have a beef against Cheese or Sandwich or whoever, but I don't want to get agit when checking papers. It makes you want to commit murder every time you come across a mangled sentence.

2. The lit class had their poetry exam the other day, and there was a Pablo Neruda poem in the mix. I'm not really a big Neruda fan or anything but I found out that the kids like him and his poems are easily "gettable." So anyway, he has this poem called "Too Many Names." (Here's a flickr rendition.) Something about Mondays meshing (or was that "moshing"?) together with Tuesdays. When I got to the part about "all of us are rain under rain" this song started playing in my head:

Too many walls have been built in between us
Too many dreams have been shattered around us
If I seem to give up they'll still never win
Deep in my heart I know the strength is within

Imagine Neruda voiced by Cathy Dennis. So I stopped and did other stuff. But as soon as I got back to my desk, as soon as I read the title, I instantly get a playback around the part that goes "If I could change the way of the world / I'd be your girl" and there's the chorus again. It's madness. I think I need to get out.