He’s Back!

There are a couple of posts still on hold, thought through in my mind or almost completey written down, but I just can’t bring myself to actually finish one of those tonight. My brain’s too tired. After work I spent 2 hours in a meeting with fellow town council members, people from the administration and some consultants. 16 guys and one woman. Me. Typical gender ratio in these meetings. Half of the population is female, why am I always the only woman in these rounds…

Today’s thought I’d love to share: I actually like the new Robbie Williams album a lot. The last two  albums were crap. I bought them both (I think, too lazy to check) but only once listened to the last one and just a few times to the one before that. The new one though…. sounds like good old times :-) Like it!

Nanci Griffith and Brandi Carlile … Two of a Kind

It must have been the year of 1996 or 1997 when I discovered the wonderful music of singer / songwriter Nanci Griffith, because videos of some of her songs were shown on Onyx TV. (Does anyone in Germany remembers that music televison channel *g*). I’m not sure if it was her version of “From a Distance” or “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” which I’ve seen first. I know it was one of those songs, which completely mesmerized me. (I tried to find those exact clips on youtube, but… no luck)
I just loved her clear voice, her way of storytelling and of course her music. Simple, but wonderful. Piano, acoustic guitar and traditional folk music. Handmade without (a lot of) synthesizers, electronic programming, computers or anything. I bought quite a few or her albums of the 80s and 90s and really loved a lot of the songs. I have to admit that I didn’t buy many of her albums from the late 90s or even the 21st century. I just didn’t feel that connection to her newer stuff.

I didn’t listen to Nanci Griffith music a lot during the last few years. There were other female singer/songwriters I get to know and grew to love. Quite a few of them I discovered via Grey’s Anatomy. Like Ingrid Michaelson and Brandi Carlile, who I both think are amazing. I can’t wait to see Ingrid in concert again in about 4 weeks and I’m a bit sad that it I won’t have the chance to see Brandi Carlile on stage anytime soon. At least it looks like she isn’t touring Germany or Europe in the near future.
Last week I got the new Brandi Carlile album and I just love it. And this afternoon while I listened to the song “I Will” I suddenly was reminded of Nanci Griffith. I’m not saying that Brandi sounded like Nanci or tried to copy her style or anything like that. But I just heard the line “You can’t break a heart that wasn’t even yours to break” and I suddenly felt like that song could have been a wonderful Nanci Griffith song as well. I really can’t explain where that feeling came from :-). But it made me get out all my old Nanci albums and marvel at the brilliance of some of the songs. Quite a few actually. She just released a new album a few weeks ago and maybe I really should order it and give her newer stuff another try…

Life’s Like A Jump Rope

For almost a week I’m planning to write this blog post and never got around to do it. I was either too busy or too tired to actually write it. I hate being too busy or too tired to blog. Not that I have a lot to write about at the moment except moping about how stressful my life is, but I’d still like to be able to at least write about that. I hope that part of the stress will be over tomorrow, even though I already thought the stress would lighten on several occasions before now and that never happened. But I don’t want to give up hope anyway :-)
The past weeks have kept me busy with our Green election campaign, but the local elections are finally going to take place in my federal state tomorrow, so all of this work is done. Hopefully with a good result for us, but I really can’t make any prediction yet. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow evening to know how it all turned out for us. We only get a short break, well no break actually, because we have to keep campaigning for the federal elections at the end of September. But that’s not going to be such a workload than the local campaign. All of it will still keep me busy at work as well, but I’m still confident hopeful that the stress will lighten a bit after tomorrow. It just has to.

Various Stuff From This Week…

There are so many different blog posts in my head, but I just never got around to write them this week. Or I didn’t feel like writing or I didn’t know how to put my thoughts into words. And I’m not even talking about the idea for a post I had even two weeks ago and still haven’t written yet. This will be one of these posts with various topics. They also might seem rather random…

We had an eventful week at work. Not a lot of big events took place, but some bigger issues were solved. For the better I hope. I still feel bad about some things, I neglected to do or forgot about. Maybe I need some re-organisation of my field and schedules as well. And I definitely need to keep better track of assignments and to-do-lists and such. Yeah, I still feel bad. And then I’m annoyed that I feel that bad, because in my mind these mishaps always are bigger and I messed up much worse than I actually did. My screwed up mind and low self-esteem just like to make me feel worse than I actually have to. On the other hand, it’s a good thing that I at least catch my mind playing these dirty tricks on me and I can take a step back and re-evaluate and in most cases realize that it’s not all that bad. I don’t know… I just spend quite some time thinking about these things this week and how I can change my way of thinking and feeling.

I also spent a lot of time listening to a song I heard for the first time on Tuesday. Well, according to last.fm I have listened to it four times during the last three years, but I honestly don’t remember. on Tuesday evening though I was enjoying the sunny weather outside on my patio, I had just painted my toe nails (because it’s freaking summer, even though it doesn’t feel like it since Wednesday) and was listening to a really great song collection on my personal last.fm station on my wireless headphones. Life was good.
Suddenly there was this new song, which I liked from the start and during the second verse I was totally hooked. The song is “Calling You” by Blue October. [follow the link to listen to the complete song on last.fm]. And it was one of these moments you can’t explain, at least I always have a hard time explaining why I’m crazy about a song. It might be the lyrics or the music or the voice or a combination of all of it. I can’t say. Maybe I was and still am just in the right mood to like a song about being madly in love. Which I am not at the moment, so maybe the song should rather make me depressed. But it doesn’t. Not at all. I just love it.

Ramblings – Part 3

But now on to the happy stuff. I wrote most of this post yesterday, so this should be quick. All the frustrating things this week once again made me realize that I spent too much time dwelling on all the “bad” stuff and that I have a hard time to let it go and move on. I’m determined to try harder though and to pay more attention to the good and happy stuff. And thus I will follow Steffi’s example with a “happy moments diary”. I won’t post these moments on a daily basis, but rather compile a post at the end of a week. I did something similar a few years back, with “Good & Bad” lists, but now I want to focus on the good and I will definitely try and note at least one happy moment every day. Today that would be

The three very nice and helpful shop assistant/waitress/barista I met in various locations this afternoon.

There were actually a lot of happy moments during the last few days, even if the “Rambling – Part 2″ post might have left a different impression. I was just too busy to write about all the events properly before now. And even this will just be a short compilation of the great moments I experienced since last week. Last Wednesday I saw the new StarTrek movie with some friends and I really enjoyed it. I wasn’t sure I would, because I don’t know much about the original series (even though I was diehard fan of StarTrek TNG in the 90ies) but I loved this movie. It was typical StarTrek stuff, but also extremly funny. And I got kind of sentimental to see the Enterprise and the bridge and was tempted to get hold of some TNG DVDs to watch some of it.

The Incredible Ingrid in Concert…

Maybe I should ask Santa for a time-turner *wonders* Until he will give one to me for christmas I should go on and use the few idle minutes I have left of this afternoon to write about the Ingrid Michaelson concert. I am sooooo happy I found out about that on time, even though I failed to notice the show announcement on Ingrid’s myspace site. But on twitter she talked about being in Germany and I checked her site again and only an hour later I had bought the ticket.
The concert took place in “Gebäude 9″, a really really small club in Cologne (@oceans77: direkt an der Messe, also falsche Rheinseite *g*), which I never have heard of before. But of course Bro2 knew it and has been there before. He has been to all of the regions’ tiny clubs for some kind of obscure concert, I’d guess.
There were about 150 – 200 people at the concert, probably closer to 150 than to 200, so it was small and intimate, which was really nice. Ingrid isn’t know in Germany at all yet, and from the conversations I listened to before the show started, I gathered that most of them knew her music via myspace, Grey’s Anatomy or her support on the Jason Mraz tour earlier this year. There were a lot of students and listen to all this talk about classes and lectures and finding roommates  made me feel sooo old.

Maybe, Maybe Not…

I might be all “talked out” after a weekend with some friends. Or I might just be too tired after a busy week and weekend. Actually all of November was busy. Being busy kept my mind of things, which I should think about. And it also put new things in my head to think about, so I might spend all of December thinking, maybe write somethings down offline, because I don’t share everything with the world, even if it sometimes looks like it :-), and basically maybe shut down a bit. Or I might not and just post a lot of random things like I used to :-) At the moment I have no idea….

So, the weekend was busy. I spent it with some friends in Cologne. We talked a lot and didn’t sleep enough, which might be the reason why I’m in such a weird mood tonight. Mentioning some plan for the weekend in Friday’s post – even if it was encrypted – might have jinxed the plan. Well, or maybe it didn’t. I actually have pretty good idea who to “blame” :-) And the weekend was sort of salutary as well…

On Friday Night Hai_di and I went to a pre-record-release-concert of a new German rockband and we had such a great time. The band is called “5vor12″, they sing in German, write great music and are really really nice guys. That night was a lot of fun, listen to rock music and to see the guys on stage have a lot of fun themselves. Twice during the show they called a friend who was at the football match Berlin – Cologne, put him on speaker and asked for the latest results. And of course the crowd started to cheer for the football team as well. Sven, the band’s lead singer once asked the crowd to start singing something.. anything. Which lead to him and us singing “Biene Maja” *g* We had so much fun…

Hai_di got to know them a bit on myspace and thus we had the chance to talk to some of them after the show and … well, they are really really nice guys. To any German readers: If you like Revolverheld, you are most probably going to like 5vor12 as well. Visit their site, listen to a few songs and buy the CD, which will be released on 5th December. It was on sale at the concert as well and of course I already bought it. I just knew a few songs (from their myspace site) but the rest of the album is great too. I’m pretty sure that this hasn’t been my last 5vor12 concert. Here are a few photos (not the best quality) I took during the show:

Taking a short break from reading…

I had almost finished writing a post last night, when the news from Mumbai kept me from posting it. My post was so insignificant compared to the terror and tragedy going on there. I don’t feel like writing much today either, not because of the ongoing horrible news, I have to admit. But I’m just too lazy and the novel I’m reading at the moment is getting too exciting. But I’ll take a short break from reading to at least announce that there won’t be much happening on this blog, because I’m busy and/or away from my computer for the next three days.

There is nothing noteworthy going on in my life right now anyway. Today was the first weekday in a while, where I actually didn’t got home around 7 PM or later. Visiting my Mom in the hospital just takes up quite much of my free time, which I don’t mind in general. She is so bored and thus always happy to be able to chat with visitors for a while. Especially as she still can’t leave her floor (to get a coffee in the cafeteria or something like that). But I definitely notice that the 1,5 – 2 hours these visits last (including driving there and back) are missing in my days. Not today though, because I didn’t visit her today. I got home around 4 PM and actually got quite a few things done. I’m under the impression that it should already be midnight, because I’ve already spent so many hours at home :-). Yes, my sense of time is messed up tonight.

Miscellaneous, 2008/08/28

A long time ago (in my german blog) I already wrote about that song and how much it helps me to unwind. It’s time to mention it again…

[....]

There’s a light at each end of this tunnel,
You shout ’cause you’re just as far in as you’ll ever be out
And these mistakes you’ve made, you’ll just make them again
If you only try turning around.

[....]

But you can’t jump the track, we’re like cars on a cable,
And life’s like an hourglass, glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button now
Sing it if you understand.
and breathe, just breathe

Breathe (2AM) – Anna Nalick

I try and have to just breathe more often than I’d like to recently…

°°°°°

Today is the first night in eight days that I’m home before 9 PM. I don’t know what to do with all these hours before bedtime :-) But then I look around my dusty and messy apartement and see the stacks of laundy which has to be ironed and I think about all the mails or papers I have to write. And then I just want to curl up and try to block out all that stuff and just be. Not do anything. Just breathe :-)
Unfortunately I can’t afford that luxury, not unless some leprechauns turn up and do the work for me. ALL the work. At least it’s not too stressful at the office at the moment so I can’t complain too much. Still some of the things I have to do (not at work but on the local politics and postgraduate side of my life) seem to ask too much of my time. I don’t know if it’s really too much work or if I just have to work on my time-management. I’m afraid the latter…

Too tired to come up with a meaningful title…

I’m not falling in any kind. Not Apart and not in love, although I wouldn’t mind that, but that’s a different story.  To be honest I don’t even have any idea what I’m trying to say with the first two sentences. I just needed some sort of introduction to this post, in which I only wanted to write about two (new) songs which I really like at the moment and whose chorus lyrics include falling or to fall… I know it’s a really far-fetched connection and no reason at all to combine these songs in one post. But I’m feeling pretty drained right now after 3 days at work (which sucked for the most parts due to my coworker) and local politics meeting on Monday night and today and the prospect of work + another political evening meeting tomorrow night and an extra day at work on Friday. I need a vacation! [Absolutely unintentionally, I'm listening to another "falling" song while I'm writing this, I just thought I should mention it *g*]