Oooooog.

I haven't been able to sleep well the last few nights. Going to bed, staring at the cieling, getting up again, waking up in the middle of the night, staring at the ceiling some more, waking up with the cat sitting on me and not being able to get back to sleep again, all that. I'm going to try and get to bed early tonight. (yes, anything before 2 am is early for me.) Hopefully I'll finally be tired enough to actually sleep the night through.

Church is in the morning. I will go to at least part of it, but I think I may skip out early and crash. Sooooooooooooooooooooo tired. Tired enough I'm starting to feel sick and lethargic as well as just tired.

Bleah.

Interesting.

I just watched a trailer for Pan's Labyrinth. It looks like it would be utterly fascinating. But it also looks very graphic, and I don't generally enjoy graphic violence and such. But... dunno. I may have to go watch it anyhow.

Crazies!

The crazies are at it again, this time with an amendment that would make it impossible for a married couple with children to get a divorce unless both parents agree to it.

Now coming from a conservative background, I can see how that kind of thing might have a certain attraction. Divorce is way too common, and sometimes it seems way too easy for a parent to just walk out and abandon his or her kids.

But let's look at this again. Firstly, you have a situation where one partner can legally force another to stay in a marriage, against that other's will.

Is there anything good going to come from such a situation? I say no. An unhappy parent, trapped into parenting when he or she doesn't want to isn't going to give children nurturing, love, or support. Oh no! (If you can think of any situation where a legal ban on divorce after having kids would be a good thing, let me know. I really can't come up with one.)

And although they say that the one exception will be in cases of abuse, that means that a battered spouse is going to have to prove an abusive situation before being free of it! It's already hard enough for those folks, mostly women, who are stuck in abusive marriages. Sometimes it's all they can do to get out of them as it is. Now add the legal burden of having to prove that its abusive before they can escape. Will any of them? I think very few.

I'm all for family values. I'm for having couples get counseling before a divorce, so that salvageable marriages can be saved. I'm frankly for making it harder to get married, and I WISH we could make it harder to have kids too, so people wouldn't do it so casually! That's what I'm for. I'm for trying to convince parents to parent already rather than try and fob it off on anybody and everybody else.

But there's no way on earth I'm going to support legally forcing people to stay in a marriage that they don't want to be a part of. That's not supporting family values, that's supporting abusive husbands.

Music

Oh look, another lj post! I am talkative tonight.

Anyhow, I recently aquired a top hits of the 90s collection. 200 songs, woot! I'm up to #33 now, so there's lots more to go. But it's interesting listening through them. There are some where I hear a bit, and go "ew, no!" and delete. Some where I go "oh yeah!" and add to my Playlist Of Doom, after listening through and getting all nostalgic. A few where I go "Hey, I remember this..." and listen through once, for nostalgia's sake, but then delete, 'cause I don't really like 'em that much. There's even been two I totally didn't remember hearing at all. Guess they were hits that never made the radio stations I listened to in the 90s. But there have been a couple where I smile, and listen, but delete anyhow, because I have them already, and listen to them pretty regularly.

Listening to all this more than a decade old stuff and seeing how much of it turned out to be forgettable, and yet finding some that I still had around, and still loved, reminded me of something that happened in one of my music courses when I was in college sometime around... 98? Something like that. It was a sight singing course, and a lot of the training was about how to tell chords and intervals by ear, but we also spent some time listening to the great classics and training our ears to hear the difference between Baroque and Romantic, Classical and Contemporary. And the guy who taught that course was a good musician, but he was a little clueless. See, he loved Contemporary music, and was kind of snooty about it. I don't know of anybody, really, who's into Contemporary that isn't. (And by Contemporary here, I mean the stuff that's suposed to be Great Classical Music Of The Modern Era. Stuff that the poor plebes don't listen to. Stuff that is, frankly, weird, atonal, and not much fun to listen to, most of the time.) He maintained that just as few people today know the music lilstened to by the uncultured masses 300 years ago, 300 years from now nobody will know the "popular" music of our age.

But what's really funny about that is that, in trying to prove that rock and pop were eventually going to die out he actually proved just the opposite! He played for us two selections. One was, I think a bit of Handel, something pretty much everybody in the class knew. "There," says he, "That was the music of the elite, and it endured. You remember it, because it was great." Then he put on another selection, saying "This is music of the masses, it's barely two decades old, and yet I think most of you won't know it." And what did he play? Don McLean's American Pie. And he shot himself in the foot, because far more of us could name tune and composer than were able to name Handel.

I think that just like most Classical, most rock and most pop is going to die. There were hundreds of contemporaries to Mozart that are unremembered today. But the greats, they're going to last. 300 years from now people will know who The Beatles and Pink Floyd and Don McLean and Aerosmith and Led Zepplin were. They may be considered music for old fuddy-duddies who just can't keep up with modern times, but they won't be forgotten!

Also,

Is it horrible that I like Michael Jackson's music? Michael Jackson himself scares me, sometimes one has to wonder if he's even a human being, (I've written before about how he's an escapee from an anime universe,) but his music I really quite enjoy.

Also, also, there's something surreal about a playlist that I didn't assemble having, in this order, Gloria Estefan's Turn the Beat Around, Micheal Jackson's Black or White, and Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. Those are not really songs that go together. But they're all three on my keeper list, so I guess they go together now, along with the rest of the hideous mish-mash that is the Playlist Of Doom.

Holy spandex Batman!

Okay, I wasn't going to lj any more tonight, because I've already posted way too much, but this MUST be shared!

http://ailurophile.livejournal.com/358880.html

Spandex! It's... er... probably work safe, but you'll get funny looks from anybody seeing you look at it, I think. Also, JJ... second to last one.