Time ain’t gonna grind you down, ain’t gonna waste your life, chasing rainbows like some clown

“But who’s gonna come with you tonight
Who’s gonna to tell you it’s alright?
Everything changes over time
Just like wine…”

-Birthright, by A-ha

 

You know, A-ha are a great band. The only thing is… sometimes they have a melancholy sort of undertone to their songs (to their post 80s material, anyway). Which only means that they’re not necessarily the best band to listen to when you’re in a great, euphoric mood. But when you’re feeling melancholy/down yourself? For a certain period of time, they’re gold.

Sometimes when I’m down, I want to listen to happy music to try to cheer myself up, and sometimes I just can’t do it and I have to listen to this sort of melancholy stuff.

Right now the biggest issue on my mind is that of my best friend. She’s getting married in two days. Months ago, she asked me to take the day off from work. I got it approved, and told her, and she seemed happy about it.

And then she quit responding to my messages anywhere. Online, and on the phone.

That was in April. She’s marrying in two days and that was the last time she spoke to me.

I haven’t received any sort of invitation in the mail.

I thought at first facebook was fucking up, as it likes to do, but after a while it has become pretty evident that she’s making a point to ignore me. She’ll like stuff my mom or brother posts, and she even makes regular posts herself, but still doesn’t respond to messages, or wall posts, or anything from me whatsoever.

If I was that important to her, I’d have heard from her by now. Perhaps she  decided not to invite me, and she quit talking to me because she thought it would be less awkward.

And even now as I’m writing this to get it off my chest, I worry I’ve just become bitter and that it’s all a mistake and my invitation got lost in the mail or something, but honestly, at this point? At this point, if you hadn’t heard from a good friend in a couple months, wouldn’t you at least try to establish contact? “Hey, haven’t heard from you in a while, what’s up?” at least, right? Even if you sent an invite in the mail, if you were that good of friends with someone, wouldn’t you have talked to them since then? Even if it was “Omg I’m getting married soon can you believe it?”.

I admit. I can be a shitty friend. I have all sorts of issues (although not as many as my friend has), and sometimes I complain too much. I’m not always there for people the way I should be, because I’m so busy needing people to be there for me.

Still, I don’t think that’s any reason to not invite someone to your wedding. It’s your fucking wedding. If I miss it, that’s it, that’s my only chance. It’s not like I can call up the Doctor, hop in the TARDIS, and poof back in time and show up at your wedding.

I don’t want to turn this entire entry into a ‘Poor me’ thing, but I think I’m justifiably hurt and confused.

I mean, I know weddings are incredibly stressful and a lot has to go on. People can feel entitled and disappointed if they aren’t involved in the day in some way, so it’s for that reason I haven’t really tried to ask her about it much. I worry I’m being too needy and too offended by this, but you don’t ask someone to get the day off from work to be at your wedding and then not invite them.

Or, I mean, if it turned out that you weren’t able to invite them, at least give them the heads up.

I would still be a little hurt if I’m so low on the hierarchy of people to invite that I get kicked off the bottom of the list, but shit, at least I would know what was going on. And I could even understand that.

It’s like birthday parties as children. Your parents may tell you you can invite a few people, but you can’t possibly include every single one of your friends. So perhaps that’s what’s happening here.

It’s not the being ignored that bothers me so much as… shit, like I said before, it’s a wedding. It is most likely only going to happen once. I will never get the chance to see my best friend get married again. So even if she decides to start talking to me after the wedding, I will still be sad and disappointed that I didn’t get to see her start her new life.

I just keep thinking back through our 5+ year friendship, all the things we’d talk about and all the “someday when you get married” conversations, so I’m just kind of in disbelief that it’s actually happening and I won’t even be there to see it.

I mean, I can understand not being important enough to someone to be IN their wedding, that I get, but not even inviting me to watch the wedding? I don’t know how long that’s going to bother me, but it will be quite a while.

 

 

I’m not one to complain, but things get heavy now and again…

-‘Give me Strength’, by Howard Jones.

It’s one among many of his wonderful lyrics, but in my case it is only a half truth… I am one to complain. Complaining sometimes makes me feel better, for some reason, but I have a feeling it’s tiring to everyone else.

Even though nobody reads this, I figured I should touch base, since it’s been nearly a month since my previous entry. If nothing else, this blog will be something for me to read when I’m bedridden in the nursing home at a ripe old age (on that note… why do they call it a ripe old age? Seems like an overripe old age to me). Anyway…

Although the timing is somewhat awkward, my car is now working again.  My brother moved into his college apartment on Thursday of this week,  and he didn’t want to worry about parking and the like, so we didn’t bring his car to college. This would leave his car free for me to drive to work, like I have been doing since I got my license back in March.

This upset my dad for some reason. He seemed to be quite angry at the idea of me driving my brother’s car… even though I’ve been doing so for months.

I know my brother’s car isn’t MY car, and that I’m  not free to just take it wherever I want, but there were few alternatives. Now that my mom is back to work at the high school, I can’t use her car, and we have two pickup trucks, neither of which I can drive.

So I was getting a bit uneasy. I’m still not sure what my dad’s deal was with that, but it doesn’t really matter anymore.

Apparently, my dad bought a new battery for my car, as well as a little switch to keep the battery from draining (there is some problem with my car in which the interior lights would not turn off for some reason, which would drain the car battery).  Every time I get in the car, I have to lift the hood, and flip the little switch. Every time I get out of the car, I have to lift the hood again, and flip the switch the opposite direction.

It’s wonderful to have my car back in working order, but like I said, the timing was odd. A better time to do this would have been say, at the beginning of the summer, when my brother was back living at home, and actually needed his car to get to his summer job.

Anyway, that is one thing that has changed since my last entry… and pretty much the only thing. I’m excited to have my car back (and the cd player in said car), but I’m still getting used to it again, and I’m still a bit paranoid, because my car is the one I was driving when I got my OWI.

Tonight, driving home from my closing shift will be interesting because it will have been the first time driving my car at night since the incident little over 3 years ago.

It doesn’t seem like that should make a huge difference, and maybe it won’t. It probably won’t, actually. I should know by now that my dread building up to an event is usually a lot worse than the event itself.  As long as I’m going the speed limit and paying attention to the road, I should be fine.

Although… I am worried about what my  nerves will do the first time I’m pulled over again for something petty, like a brake light or something.  Eh. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it, so to speak.

What else did I want to talk about here? Oh, right.

I was reading a short biography about Howard Jones. I noticed it mentioned a favorite album of mine failing to chart at all. The album in question was “In the running”, and as the biography said the album moved away from synthesizers, to piano, and it just made me think.

Though I love it to bits and consider it one of my favorite albums of his, it’s not his best. So that could be part of the reason it didn’t chart, but there’s another thing I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while.

Take an artist like Howard Jones, or Thomas Dolby, or anyone that first found fame in music that featured heavy synth use:  it seems like, to me anyway, people keep expecting them to continue on the path as they first began, and once they veer away from that, people lose their interest.

Which is sad.

Both Howard Jones and Thomas Dolby have wonderful electronic based music, but their talents can shine through equally well when going in an acoustic direction, too.

Not every artist can do that. I feel that some artists rely heavily on the technology and the voice effects and etc, and once you strip that away, there isn’t really anything special about them.

This isn’t the case with Howard Jones or Thomas Dolby, and while I’m happy that their electronic music has gotten them fans, it makes me sad to think that most people quit paying attention to Thomas after ‘The Golden Age of Wireless’, and to Howard Jones after ‘Dream into action’.

I would love to go on and on about this, but I don’t seem to be articulating it as well as I would have hoped. With work and such matters looming over my head I seem to be losing focus.

I am planning to write a more coherent, complete entry on this ‘People quit paying attention to artists once they deviate from the sound that got them famous’ issue, since it’s an issue I have with many of my favorite artists.

I just wanted to get a little of that in this entry before I forgot (which I do often).

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to relax before work and hope to god I don’t get cramps while I’m there (I’ve managed to hold them off for today thus far, but I’m not sure how long that luck will last).