Generals & Majors

I’ve started a “Music” journal. Each page has the name of a musical artist on top, and then the songs of theirs that I like singing are listed below. The journal is indexed by artist:

Incomplete index
My Talking Heads page.

My plan is to work my way through the journal and try singing all of the songs in public, whether at karaoke or with a band.

So…actually, my big, overarching plan is to start a cover band, but I haven’t gotten that together yet. When and where will we practice? Who will be in my band? How will I coordinate band life with mom life? This all seems overwhelming at the moment, so the band is still existing mostly within the realm of fantasy.

Starting the song list journal is my way of cataloguing my singing repertoire and beginning to dream of a band.

I recently took my journal to the Baby Ketten Karaoke club here in Portland and tried a song from it. I chose XTC’s “Generals and Majors,” a song from 1980 that popped into my head recently. It is a song about military hunger, war, ego, and glory, and ultimately a satire about the cogs in a war machine.

As a former drum major, the one who leads the marching band, I feel a special connection to this song. I have the hungry spirit of a leader, a love of pomp and glory, and a stirring desire to rally with others for a worthy cause. I detest war and real violence, but as a martial artist, I adore fighting and the self-realization available along the warrior’s journey.

A line from the song goes: “Generals and Majors always seem so unhappy ‘less they got a war.”

I seem so unhappy too, when I lose sight of a cause to fight for, or simply an inspiring goal to work towards. As a mom, the cause I’m most often fighting for is getting my kids to school on time. Or having enough clean laundry to dress my family. These goals are necessary, but not so inspiring. And definitely not glorious.

In contrast, my karaoke performance of “Generals and Majors” was glory-filled. I smashed and bounced my way through the song, leaping through the vocal gymnastics of quick-change intervals, and marching around the stage on the breaks. The crowd cheered, and after my performance, the club owner told me I “killed it.”

Performing was SO much more satisfying than doing laundry.

I logged my performance in my “Music” journal. The entry, along with a few others, appears below. More to come in the future. 🙂

The XTC page, complete with illustration.

Training Journal 04.08.22

I meet with a writing partner every other Friday. We share what we will be working on for the day, and then we sit together for an hour and work on our respective pieces. Today I told my partner that I wanted to write a blog post I could complete and publish today. My main practice in writing right now is getting comfortable sharing again, so posting regularly and being OK with what I post is my main goal at the moment.

My laptop wasn’t working right at the coffee shop, so I closed it and opened my journal. I decided I would write and draw about my martial arts practice, specifically, the pieces I am working on right now. When I finished the drawing/writing above, I told my partner that my martial arts practice feels invisible sometimes, except to the few other people I train with.

Sharing this little piece makes my practice start to exist in the bigger universe, rather than just in the few tiny universes in and around me.

Moments of Glory

I was recently talking with my friend J about karaoke. “When I sing karaoke, it’s a feeling of glory that I’m ultimately going for,” I told her.

You know, the feeling you get when you’re belting out the chorus of Arcade Fire’s “Intervention” and all your friends come in with falsetto backup at just the right moment. Or when a dude puts Britney Spears’ “Oops I Did it Again” in the karaoke queue as a joke but there’s no one to sing it, so he says, “OK, who’s got this one?” and you grab the mic and YES, you do know all the words. AND the dance moves. Or when you sing The Strokes “Heart In A Cage” at a karaoke bar and the MOMENT you start singing, two scantily clad women start gyrating on your legs because you are instantly a rock star.

Glory.

All of those moments happened to me, save the last one, which happened to my husband. But I haven’t felt a lot of glory in my life lately. Largely this is due to the combined socially isolating forces of covid and parenthood. I also haven’t done karaoke in a long time. And even though I do LOTS of glorious dance moves and singing in my own home, glory is a feeling best shared. Perhaps glory only truly exists when it can be honored within the presence of others…

Martial arts is also a place where I have felt glory in my life. (Boy, was that a lightning-quick if rocky topic transition!) Landing a new move, getting someone in the head with a sweet kick, surprising myself with a thought-free but perfect retaliation to my partner’s strike. Yes, glory is a sweet feeling of hard work paying off with a beautiful success.

I’ve really been wanting to post the picture below for a while, and I chose today’s topic of glory with the photo in mind. It’s me and three of my old kung fu buddies after a tournament. The four of us had been practicing our point sparring quite intensely at the time, and our hard work was rewarded with the huge pile of trophies we won at the tournament. Our teacher laughed at how many and how big they were when we brought them back to our school.

Yes, this was a moment of glory…but even more, it was a moment of shared joy with my friends. I had so much fun that day– there were loud musical forms presentations, teenage boys spinning sticks real fast, a table where you could buy big ol’ knives, and if I remember correctly, there was Hawiian plate lunch to eat.

It was really tasty.

So in the spirit of looking for glory anew in my life, I take a moment to note a glory of the past:

That one time we went to that tournament and CLEANED UP.

My tournament career is over, but I’ll be doing karaoke again very soon. I’ll let you know what glory I find there.

Grief & Lost Contact

I remember my friend Zach telling me that he didn’t really remember anything that happened the year after his mom died. Grief hits hard and in strange ways.

I did remember what happened the year after my dad died in 2020.

I did remember what happened the months after my mom had a massive stroke in 2021.

I didn’t drift away from memory, I drifted away from other people.

Away, distant from my friends and family. I became unreachable, unavailable. I went into a massive state of withdrawal and social overwhelm. I couldn’t answer texts, I still haven’t answered emails, and social media became terrifying, so I stopped participating in it pretty much altogether.

My internal world felt safer than the scary external world where people I love really do die and are gone forever.

My internal world felt safer, but it isn’t safer. I know that.

I love my friends, I love my family. My life is bleh without them. I need them to keep me from feeling like a ghost. To remind me that I’m real.