dance on a moonbeam

1. Music and Life

Found via http://wherethehellismatt.typepad.com/blog/2008/08/05/index.html
1a. That blog post is quality stuff. The Yahoo version of the video is hilarious, at once uplifting becuase it’s spontaneous silliness and depressing because it’s corporate-planned desperation. The concept of this dude meeting Emotion Eric is hilarious. Those emails people send him are amazing.
1b. Those emails people send him make me never want to talk about depression; with stories of administering aid to refugees and flying into war zones nearby, the phrase "have been coping with depression" reeks of self-pity, self-hatred, and the ennui of a priviledged, meaningless life. Really. How does it feel to be sleepless because I can’t graduate from college when I am presented with someone on the internet who is sleepless because of the what their Somalian students tell them about war, torture, and death? Wow, I hate myself.
1c. http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/root/Magnetic_Movie/Magnetic.htm What the hell is going on??

2. I’m doing this backwards, but whatever. Here is "where the hell is matt." Kimberley sent me this link.
http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/videos.shtml?fbid=fp3lU-zAyeN
An entry and a video interview about the song used in the 2nd video is here: http://wherethehellismatt.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/honiara-solomon.html He acknowledges that some kind of payment for the usage of the young girl’s recording from so many years ago is owed to someone by someone which is a difficult sort of moral thing to process and I’m impressed by his honesty and thick skin. He gets a lot of shit but a lot of good feelings too, for doing what he does.
2b. Wow, he gets a lot of shit. http://wherethehellismatt.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/kuwait-city-kuw.html
2c. I will never believe in world peace, or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb. Thanks, shits. Thits.

3. I don’t want to live on the moon

I remember watching this as a small small child and crying and being totally confounded about why I was crying. I very clearly remember the visuals of Ernie leaning back on the moon and Ernie looking at the moon through his little curtained window. I still cry when I listen to this and I am still confounded. How does it create such a sense of loneliness? It’s a song about missing what’s familiar and happy about your life without even the possibility of the removal of any of these things, since it’s only about the fantasy of visiting faraway places. Maybe it’s really a song about missing the happiness, community, and purpose that are supposed to be present in my life but are not, so it’s a twice-removed missing of the ideal of a happy normal life on Earth that I don’t have, and thusly can’t even miss if I do move to the moon. Maybe sadness that neither Ernie nor I nor most ordinary people will probably never visit the moon is encoded in this song and thus I cry for all of the unrealized dreams that we have. I just cannot believe the sharp degree of pre-emptive collective/cultural nostalgia that this song generates and my completely uncontrollable emotional response. I feel like a robot programmed to respond this way on the whim of a cruel god. My throat tightens and I am overcome by intense sadness.
3a. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXVFWNSEW-M Watching Sesame Street makes you like Jesus because you see characters with their transparent meanness and pettiness and all their flaws as well as their many redeeming qualities and you forgive them all.

4. My plane leaves at 8:50am. It is 5:21am. I had better pack, and also figure out how I am going to get from the airport in Honolulu to the hostel I am staying at. Everything else can be figured out while I’m there, because I go wherever the wind blows.
4a. I have not been sleeping. I think there have been serious ramifications.