Highlights with Soundtrack

Your assignment is to choose 10 highlights from your life.  For each moment, choose a song that  would appropriately accompany that moment.  Then, for each moment, write 1 to 3 sentences explaining your song choice for that moment.

EXAMPLE

MOMENT: 10th grade, a crisp fall night.  I remember being sprawled out on the front lawn of my buddy's house, staring up at the stars, talking for hours with a person I had only known vaguely before that time.

SONG: "Are You Lightning?" by Nada Surf.  I chose this song because it conveys the sense of the glorious confusion that often accompanies a new relationship.  There is a feeling of anticipation and the slight undercurrent of trepidation that comes along with opening yourself up to someone new.

MOMENT:  Also 10^th grade, oddly enough.  Dead middle of Christmas break.  One of my best friends was heavily addicted to drugs, and had been hiding it from me, fearing my judgment.  We had argued about it.  As a gesture of good faith, she walked a mile across town in 2 feet of snow, the day after having major knee surgery, to carry me the pipe she had been using; her thinking was that this would prove she was done with this stuff for good.  I remember feeling sadness upon recognizing the futility of the whole gesture.  I appreciated it, but I was not about to fool myself about it.  I could tell she wanted me to tell her that I trusted her, that this was all she needed to do to make things right, but I just couldn’t.  It was a hard truth.

SONG: “Soma” by The Smashing Pumpkins.”  Musically, the spacy introduction of this song always conjured the feeling of Christmas lights, strung out on cold rooflines, blinking, magical.  I think of her walk in the snow and hear that music.  The way the song crests, the way it swells, even the screechy vocals remind me of a truth one can’t ignore. 

MOMENT:   January, at a young, purposely non-specified age.  I was at a social gathering of sorts, and it was “somewhat” rowdy.  At the absolute apex of the evening, which was at a friend’s house, the craziest kid I knew at the time got into a fight with his girlfriend.  He was in a “somewhat altered” state of consciousness.  I could see it escalating.  He was standing in the corner of a screened-in porch, and suddenly he decided to just leap backwards.  He smashed through the screen, and reverse face-planted on the concrete, splitting his head wide-open.  The chaos that ensued when the “social gathering” guests were informed that an ambulance was on the way can best be described as “the stuff of legend.”  Half-filled cups flying into bushes.  Various glass receptacles being tossed down the hill in the backyard.   By the time I had made my escape, I wasn’t completely aware that I had made my escape.  Luckily, I had the assistance of a friend, who literally saved my life that night; she pulled me back as I tried to cross the street, and missed being hit by a truck by about 6 inches.

SONG:  “Lady, Your Roof Brings Me Down” by Scott Weiland.  I’m not even a huge fan of the artist, but this song typifies the silliness and disorientation that goes along with my night.  It falls all over itself; it is sloppy.  The groove lumbers along like a dizzy sloth.  It’s perfect.

  

This assignment is due at the end of class on Monday for Mr. Kupiec's class and by the end of class on Wednesday for Mrs. Ell's.