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Top 6 Heartbreak Songs

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If love is one of the best emotions a person can experience, then losing love must be one of the worst.  Thankfully, no one is alone in their bitter pity parties.  If this Valentine’s Day is a painful one for you, then once again the answer is music!  I suggest these six songs if you need to scream out your heartbreak.

1)  Not in That Way by Sam Smith
My favorite blogger Sashayed linked to this song before Sam Smith’s album was released, and I listened to it at least fifty times.  In one sitting.  As a perpetual piner, I adored the fact that someone was singing about loving someone who didn’t love them back.  It is my heartbreak jam, and I revel in feeling less alone in my rejection.

I’d never ask you cause deep down I’m certain I know what you’d say You’d say I’m sorry believe me I love you but not in that way

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Top 6 Romantic Songs

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Is romance even possible without music?  The right song can put you in the mood or else help you process and relive the romance after the fact.  As Valentine’s Day draws nearer, it is of extreme importance that your playlists are ready and romance-ified.  Here are six songs that perfectly capture what I love about love.  Click on the title of each song to listen to it!

1)  The Gambler by Fun.
This is my favorite romantic song of all time, because it’s the story of completed love.  It’s easy to believe in the first blush of attraction, but my heart really swoons at this story of a married couple with grown children looking back at their beginning and forward to their ending.  It’s absolutely beautiful.

You come home from work, and you kiss me on the eye
You curse the dogs, you say that I should never feed them what is ours
So we move out to the garden, look at everything we’ve grown
And the kids are coming home so I’ll set the table; you can make the fire

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What is the Real Problem with 50 Shades of Grey?

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The Christian online community is blowing up, and this time it’s about 50 Shades of Grey.  As usual, I have come to the same conclusion (don’t read or watch it), but for very different reasons.  I’m always this close to fitting in.  Most of the concern I see is directed at either 1) the erotica or 2) the BDSM.  With some caveats, I don’t really see these issues as all that significant.  What bothers me about the story is, instead, the abuse.

Full disclosure:  I haven’t read 50 Shades of Grey.  This makes me that absolutely annoying person who has an uneducated opinion.  I’m sorry!  I have, however, had many conversations with readers, and I have been devouring any and all information about the series, positive or negative.  If that still doesn’t count as good enough for you, I don’t blame you.  But I encourage you to keep reading, and if I’ve missed something important, please let me know! Continue reading →

Hope in Lord of the Rings

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When I was in seventh grade, my older brother invited me to see The Fellowship of the Ring on opening night with a group of his friends.  They invited one other younger sibling in an attempt to set us up.  I did fall in love that night, but not with the other seventh grader.  My heart was 100% stolen by the beauty and power of The Lord of the Rings.  Continue reading →

Best of: So You Think You Can Dance

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I haven’t watched So You Think You Can Dance the last couple summers, but there was a time when I was totally obsessed with the show.  I’ve never been into Dancing With the Stars; I don’t care to see people learning how to dance.  I want to see professionals who are stretched beyond their expertise, but who definitely have an expertise to begin with.  I love the different styles of dance, and the way different choreographers portray a variety of emotions through movement.

And I love Mark Kanemura.  His audition intrigued me, his weirdness endeared me, and then this dance absolutely blew me away.  Continue reading →

Change of Heart (Sia’s Elastic Heart Parody)

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I recently wrote about how much I love Sia’s dance videos, and knowing that, my roommate burst into my room shouting about how I needed to watch this parody video.  I recommend going to their website where they describe their motivation for making the parody as well as why they changed the title of the song.  It definitely sets the mood for the hysterical video you’re about to see.  And I do mean hysterical.  I was screaming and weeping with laughter.  These men commit to their roles and to the choreography in a way that astounded and impressed me.  I hope this goes viral–they deserve it.

My Favorite YouTubers

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I first became aware of YouTubers (people who regularly upload personal videos to YouTube, as opposed to people who post single unrelated videos) when I discovered the world of cute and clever British boys.  I checked in with them regularly, and then I discovered the Vlogbrothers.  These were my favorite YouTubers for years, and only recently did I discover Grace Helbig.  Through her collaborations, I found Rhett and Link’s daily morning show Good Mythical Morning.  It was a quick step from their to find their podcast, Earbiscuits, as well as Grace’s less intense spinoff, Not Too Deep.  From there, the YouTube world opened before me, and I found several new people I wanted to subscribe to.  Listed here in chronological order (because I could never rank them):  my favorite YouTubers.

  1. Charlie McDonnell (charlieissocoollike).  This is where it all began for me.  An awkwardly adorable British boy doing dumb things.  Pretty much…my exact favorite thing in the world.  Although he has lately gotten more professional and less spontaneous, his old videos never fail to make me smile.
  2. Alex Day (Alex Day).  A former roommate of Charlie’s, Alex is less cute but more hilarious.  He is snarky and inappropriate, and I wound up looking forward to his videos the most.  He’s disappeared and reappeared from YouTube for the last six months because of sexual misconduct scandal–I’m on the fence about his new stuff, but this old video remains my absolutely favorite as far as painfully awkward stories go (see also his “Alex Reads Twilight” series).
  3. John and Hank Green (vlogbrothers).  What began as a way for two brothers to keep in touch turned into a straight up Internet movement.  Nerdfighteria has created charity drives and organizations based upon their commitment to “increase world awesome and decrease world suck.”  They are intelligent, ridiculous, and passionate, and their videos immediately reveal this.  The one below is an introduction to Nerdfighteria, but I also recommend their educational series Crash Course, which is so good teachers have started using it in classrooms.  DFTBA!
  4. Grace Helbig (Grace Helbig).  Awkward, beautiful, dumb, and creative, Grace is everything I want to be.  She turned her YouTube fame into a best-selling book (Grace’s Guide: The Art of Pretending to be a Grown-Up), a movie (Camp Takota), and several other side projects.  She’s effortlessly cool, and her videos are consistently funny.  Definitely check out her travel series collaboration with Mamrie Hart (HeyUSA).
  5. Rhett and Link (Good Mythical Morning).  Best friends since grade school, Rhett and Link host a daily morning show of skits, songs, and Internet lists.  They have great rapport, they eat weird foods while blindfolded, and they seem like genuinely lovely people.  Below is one of my favorite videos in which they test their friendship.
  6. Natalie Tran (communitychannel).  Natalie is one of the cleverest people on YouTube.  She is the master of finding humor in everyday situations, and she creates skits that are nothing short of genius.  She’s recently been taking time off to film some travel shows, which is of course right up my alley.  Be careful with Natalie, her videos are almost impossible not to binge watch.

Honorable Mentions to: Mamrie Hart, Hannah Hart, Dan Howell, Viral Video Film School, and Belated Media.

Do you have suggestions of YouTubers I ought to start watching?  I’m always up for wasting more time on the Internet.  Comment and let me know!

Creativity on the Internet

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I have spent the last couple months obsessed with YouTubers.  In three days I plan to post a list of my favorite vloggers and Internet performers, but for now, I want to take a few steps back and look at creativity in general and how it is expressed online.

Ear Biscuits is a podcast by YouTubers Rhett and Link.  Together they interview interesting people on the Internet, going deep in discovering what makes these successful YouTubers tick.  The men and women who have sat at their Round Table of Dim Lighting include John and Hank Green, PewDiePie, Smosh, and the Holy Trifecta:  Grace Helbig, Mamrie Hart, and Hannah Hart.  These are men and women who have millions of subscribers to their channels.

During their interviews, Rhett and Link cover family pasts, careers and hobbies, and how people became the Internet sensations that they are today.  Most of the people they interview make enough money in creating videos that YouTube is their full-time job.  After listening to thirty or so interviews, I’ve put together a few common denominators that I think influence how creative people successfully become Internet famous.

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Most of the YouTube elite have some kind of family trauma in their past.  This is not entirely surprising, since creative people often feel the need to express themselves because their earliest selves were not able to do so adequately.  At the same time, the way people spoke of divorce and mental illness was from a place of resilience.  They took the pain they felt and turned it into something else–something funny or educational or meaningful.

There is also a trend of YouTubers being introverted or shy; many sheepishly talked about having few friends growing up.  The Internet is a perfect place for people who deeply crave attention and affirmation while also wanting safety and distance.  Content creators can express themselves and be vulnerable with the safety of a screen between them and their audience.  The quietest people sometimes just need a safe outlet for them to truly shine and become outgoing.

I should clarify, these trends stood out to me, but by no means has every YouTuber had a traumatic past or been introverted.  Many had loving childhoods and were extremely outgoing.  But it did seem that the YouTubers interviewed seemed disproportionately unique in their personalities and pasts.

Nearly all of those I heard interviewed began making videos within the first couple years of YouTube’s existence in 2006.  They created videos because they wanted to.  That they later developed an audience was unintentional.  Almost unanimously, these vloggers and performers had a genuine love for creating.  They made content because it was going to spill out of them whether or not they had a platform.  It was after one of their videos went viral and their subscribers drastically jumped that they had to reconsider what exactly they were doing.

And that is the final piece of the puzzle.  Although most of the men and women interviewed did not start creating videos in order to get famous, once they accumulated a following, they had the business acumen to create a brand and sell it.  They became more intentional about what they made, and they expanded their brand across media platforms.  Some branched out and created merchandise, or charity drives, or wrote books.  All of them continued to be passionately creative, but now they had a bit more focus.

Why does this matter?  Well, internalizing these YouTubers’ stories was what inspired me to combine my blogs.  I have been blogging for over twelve years, from Xanga to Blogger to WordPress.  I create because I have to, but in the last month or so I decided I wanted to be more intentional about it.  I don’t think I will ever have the influence of Rhett and Link or Grace Helbig, but I want to be the best blogger I can be.  Although we’re in different realms of the Internet, I’ve learned a lot from YouTubers, and I hope to continue to be inspired by their stories.

Coming up:  My list of favorite YouTubers!

How do you think people express their creativity on the Internet?  What are the necessary pieces to someone’s Internet success?  Comment and let me know what you think!

Sia’s Dance Videos

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For the last couple months, it’s been an unspoken rule that the second I find “Chandelier” on the radio, everything else in my car becomes non-existent.  Ketan once stopped mid-sentence, said, “Oh no,” waited as I scream-sang for 3 minutes and 52 seconds, then picked up where he had left off.  I loved the song’s unflinching awareness of self-harm as a coping strategy and the hidden pain of those we think are on top of the world (see also Tove Lo’s “Habits”).  The unapologetic message, “This is what I have to do to make it through the day, but I know it’s not really working” is hugely appealing to me.

And then I saw the music video, and my love exploded through the roof.

I mean, first, the choreography is amazing.  Maddie Ziegler is an extremely talented young dancer whose graceful chaos is both attractive and disturbing.  She is aggressive, confused, childlike, crazed, powerful, weightless, and silly.  She is the cacophony of humanity, the riot of emotions that refuse to be categorized or systematized.  She is too much–too much for her past, for enforced societal roles, for what she wants or what she fears–you can read a lot of things into this dance, which is what makes it so powerful.  What is clear is that she’s cramming herself smaller, flying and screaming before ending with a perfect curtsy, one that continues for an uncomfortably long time as she forces us to bear the weight of her strained grin.

Perfection.

A couple days ago I saw Sia had a new music video, this one to a song called “Elastic Heart” which I know nothing about.  That lends a weird quality to my appreciation of the video, since I’m judging it entirely on the dance and pretty much ignoring the lyrics.

There is an immediately obvious difference–Maddie Ziegler is joined by Shia LeBeouf.  After an initial squick of “the prepubescent girl and adult man look naked!” I was immediately overwhelmed by how perfect the skin-toned outfits are.  Never once is either dancer sexualized, though it would have been easy to let the tone slip somewhere inappropriate.  Instead, the implied nudity is all about vulnerability.  Maddie and Shia are laid bare to the public, ripped open beyond skin to the uncomfortable pain that lies beneath.  The dirtied coverings perfectly convey the discomfort of being exposed without once being about sex.  Brilliant.
When I first watched the video, I viewed it through the lens of a relationship, since I’ve been trained to think of any female/male interaction as necessarily romantic.  I liked that narrative, but then I saw Sia’s tweets about how Maddie and Shia represent two “Sias.”  I watched it again, and I love this.  I love it so much.

Alluding to Carl Jung’s theories of each person containing both anima and animus forces (feminine and masculine),  this video delves into warring aspects of self.  The two circle each other, fight, retreat.  In a moment of tenderness, it seems like there could be reconciliation, but the wild one lashes out in fear.  The other becomes angry until it is clear that the wild one is free.  In the cage, the two selves can fight in freedom and even safety.  But now there is disparity–one can grow up and leave the other behind.  In a last bid for unity, she re-enters the cage, drugs and tricks him into following her out, but to no avail.  We cannot grow up without leaving some parts of ourselves behind.  We cannot embrace one role without neglecting another.  And so we’re left for nearly 50 interminably silent seconds to watch them fail to free him.  Holy goosebumps.

I’m a huge fan of story-telling, but my obsession with words often makes me forget how powerful the medium of dance is for conveying emotion.  Thank goodness Sia is around to remind me of its possibilities.

Arwen and Tauriel

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Me:  And I loved Tauriel and Kili.
David:  Of course you did.
Me:  I was expecting her to die with him, since she’s not in Lord of the Rings.  I thought it would be a tragic Romeo & Juliet thing.  But she lived!  And it was so much worse and so much better!
David:  She has to live without him forever.
Me:  Yeah.
David:  Forever.
Me:  Oh my gosh.  You’re right.  *keening*  This is so painful!!
David:  She’s like the opposite of Arwen.
Me:  *gasp*  Someone should write an essay about that!
David:  I’ll get right on that.

I don’t think he’s going to get right on that, so I will!  Tauriel, the immortal elf who loved a mortal dwarf, and Arwen, the immortal elf who loved a mortal man.  The first watched her love die and will have to live forever with that pain, while the second gave up her immortality and died with her love.  Although Arwen’s decision was given much weight throughout the LotR series, I can’t help but think that Tauriel’s love is the more tragic.

Arwen’s choice to give up her immortality and live a mortal life alongside Aragorn was undercut by the overarching tragedy of the elves.  They live forever, but in a broken world, this is not such a gift as it might seem.  Some elves respond to this tragedy by isolation (Thranduil and the Mirkwood elves), while others jump into the affairs of men and suffer the consequences (Haldir in the movies).  In between are those like Elrond and Galadriel who spend most of their time amongst their own people, but are willing to engage with the wars of men and dwarves if the need is great enough.  No matter their worldview, the elves are consistently portrayed as beautiful tragedies, a relic of a time long gone.  They are separate from everything around them, waiting for the end of their age when all elves journey on to Valinor.

With this backdrop, Arwen’s decision feels almost smart.  Choosing to live and die a mortal means becoming relevant.  She can engage with the peoples around her and feel the increased joy and sorrow that accompanies experiences from a mortal vantage point.  Eternity for elves is known, but the fate of men after death is less established.  This is one of her risks, trusting in eternity even without the surety of elven faith.  Far greater, however, is her separation from her people.  As her father and friends leave Middle-earth, she alone lives on.  Until she dies.  But it seems to me that death is not so much the tragedy as is her goodbyes.

Then we have Tauriel, a new character added by Peter Jackson.  I adore her, both for the general inclusion of a female presence in the male-dominated Hobbit story, and for her specific combination of warrior-lover.  Kili the dwarf falls in love with her when she saves his life, and she falls in love with him when they discuss starlight and family traditions.  Although they know each other an impossibly short amount of time, Tauriel feels his death deeply.  So deeply that she finally comes to understand the coldness of Thranduil, who repressed his emotions so deeply in order to ignore the pain of losing his wife centuries ago.

And that’s the thing.  Losing someone you love means centuries of grief if you are an elf.  As in Thranduil’s case, this can still occur even between elf-elf reltionships.  But Tauriel’s love for a dwarf exacerbates this problem.  Not only is she in love with a mortal, she is in love with a hot-headed dwarf who seeks the glory of battle and the honor of his homeland.  A short time together, she now has an eternity to mourn him.  No wonder she cries, “If this is love, I do not want it.”  Opening your heart to love means opening your heart to pain.  For a human, but so much more for an elf.

So who has the greater tragedy?  Arwen, who gave up immortality, or Tauriel, who must live forever with grief?

Clearly the answer is me, a obsessive fan who has chosen to carry both their burdens.