Journaling project, Day 20

When someone upsets us, this is often because they aren’t behaving according to our fantasy of how they “should” behave. The frustration, then, stems not from their behavior but from how their behavior differs from our fantasy. Let’s not get carried away. Remember, calmness is a superpower.

How can you let calmness be your superpower today, instead?

Since it was pointed out that I kind of failed to answer yesterday's prompt question (true, and I will get to it... someday) I'll start off by answering this one: calmness is my superpower when I know it'll piss off the other party. I can be infuriating in all kinds of ways, one of which is by not getting upset when people think they're upsetting me. It's kind of fun to watch other people blow a gasket, sometimes.

The other way is by doing what I call "going meta". When my mother used to go off on me (late in her life, when I was an adult and had a lot more skills, distance, and cope) I would say, "Why are we having this argument?" Usually the correct answer was because she was having a bad day, or mad at my father or brother and taking it out on me, but those weren't answers she was capable of generating herself so the question tended to stop her in her tracks. Or she'd just ignore it and keep on going at me.

This question has some other uses in more productive relationships, too. I've always said that I'm willing to argue, if it's worthwhile. Part of knowing whether it's worthwhile I knowing why you're having the argument in the first place. It's quite often the case that people argue about things that they aren't actually arguing about. I used to say that my first wife and I only ever had one argument - it was about money and it took a myriad of forms.(*)

I still find the phrasing of these prompts frustrating. Calling my model of how someone will behave a "fantasy" is insulting. Never mind the notion that my belief people should act in moral and kind ways. I realize not everyone else (no one else) has my morality, but if I believe people should not be racist shitbags and they act in ways that don't accord with that, please don't call my beliefs "fantasy". Furthermore, if peoples' behavior deviates from my expectation in certain ways, I think I'm completely justified in saying that my frustration comes from their behavior. Again with these questions there's an unaddressed question of boundary-drawing - how do I know if I'm being unreasonable? To take one example, there's a whole segment of people who think it's unreasonable to punch Nazis; there's another segment who think it's unreasonable to allow fascists to go unchallenged in shouting "Jew will not replace us" in peoples' faces. Calmness doesn't seem like much of a superpower these days.

Or maybe less dramatically: I have endless examples of people saying "I believe X" and then acting to bring about not(X). Who's the fantasist in this scenario? And don't patronize me by saying "let's not get carried away". In response to an earlier prompt someone hypothesized that a major target of these prompts are women who've been socialized not to express things outwardly that might be controversial or confrontational. How do my women readers feel about being told that calmness is a superpower?

(*) Hypothesis: it wasn't about money, it was about something else, which money stood in for. Security or respect, I'd bet. Ain't hind-insight a bitch. I can't imagine my 20-something self being mature or sophisticated enough to penetrate two layers of indirection but it sure would have been nice. That alone might make this the most useful prompt of the series, so far.

Trimming music tabs, part 1 - The Casts

I have a couple of really serious posts I'm working on, and I'm still doing the journaling project. So I've not done music in a while. I'm back in the mode of listening mostly to DJ sets. Here's a list of the regular weekly(ish) things I tend to listen to. They're like regular podcasts, each with a little bit of formatting and self-promotion mixed in. I may highlight some of them or pull tracks now and then, but you can also listen and decide for yourself:

• Groovelectric - DJ Steveboy. House, new-old funk, occasional downtempo chill or drone mixes. These tend to be more curated and less club-oriented than others.


• Maxximize On Air - Blasterjaxx. Very club/performance. Hottest tracks and remixes, rarely original stuff. More monotonal than others, which is good for workouts or pushing through things without distraction but rarely causes me to sit up and search for a specific track.


• Identity - Sander van Doorn. Another European performance DJ. Throws in his own mixes from time to time and posts a decent number of festival playlists.


• I Need R3hab - R3hab. Still club dance, but more varied tempos and styles than others. Also occasionally contributes his own mixes.


• Innerstate - Ummet Ozcan. Tends toward more trendy things, including his own contributions to whatever has grabbed his ear this week. Lots of people submit tracks for inclusion on his cast so we often hear new artists in his top tracks of the week. Downside is that dub and electro-scratch are still pretty popular, which leads to me turning off the episode about half the time.

Many of these, but particularly the "what's popular" compilations make me miss the old days when I could skip forward a track. Each of them shows artistry in how tracks are selected, mixed, and worked into each other so I can see how skipping would miss what the artist is trying to bring, but my alternatives right now are "suffer" and "listen to something else" which isn't great.

Trimming music tabs, part 2 - The Singles

OK, having just said I'm mostly listening to DJ sets and podcasts, let me now try to bring forth a few individual tracks for listening.

https://soundcloud.com/westwoodrecordings/fort-knox-five-give-it-a-minute
Fort Knox Five doing their funky thing. This one is kind of low-down twangy. It feels like I've heard the track - "Give It A Minute" before but I couldn't find an antecedent. Maybe it's that it sounds like a lot of FK5 music or maybe that it sounds like a lot of things that get sampled often.

https://soundcloud.com/likamorgan/sets/sweet-dreams
Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" also gets sampled a lot, but not often remixed. Here are two takes on Lika Morgan's EDM cover of it (original here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz2DZC_yPSU). Of the two I like the first better, possibly even more than I like the original mix, which manages to be both over-thumpy and still kind of randomly glitchy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tdnDFiTysk
Back Avicii died I noted that he'd had some big tracks. Some of those have been appearing in tributes. Here's a live cut of Tiesto, himself a giant in the club DJ scene, doing a major riff on Avicii's "Waiting for Love". I like that this is an extended track, and not just a quick redo. It feels like a proper tribute and I'm glad to have found it. Some of the tracks mixed in I recognized and are clear (e.g. Tim Berg's "Seek Bromance"). Also, that's a hell of a stage show, from what I can see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxcfIG_86MU
While I was researching tributes I came across this, and wanted to share. It's another EDM big name, Markus Schulz, doing a remix of Linkin Park's "In the End" as a tribute to Chester Bennington. I'm not sure this would have worked as a studio-produced track. It's very high BPM and I'm not convinced translating rock tracks to EDM styles works. But in this live clip you can hear the audience singing along and really being into it. Ultimately, that's what it's about, I think. Artistry doesn't exist in the abstract, it exists between the artist and the audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTLTXDHrgtw
Janelle Monae's current and very popular "Dirty Computer" made me want to see what she'd been doing just prior to that, as I'd kind of lost track. This "Venus Fly" from Grimes features Monae doing her thing in full color and style last year. It's very interesting musically, bringing several different influences together. I really like the costuming and strong saturated colors here - it feels like many of the same things that ended up in Dirty Computer. The music is obviously hip-hop with a strong tribal drumming... oh, and don't miss the solo violin bits. Grimes is a Canadian musician and visual artist worth checking out in her own right.