Talking in Your Sleep

Last Wednesday I woke up to a familiar sound.  It was my wife, and she was talking.  What she said, I couldn't tell you... since it didn't make sense.  Immediately a familiar tune came into my head:

TALKING IN YOUR SLEEP by THE ROMANTICS

This is one of many songs I was exposed to at a young age by MTV.  My guess is that I watched at least one hour of MTV every day with my brother and sister between 1982-1984 when I was 3-5 years old.  I think many of these early 80's songs were permanently tattooed to my young, developing brain.  Even after all these years, I still love these songs from the early 80's. 

My wife uses the term "pillow talk" when she hears me talk in my sleep.  A couple of years ago, she started emailing me the bizarre things I say in my sleep.  It always makes me laugh when I get the email early the next morning.  Here's one example:

on April 25th last year:  "Did you put this hornets nest on my neck, Megan?  Huh, did you?" 

I started doing the same thing as I heard her talking in her sleep. 

This is one Megan said on the 23rd of February, the night after a late rehearsal as Musical Director for Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat:  "Perhaps well all misjudged the lad."  (A lyric from the show.) 

I love when this sort of thing happens.  It's always good for a laugh. 

Often I am asked by our daughter to share a story from the first year of our marriage.  When I married Megan, my step-kids were 5 years old and 18 months old.  One night, the baby woke up and Megan got up to comfort him and help him go back to sleep.  She soon returned and got back in bed.  Through all the commotion I was awake and I asked her "is everything OK?" 

Her response was an angry, incoherent stirring of mumblings that made no sense.  I'm still impressed in this moment at her ability to fall back asleep so quickly.  Still not sure if she was asleep and wondering where she had learned to speak wookie, I asked her to clarify what she had said. 

She sat up, scoffed and said "Zoe was cleaning the bathroom, and I told her to stop making so much noise or she would wake the baby up."  I was new to parenthood, but it did seem bizarre that a 5 year old would voluntarily clean the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Don't be deceived by this sleeping beauty.  She doesn't make sense when she talks!

My personal favorite is more of a sleep walking story.  My dad woke up in the middle of the night and my younger brother (about 8 years old at the time) was standing by the side of the bed awkward and silent.  When he asked what was wrong, my brother didn't respond.  Soon, my dad felt something wet and realized my brother had mistaken the side of his bed for the toilet and he was being peed on.  My dad acted fast, jumped out of bed and rushed little brother to the toilet.  It was too late though, there was pee all over the bed and floor of his bedroom. 

I'm sure everyone has their own little story about sleep talking.  Thanks for listening to mine.  Share some of your own in the comments section here if you feel so inclined. 

   

Smurfs

I've joked many times about having goofy TV show theme songs from the 80's stuck in my head.  So I wasn't surprised this week when a familiar melody came to me:

Facts about the smurfs that you may not have known:

1- The Smurfs are a Belgian cartoon!  I had no idea, did you?

2- When I was 4 years old, I wanted to be a smurf when I grew up.  True story.  That, or a firetruck.

3-  The smurfs social organization is similar to termites.  Smurfette, like the termite queen, produces 20,000-30,000 smurf eggs each day!  If it weren't a children's TV show, I would go into more details. 

Every Drop of Rain

Hi Peoples.

So here I am again with some music, stories, and adventure.

If you know me well, you know that I am an odd person, who is oddly drawn to odd things.  Oddly enough, I will share with you something oddly odd.  This week's song is from an album called "Here Lies Love."  Once I heard about this album, I knew I had to have it.  David Byrne (of Talking Heads' fame) and British DJ and songwriter Norman Cook (otherwise known as Fatboy Slim) teamed up to write this album.

David Byrne wanted to write a musical about former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos.  As he was doing research on her life, he learned that she loves to disco dance.  This inspired him to collaborate with Fatboy Slim to give his songs a disco beat.  He intended to put the show on stage to tell the story of Marcos' life while giving the show a discotheque feel.  Then, after writing the songs, he hired several different female artists to sing on the record.  I am a fan of David Byrne, and once I had heard that this album existed, I knew I had to own it.

Candie Payne is the artist who sings the song that was stuck in my head Wednesday morning, "Every Drop of Rain."  This song is about the woes of being poor and is the second track on the album.

I like the idea of this song, how someone who is poor feels "every drop of rain."  I think this is true for anyone who feels sorry for himself.  I've talked about this before, but my son has a bum left arm that doesn't work.  He was born this way, and we've already had one operation for him back in July last year.  8 months later, we've found ourselves again at Shriner's Hospital in Sacramento for another procedure today.  This time, the doctors are transferring nerves in both the bicep and forearm.  It's not nearly as invasive as the first surgery, but he is very little and any kind of surgery for a parent can be nerve racking.

I guess I'm trying to tie this song into how I'm feeling.  There's a temptation to feel sorry for yourself, to wonder what you could have done differently, to blame yourself for his troubles, or to just wish things could be different.  I am a worrier.  I fret over everything.  Yet, for some reason, even with all of Jude's troubles, I have never been in deep despair over his arm.  I've watched him take 15 months to learn to pull himself up, scoot around on his bum instead of crawl, and fall countless times hard on his head- having only one arm to brace his fall.  Still I feel, and have always felt, that he would be OK whether we can fix his arm or not.

Those of you who know him, understand what a great kid this is.  He always smiles.  He is sociable, and likes everybody.  He makes everybody happy with his charming personality.  His charm is probably one of the main reasons I don't worry about him.  He's just a rad kid.

One Day More

Wow have we been busy these days!  This post is late, a few weeks ago I woke up on a Wednesday (my new song day) with this song playing in my head:

 

 

 

 

 

Probably the most dramatic moment in Les Miserables, already a dramatic show, this song features several key characters as they anticipate the next day's events.  It's such a neat song!  (I'll let you, dear reader, decide whether or not the last sentence was sarcastic)

 

And sadly, I tried to round up my kids to get a Cash family production of this song together.  Sadly, we have not had the time, with Megan working at nights and me away for a business trip.  If time permits, hopefully we will throw one together...

God bless us every one.



A Year of Songs Stuck in my Head

A year ago today I created my first blog post ever.  I mostly started this blog because, first of all, I have music going through my head all the time, and second of all, because I was starting to feel worn down from parenting 4 young children.  I needed a creative outlet and being mostly stuck in the home it seemed like an interesting idea.

A year later, I've had nearly 9,000 visits to this site.  Traffic has slowed in the last few months.  Partly because I haven't written as much, and partly because I've felt uninspired and the quality (not that any were THAT good to begin with) of the posts has gone down.  Also, I used to promote   new posts regularly on Facebook and Twitter.  I've decided to do that less frequently because I figure if people are interested in the blog they would be following already.  

Anyway, 9,000 visits... not incredible, but much more than I thought possible!

Here are some posts that I was proud of from the year.  I realize even having a blog is a pretentious and indulgent thing to do.  And now I'm one upping that by saying, hey, look how funny I am over the last year and check out the best of the best.  With little shame, I'm doing this anyway: 

Folding Chair

The kids and I sing a song by Regina Spektor

or this Gem....

Sam's Town

My wife indulges me by using her powerful opera voice to sing a popular song by The Killers

Going Through The Motions

How to make your day less mundane

Why Does it Always Rain on me

A story about my first experience in a foreign country

Be Prepared and ABC

When I pooped my pants at scout camp and When I wet my pants in elementary school

And my personal favorite:

All The Rowboats

That one time I was "sponsored" by a real company

I plan to keep blogging but I need to change a few things.  

To start off, I am going to blog weekly instead of every other day.  I liked the idea of making it a daily blog so that a vast array of music could be talked about.  I'm feeling burnt out a bit, so weekly I think is better, and I'm sure you do too.  

I like the challenge of having to blog about a song that my subconscious magically put into my head in the morning.  Ever since my days of playing Dungeons and Dragons with all kinds of multi-sided dice, I've been obsessed with the idea of something random happening.  

That being said, I will be writing about the song that plays in my head on Wednesday mornings.  Then, I will work throughout the week on one blog post about that song to have it posted by Tuesday the following week.  By doing this, I hope to accomplish the following:

-Better blog posts, quality over quantity.  

-Give myself more time to focus on things that are important in my life (i.e. not this blog)

-Hopefully find time to learn to play the song and perform it more on this blog.  

-Challenge myself both creatively and musically to make a really entertaining blog for all to enjoy.  

Also, for your information, I'm gonna stop obsessing so much over how many people have come to visit my blog.  As the numbers of visits started going down, I found myself feeling insecure.  I know, an irrational thought, as if people only liked others based on the quality of their blog posts, right?

Peace my brothers.

Brady