Year of Songs: A Most Ingenious Paradox

Remember my 'Year of Songs' project I announced in January? Yeah, me neither. With all the craziness of February it got put a couple burners behind the back burner. But there are still a few hours left in February, so I'm getting my assignment turned in just before the deadline. Too bad it's not leap year, or else we would have had a full day to drink in these February Jams. For as we learned from The Pirates of Penzance:

For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,
Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,
Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February,
One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty.

1. "When You Had Left Our Pirate Fold" - Gilbert and Sullivan
The above-quoted trio from The Pirates of Penzance explains how the protagonist, though he has lived for 21 years, has only had five birthdays since he is "the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year, on the twenty-ninth of February."

2. "País Tropical (Tropical Country)" - Gal Costa feat. Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil
"I live in a tropical country, blessed by God and naturally beautiful. In February there's Carnaval, I have a VW bug and a guitar." The original version is by Jorge Ben, but I prefer this more raucous version by Gal Costa (maybe because I met her). This is a great song for winter - just start it up and suddenly the snow* melts away and you're sipping coconut water on a palm tree-lined beach (maybe because February is the middle of the summer in Brazil).
*If there were any snow in Portland. Best winter ever.

3. "President's Song" - The Simpsons
Fantastic President's Day musical number from the immortal Valentine's episode "I Love Lisa" (think "I Choo-Choo-Choose You").

4. "My Funny Valentine" - Elvis Costello
This 1937 standard by Rogers and Hart has been covered by all the usual suspects (Sinatra, Ella, etc.), but I like this unorthodox cover by Elvis Costello from 1979.

5. "Loomer" - My Bloody Valentine
The February-related name of this late-eighties/early-nineties shoegaze band was a barrier for entry for me for many years; however, when I finally gave them a chance a few years ago I fell under the spell of their unique sound: dreamy vocals floating over a guitar maelstrom. (Bands such as Smashing Pumpkins and recent indie darlings Sleigh Bells have since co-opted the Bloody Valentine formula.)

6. "I Got You, Babe" - Sonny & Cher

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Did I miss any great February songs? Any suggestions for March? Leave a comment!

When It Rains, It Freaking Pours

I've been a little overwhelmed the past few weeks and my blog (among other things) has gotten lost in the shuffle. After many, many months of joblessness, I suddenly found myself with not one, but three jobs all starting up simultaneously, namely:

1. As I have mentioned before in this space, I now work full time at Yahoo! Although I've now been there for three weeks, I'm still in that awkward beginning phase where I have to call my more experienced co-workers over to my desk a dozen times a day to hold my hand through any unfamiliar situation. The work itself is pretty challenging, but then on top of that there is the additional challenge of doing it all in Portuguese.

I'm a very proficient speaker for a non-native, but this job is really teaching me that there is a huge difference between being a proficient non-native and being Brazilian. I spend the whole day reading emails that are mostly written in slangy, misspelled, internet-abbreviated Portuguese that is very different from the Portuguese I heard as a missionary or tourist. I frequently have to flip over to Google Translator or the Dicionário Informal (it's like a Portuguese Urban Dictionary). It's been two and half years since I was last in Brazil and much, much longer since my mission, so the Portuguese isn't as quick as it once was. Reading/writing in Portuguese still comes to me fairly easily (my bosses told me that the written translation I did in my interview was better than a few native Brazilians they interviewed - that's an encouraging thought that keeps me going on the hard days), but my spoken Portuguese is more difficult. My mental loading time is a little slower and I'm sometimes appalled by the gringo accent I hear coming out of my mouth. By the end of some days I feel like my brain has run out of spoken Portuguese and I need to go home and recharge.*

2. I am also teaching guitar lessons part time. Here's how that came about: One of the first people I met out here in Portland is an LDS guy who has a large piano academy (150ish students) where he employs several piano teachers. He used to have a voice teacher there too, but the voice teacher started his own business and signed a non-compete agreement with the piano academy that lasts until this summer. But the academy owner likes me and wants me to potentially teach voice at his academy eventually, so he has hired me on to be a guitar teacher in the meantime.

He has never had a guitar program at his academy and doesn't know anything about the guitar, so I've been building my own curriculum and methodology, which is both scary (though I love playing the guitar, I'm certainly not a guitar wizard or anything) and interesting (it's a really fun challenge to approach teaching a different instrument). I had been really stressing over it for weeks leading up to my first lessons, but each one of my students is a true beginner - like, picking-up-a-guitar-for-the-first-time-in-their-life beginner - so it's all really basic stuff that I can teach confidently.

3. I am continuing my work with the University of Michigan department of surgical education as a mock patient. I agreed to do this job again back at the beginning of December, when I had no real job prospects on the horizon. Little did I know that the work would start up the exact same time as the other two jobs. I'm playing the exact same patient as I was last year and I've literally recited the script hundreds of times, so at least there's not the stress of learning anything new for this job.

The job is done completely over the phone, so I could theoretically do it from anywhere, but the catch is that I have to call the patients between the hours of 8:00 am - 8:00 pm in whatever time zone they happen to be in. Many of them are in the Eastern Time Zone, meaning that I can make those calls from the West Coast is before I go to my other two jobs because by 5:00 p.m. my time it's already too late.

So, a typical day will go something like this: Wake up a little after 5:00 a.m., make mock patient phone calls until 7:30 a.m., go to Yahoo! until 4:30 p.m., drive a half hour in rush hour traffic over to the music academy, teach guitar until about 7:00 p.m., drive home, eat something, electronically submit the evaluations from that morning's mock patient phone calls, and fall exhausted into bed around 8:30 p.m. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Yahoo! and teaching by themselves are actually quite manageable and I'll only be doing the mock patient job for one more week, so I'm expecting a return to sanity fairly soon. And while it has been overwhelming, I got my first Yahoo! paycheck yesterday and decided that there may be something to this whole "gainful employment" thing.

*A few years ago while waiting for my flight in the São Paulo airport I overheard a long conversation in Portuguese between a group of Brazilians, including a middle-aged married couple. At one point the couple turned to each other and had a short exchange in perfect, unaccented American English. I was shocked - I was completely convinced that they were Brazilian. Later I struck up a conversation with them. Turns out they were Americans who had lived in Brazil for 25 years. I asked them how their English was so great after 25 years and they said that they only spoke English to each other because when they arrive home after a long day at their respective jobs they have "run out of Portuguese." I find that to be a very reassuring memory whenever I feel my brain short-circuiting by the end of the day.

SST: Have a 7

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

It's amazing how durable this ad is:



Coke Zero remade it for the Super Bowl two years ago with the Steeler's Polamalu, and this year's Super Bowl had a parody starring Dr. House and a churro. I remember finally seeing the original for the first time as a teenager and being confused - I always thought it was an ad for the number 7:



P.S. - This year's great Super Bowl ad was this stunning Chrysler/Detroit spot. It's already been plastered all over the blogs and facebook statuses of my Michigan peeps, so I will let you just link you through to their thoughtful analyses.