New favorite song I’ve never heard before/Ibrance Lady
I have a new favorite song that I’d never heard until this morning:
“Rattlesnakes” by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions.
I listened to other songs by this band, but none are as good to me as “Rattlesnakes.”
Somehow this song and band missed me when I was deep in my 2kewl4skool music choices of the 1990s.
Like 1990s, teenage me, would scoff, “Uh. Ick. You’ve seriously never heard ‘Rattlesnakes’ by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions? Next you’re going to tell me you haven’t read Infinite Jest . . . “
Just kidding — I never read Infinite Jest (see what I did there?)
but I was DEFINITELY an asshole about music in my teens/twenties.
(Sarah might argue this is still, sometimes, true.)
I come to you from my Tucson Studio, aka The Spaceship, having taken a break from other (paid) writing gigs and from this light reading called Trusting Teachers With School Success: What Happens When Teachers Call the Shots. Not gonna lie, it’s super interesting, but the experience of reading intently and annotating is definitely nothing like getting stoned and playing Zelda.
The latter is what I’d rather be doing.
Alas, I am trying to rally.
I think I started mentally slipping early this month (who can blame me or any of us, really?)
I think I feel better when I’m playing the role of Responsible Adult.
These days, it’s so easy to justify all the “fuck it” we feel inside.
But we can’t sleep until ten every morning.
And we cannot take edibles before noon even if this is our week off from work.
And we cannot eat Eegee’s french fries twice a week.
And we must shower daily.
And we must get our medical appointments established.
And we must plan in earnest for next semester’s courses.
And we must get an entire grip on ourselves.
And by “we” I mean “me.”
(But if any of this applies to you, by all means, steal this life advice.)
This slow-mo belly flop onto the surface of the new year is feeling . . . gross? I can’t really find the word. Like if the word/connotations of “gross” and “melancholic” and “dispassion” were hybridized, that would be the word to describe this feeling as we slouch toward 2021.
‘Least as far as I’m concerned.
Sarah says that sometimes, at night, when she can’t sleep she imagines she’s on a raft floating down a river that cuts through a jungle full of dangerous animals and that she must be “very quiet” to make safe passage.
I think about sleeping in the trenches on the front in WWI.
Seriously.
And this has been my “counting sheep” for years — nestled in a den during a war, bombs going off, tank’s engines . . . me in a little mud hole in a trench wall somewhere in a French field . . .
I bring this up because right before break I realized that neither of my AP Lit courses were going to finish Mrs. Dalloway. In a normal semester, we’d be on our third or fourth text by winter break.
This fall? We made it through one and a quarter of a text.
I was so excited to teach Dalloway this year — the trauma of the recent past lingers, soaking each character.
But we were not through the horror show of this year.
We didn’t even have the kind of perspective afforded to the characters in Dalloway.
In Dalloway, the war is over. Only the memory of war remains.
We haven’t even had time to make a memory out of this trauma we’re living.
All this to say that while it broke my heart to “stop” Dalloway (one of my favorite books ever writ, AND one of my very favorite books to teach in AP), we had no other choice, we simply ran out of time, and anyway, the meaning I thought my teens might be able to make of it was lost in the anxiety and dread that drenched last semester.
So I’ve listened to this “Rattlesnakes” song like five thousand times today. Spotify is magical for this reason.
I mean, children, you have no idea how good you music lovers have it with this Spotify do-dad.
Years ago, a senior, during her final presentation played a song I’d never heard before. She found it randomly on Spotify.
It was called “The First Emanation,”
it’s a very short, moody song, but I liked it immediately and still do.
I think that student is some kind of performance artist now.
Sometimes songs are like people: you like them intensely, right away.
Sometimes you don’t even know exactly why.
Today, I finished a 21 day course of Ibrance for the fourth time.
Today, I finished a 21 day course of Ibrance without getting crazy sick for the first time.
I don’t know if it’s Tucson, the lower altitude, the warmth, or none of the above, but I am so fucking grateful to have gotten through a course of the medication without being sick. (Now watch — my Angela Lansbury powers will summon the demons of Ibrance hell as soon as I post this: nausea, hot flashes, I-don’t-have-the-energy-to-drink-this-Gatorade fatigue . . .)
You do realize commercials lie, right?
I was never more duped by commercial v. reality than when I started taking Ibrance.
In Ibrance commercials, the elderly women are super happy and hiking with their husbands or planting tulips in big floppy hats or throwing their gray head back in laughter (women in commercials are always overly thrilled — whether it’s about salad or about the pill they take for their metastatic breast cancer).
Ibrance Commercial Ladies seem so healthy, so full of life. So when I started the drug, I was like “Pfft. If old women can take this and still be well enough to stand in the bleachers and enthusiastically cheer at their grandson’s soccer game, surely I, who am not technically old, will have no problem . . .”
Lies. All lies.
But this month, I guess I was my very own positive Ibrance commercial. I was my very own Ibrance Lady.
Montage:
Ibrance Lady showers and puts pajamas back on, makes mug of tea.
Ibrance Lady takes dog out into dusty yard at night and shouts “potty! Potty!” at him until giving up in frustration.
Ibrance Lady asks wife if she’d be cool with “snack dinner.”
Ibrance Lady listens to the same song repeatedly and stares into the middle distance.
Ibrance Lady dances to EDM with her dog in the kitchen.
Ibrance Lady is gay married.
Ibrance Lady laughs, but never throws her head back when she does.
Ibrance Lady eats medical marijuana chocolate and watches Schitt’s Creek.
Ibrance Lady is cold and hungry.
Ibrance Lady is having a hot flash.
Ibrance Lady gets misgendered at a weed dispensary.
Ibrance Lady gets up at a responsible time and reads about pedagogy.
My life would make a very boring commercial right now — even boring by cancer drug commercial standards, but I think for the sake of inclusivity, Ibrance could be better in their advertising, and maybe Humira, too. I never ended up taking Humira for my Crohn’s because it causes cancer and I’m good on second helpings of cancer right now, but I think the Humira commercials need to clear up, for the American public, that not every person with Crohn’s is in a band.
I have Crohn’s and I’m not in a rock band.
I have metastatic breast cancer and I don’t plant tulips.
I wish I was in a rock band.
I wish I didn’t have Crohn’s or cancer, but instead
had an electric guitar and a million bucks.
