I first heard about this movie when I saw the film Get Out a few years ago. The trailer gave me nightmares. And normally I don’t watch many horror movies, but this movie and Get Out were the few exceptions because they are scary in more of a social commentary sense. I wimp out like a baby when I see possessed dolls/children, flesh-eating zombies, or shape-shifting clowns holding red balloons, but for this movie there weren’t too many jump scares, and the score did a pretty excellent job of letting me know if there was anything scary in the next scene. While Get Out was scary because racism is a real thing that happens in society, It Comes At Night was scary because it depicts a real-life horror that we’ve been living through this past year: a pandemic. Even though it has suspenseful scenes, it’s not your typical horror film because it’s more realism than it is supernatural horror.
It also made me want to take COVID precautions more seriously. I remember one time I wanted to get some fresh air during the pandemic, so I would take off my face mask, but this movie made me want to take the mask rule more seriously. Throughout the film, the main characters Paul, Sarah and Travis wear gas masks whenever they go outside the house, and Paul constantly tells Sarah and Travis to take strict precautions and not invite anyone into their home. However, another family who is also trying to survive the pandemic begs him to let them stay over in exchange for food (the husband is Will, the wife is Kim, and the son is Andrew).While I will try to not give away spoilers, you could probably imply from the trailer that letting the family stay probably wasn’t a good idea.
I love A24 films because they make you sit long after the credits are rolling and think. This film made me think about the pandemic and how it has forced everyone into survival mode. The families in the film try to build trust with one another as they share space, but one of the members contracts the virus, and that trust is broken in a heartbeat. It reminded me of the pods that people have formed during this time, and while I’m not discouraging people from forming pods, the film makes a great commentary that if I were to invite people over, even if they were my neighbors or my family, I could potentially contract COVID if I don’t practice social distancing or wearing a face mask around them. In one scene that really stuck in my memory, Travis brings Andrew to his parents when he finds him sleeping on the floor in the room of his (Travis’) late grandfather, who dies at the beginning of the film of the virus. But after finding out Andrew has the virus, Paul asks Travis if he was wearing a mask and gloves when he picked up Andrew and brought him to his parents. Travis not taking these precautions puts him at greater risk for contracting the virus.
Sometimes I would scroll past articles about Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public health professionals advising people to double mask, or articles talking about what precautions to take. In 2020 some states took mask mandates seriously, while others did not, and many of us saw the consequences of making masks a political and personal issue rather than as a thing you have to do to protect you and others against coronavirus. Even though It Comes at Night came out a few years before the pandemic, it is more than timely, and serves as a stark reminder to wash hands, socially distance, and wear a mask and gloves when interacting with others. It also makes a sort of commentary about asymptomatic people because the grandfather at the beginning clearly has the virus, but Will, Sarah and Andrew, it’s not obvious that they have contracted the virus from somewhere else. I saw this as a parallel to people who are asymptomatic because Will, Sarah and Andrew don’t display visible symptoms of the virus. They look perfectly healthy, but as Paul warns Sarah and Travis, they can’t be too sure about that.
Also, the film felt very real because Travis keeps having nightmares about getting the virus. Because a lot of people are under stress during this pandemic (I am no exception) they have been having disturbing dreams related to COVID-19. I don’t blame them though, because this pandemic has been a nightmare for many: people from all around the world have lost their jobs, their loved ones, and their sense of control and order around their circumstances. I myself have had dreams as of late where I would walk in a store and no one was wearing a mask or I was in a college cafeteria one time and students were trying to enter the cafeteria without a mask on, and my mask kept falling off of my face every time I tried to put it on. So it makes sense that Travis in the film kept having nightmares about getting symptoms of the virus or contracting it from others. These repeated nightmares signaled to him that he and his family needed to take precautions and not get too friendly with the family they invited, no matter how nice these people were.
This film also made me appreciate that I have Internet access and a reliable mail service to send letters to people. The family in It Comes At Night had none of that. They are literally in the middle of nowhere not out of choice, but out of survival, because the place they once lived in, the city, is not a safe place anymore to live due to the spread of the virus. I can text, call, and send letters to people to check in on them even if I cannot see them physically.
If anything, this film taught me the value of social distancing. Even though we have a lot of hope because the vaccine is being carried out and distributed, this doesn’t mean I get to just take it easy and hop a plane to see my friends in other states. Had I watched the movie before the pandemic I don’t know if I would have understood it on as deep a level as I do now. Now that I and many have been socially distancing for an entire year, the film was more relatable. I also think if I saw it before the pandemic I probably would have felt more disturbed because it would have felt like something that could only happen in dystopian fiction. But after living through this public health crisis alongside everyone else for a year now, the film was still disturbing but it didn’t feel unreal, surreal or post-apocalyptic because we are dealing with an apocalyptic unpredictable event. And it’s not like there were never pandemics or epidemics, but this one hit so hard that I was forced to reckon with a truth spoken in The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin: that no place in the “threefold world” is truly safe. (WND-1, 891)
It Comes At Night. 2017. 1 hr 37 min. Rated R for violence, disturbing images and language.
Prince was one of the most amazing musicians in the world, and when I first listened to this recording of the African-American spiritual “Mary, Don’t You Weep” it gave me goosebumps. Even though I haven’t listened to the full album yet, I kind of want to now that I’ve heard this song. The raw power Prince delivers to this spiritual…absolutely incredible. It embodies I have listened to this more than a few times and each time I do I feel Prince’s piano and his voice reverberate through my whole body. Beautiful performance.
Here is more information I read on the spiritual itself for more context. After reading the article I’m thankful to the Fisk University Jubilee Singers for performing the song, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to hear it and savor its truth and its beauty.
And here is the audio for Prince’s version of “Mary, Don’t You Weep”
“Never Gonna Break My Faith”: Aretha Franklin ft. The Boys Choir of Harlem
A few months ago I was listening to music on YouTube when I came across a playlist titled Black Lives Matter. It featured music by Black artists about police brutality and racial justice, which is timely considering the multiple police killings of Black people over the summer (not to mention in 2015, 2016 and even before that). One of the songs on the playlist was “Never Gonna Break My Faith” by the late Aretha Franklin. It gave me goosebumps: the power of the message sent chills up my spine because I remembered how confused, scared and sad I was in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and countless other Black people over the summer and in past years. It gave me hope and also made me sit and reflect on how I could do better in the fight against systemic racism and police brutality. I’m still educating myself on these topics, but Aretha’s song reminded me to keep fighting, keep educating myself and to not give up. I’m grateful to my African-American Studies professors for teaching me the importance of listening to and studying the music of African-American artists and musical traditions.
Just some context, the song came out in 2006 as a duet with Mary J. Blige for the film Bobby. It was co-written with Bryan Adams but the solo version of the song wasn’t released for a long time. Adams said in a Rolling Stone interview that when he found out Clive Davis, a longtime producer and friend of Aretha Franklin, was making a biopic about Aretha’s life he sent Davis the previously unreleased version, saying that few people have heard this version and it was time for people to finally hear it. I think especially given the circumstances around the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain and countless other Black people in the summer of 2020, and a subsequent global reckoning with centuries of systemic racism, society needs this song more than ever. This is the article: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/aretha-franklin-never-gonna-break-my-faith-solo-version-1017873/
When I first listened to this song I didn’t know there was a music video for it. I had just listened to the audio at the time. But I finally watched the music video today, which came out last summer during the global Black Lives Matter protests. And honestly my description of it would never do justice. It speaks for itself.
This is one of my favorite songs of all time and out of all the songs on D’Angelo’s 1995 album Brown Sugar, this is the one I have listened to the most (besides his song “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine”, another beautiful song) This song always calms my hurried mind and brings me peace. And I love the musical key that it’s in because I see a bright shade of yellow, kind of like the sun, when I listen to this song. I really love listening to the ways in which the piano, D’Angelo’s voice, the drum beat and the trumpet merge to create something so incredibly beautiful. Makes me want to stroll outside and perform an improvised dance of some kind. I literally feel this song from the depths of my soul. Reading up on the album gave me more insight into the style of D’Angelo’s music and how he put the album together. It’s quite fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Sugar_(D’Angelo_album)
I just finished The Social Animal by David Brooks. I was curious about it for a while, but never got around to reading it until now. I can see why it was a New York Times bestseller. It is nonfiction but the narrative he weaves into his discussions about the brain and the unconscious made it feel like I was reading this really intriguing novel.
The book starts with the meeting of a man and a woman who fall in love with each other. Brooks analyzes the different social cues that they follow when they first meet and how the different networks in their brains are working while they look at each other. As someone who doesn’t experience sexual attraction, it was interesting to understand how attraction works or why people prefer certain bodily features such as eye color, hair color, body measurements.
Harold
The couple have a son named Harold, and Brooks explores how Harold’s brain operates as a baby then a child then a teenager. He explains how Harold’s affluent upbringing and access to good education and social activities impacts his career and his view on the world later on. He is a pretty popular kid in school, but one encounter that impacts Harold’s life is his encounter with his high school teacher. She is an avid reader and recommends books to all of her students, and she especially sees Harold’s potential to do better at school and gain the most from reading and her class. She assigns him books on ancient Rome and Greece, and at first he is reluctant but then he delves into the literature and watches movies like 300 to gain more knowledge of this time period. When he writes his paper on this time period and everything he learned from it, at first he experiences severe writer’s block and has a hard time synthesizing all the information he learned in a cohesive way, but as Brooks notes when Harold goes to bed early and gets sleep rather than trying to chug through the paper all night, the networks in his brain start making new connections and new ideas pop up, and in the end Harold is finally able to write a paper that speaks to him personally and shows that he studied the material and could apply his learning to his own life, making the paper his own.
I really loved the way Brooks describes this whole process with Harold writing the paper because I remember how hard it was for me to overcome my writer’s block when writing my thesis during my senior year of undergrad. Even though I read and read countless books and academic journals on environmental justice and visited The Jane Addams Hull House Museum in Chicago as part of my research, when I actually sat at the computer to type the draft, I couldn’t come up with anything, and thus my drafts were always late to my advisor. I think also my perfectionism played a role in my procrastination. I was so stuck on writing the perfect paper, when in reality for most, if not all, people, your first drafts are just not going to sound good, and that’s just part of the writing process. I was also afraid to receive feedback at the time because I was so adamant about writing the perfect paper, but I also learned, looking back, that receiving feedback on your drafts is the only way you can improve. It wasn’t always pleasant to my ego to receive feedback on what I could do better, but in retrospect, my advisor was encouraging me to dig deeper and to not just regurgitate the information I absorbed from reading, but how to formulate my own ideas about the material, whether they were right or wrong. I finally just decided to sit down and write, and while my ego kept screaming at me how bad my writing was and that I should just trash it, I had to finish because long story short, I had a deadline to submit the thesis and there was no shortcut around that. I just had to sit down and write. Not keep reading. Not surf YouTube and watch my favorite Key and Peele videos. I had to just write the thing even if it sounded bad and just submit it to my adviser.
When I finally finished the paper and received an award for it, I was both elated and exhausted because it felt like I had worked on the thesis for 1,000 years instead of just a year. But in all honesty, the thing I remember most about the thesis was how much I grew from taking on this project. I learned how to form my own opinions, I learned how to meet deadlines, I learned how to write and rewrite and edit, I learned how to take feedback from my adviser and run with it, and more importantly, I learned about a very crucial issue that I didn’t know much about before writing the thesis. Environmental injustice has been a huge issue for years, and as a longtime environmentalist, learning about how the environmentalism movement hasn’t always welcomed the narratives of BIPOC and low-income people made me more aware that I needed to challenge my own assumptions about what made someone an environmentalist. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder last year, I came across countless articles and social media posts about the disproportionate impact of environmental pollution and other injustices on Black communities, and it really gave me hope because it reminded me that I wasn’t the only one thinking about this issue, but that there were many other people who were writing about and organizing demonstrations calling for local, state and national governments to do something about the environmental problems that low-income and BIPOC communities have had to deal with. It also helped me appreciate the work that activists like Hazel Johnson had done for environmental justice years ago. Hazel Johnson was a Black woman who spearheaded the environmental justice movement in the South Side Chicago community of Altgeld Gardens in the 1970s. The mostly Black residents started dying of cancer because so many factories surrounding the community leached toxic chemicals that polluted the air and caused many health problems in the residents. After speaking with public health officials and learning more about the cancer rates in her community, Johnson found that the chemical companies didn’t actually care about the health of the residents in Altgeld Gardens, and that this neglect constituted environmental racism. She founded an organization called The People for Community Recovery and fought tirelessly for the community members against this injustice, and her legacy continues to this day.
Erica
The book then talks about Erica, a young Mexican-Chinese woman who grows up in poverty with her mother. She fights hard to get into a selective private school even when the social workers tell her no, and when she gets to the school she encounters a lot of challenges, particularly when it came to her love of tennis. She falls in love with the sport, but often get frustrated when she loses, and this causes her to want to give up. But Brooks talks about how important mental coaching is for athletes, so Erica trains herself to focus on what she can control rather than what she cannot control. She decides to focus on the task of hitting the throw rather than what other people will think of her or past mistakes, and she disassociates from her anger and realizes that it’s not part of who she is. I really loved this part and underlined it because in my cello lessons I often would get frustrated with myself and would take my anger out on my teacher, fuming and getting upset every time they corrected me on something while I was playing the music. I think reading how Erica learned to manage her frustration and focus on the game inspired me to focus on the task at hand and not get so caught up in ruminating over my past mistakes or worrying about what my teacher would say to me. I get it’s important to work on correcting mistakes, but the problem was that I often attributed my mistakes, even the smallest ones, to a flaw in my character, so I concluded that because my character didn’t want to change I couldn’t change my mistakes. My teacher and I had a long discussion about this, and I left feeling hopeless, like “Gosh, I’m so stubborn, I’m never going to get over this.” I hit a breaking point when I was tasked with memorizing the third movement of this really difficult piece of music, and I got so fed up with myself for forgetting a huge portion of the movement. I sat there and cried and chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo about it (it’s a Buddhist prayer I do everyday that helps me bring forth my inner potential). Then I read about Erica dealing with her frustration in tennis, and it inspired me to approach my music lessons and practice sessions with the same attitude. Even though it’s easier to get defensive than it is to take constructive criticism, I’m learning slowly how to take a deep breath and just focus on the task of just playing beautiful music. I learned I cannot control how people react to me or what audience members think, but I can control whether I fulfill the task to the best of my ability or not. Reading Erica’s example has helped me in that sense.
In the book Erica also gains a new perspective on how to do things in life, and starts creating different maps for new ideas that she comes up with and how different social interactions work. When she enters a mostly male workforce she is fed up with the men’s overconfident and dismissive attitudes and figures out a way to mobilize other fed up employees to speak out against this behavior because the male colleagues’ overconfidence is causing the company to go into debt and business to suffer. Erica later does her own freelance work, but she has a hard time finding clients because her work doesn’t speak to them, but then she meets Harold (who we meet earlier in the book) and he uses his writing and analysis skills that he learned in school to help Erica make connections between ideas and find ways to make that work useful to the daily lives of their clients. They develop an emotional connection, but like any committed relationship marriage takes a lot of work and communication, and Erica and Harold find themselves so caught up in their own busy work lives that they don’t find much time to relax in their personal lives. This burnout puts a huge strain on their marriage, and Erica has an affair with someone else and keeping moving up in the corporate world so that she is going to the most exclusive parties, which end up being boring. Later on, when their lives slow down, Harold and Erica spend more time together and reflect on their past failures, successes, their childhood, the people they’ve met, the things they have done, and how all of these moments shaped who they became later on in life.
My Overall Takeaway
The Social Animal gave me a lot of good insight into human behavior: why we do certain things, why we make assumptions, why we fall in love with certain people, why we interact with each other the way that we do. The full title is The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, so the main framework undergirding this entire story with Harold and Erica is psychology, the study of the mind, how the brain works, how our unconscious mind affects who we fall in love with, how we behave, and how we achieve success and bounce back from failure. I really loved this book for that reason because I took a class in college that integrated philosophy and psychology, so whenever we studied about the brain or the mind we always looked at it from a philosophical perspective, the why, the reason why particular neural networks in our brains operate the way they do and how and why they affect decision making. Brooks integrates economists, psychologists, philosophers, and so many other thinkers into his writing, and the ideas of these people gave me a more inclusive way of looking at how Harold and Erica developed over time and how the unconscious part of their brain played a fundamental role in their ability to come up with new ideas and new ways of examining their lives and their interactions with others. I had forgotten a lot of my learning from the course sadly, and there’s still a lot I don’t know about the brain or how my unconscious works, but this gave a lot of excellent insight into it. I also loved learning about the creativity part of the unconscious in this book because in my Buddhist practice (the particular school is called Nichiren Buddhism) we talk about different levels of consciousness. The first five levels of consciousness correlate to the five senses of hearing, taste, seeing, touch and smell, the six level makes up these five levels in a cohesive way (our conscious mind). The seventh is the ego, where we distinguish our self from others, the eighth is our karmic consciousness, which operates on the law of cause and effect and stores all of the causes and effects from our past thoughts, words and deeds. The ninth is called the amala consciousness, and this consciousness is the life potential, the life energy that we and all phenomena possess. Personally, when I chant nam-myoho-renge-kyo, I unconsciously tap into this potential without thinking too hard about it or having to make a million good causes over several lifetimes to tap into this. Tapping into this unconscious connects me to the universe and to other people and things in the universe, so that I naturally get over trying to protect my finite limited ego and awaken to a potential that I still cannot fathom through statistics or concrete measurements. Brooks talks about how the unconcious is responsible for creativity, the forming of new ideas and connections. I noticed when I chant and tap into this unconscious, I find new ways of seeing myself, ways to integrate new perspectives into my ways of thinking, and this has helped me whenever I find myself dealing with creative block. I have the unconscious to thank for my art, my writing, my new recipes, and the different ways I express myself while playing music. The article on the nine levels of consciousness can be found here.
Brooks’ The Social Animal gave me a deeper appreciation for the way the brain works. It also gave me a deeper appreciation for the interactions I have had with others over the course of my lifetime. I couldn’t become the person I was without the people in my life who helped me grow.
Overall, this was an excellent book.
The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement: David Brooks. 430 pp. 2011, 2012. Random House Publishing Group.
Yesterday I finished this sequel to the bestselling novel Confessions of a Shopaholic. I definitely needed to read something funny during this time. If you haven’t read the first book yet, it’s about a 20 something year old woman named Becky who, as you guessed by the title, loves shopping a lot. Her love of shopping gets her in a lot of financial debt and on top of that she isn’t making enough money at her job to keep up her lifestyle. Honestly it’s been a year since I read the first one, so I forgot some key plot points, but I was able to remember a few key characters, like Becky’s boyfriend Luke. This time, Luke moves to New York and she goes with him, hoping to land her own TV show. But she still hasn’t paid her overdraft fees and is still in a lot of credit card debt, and the many stores around NYC don’t do much to curb her shopping addiction.
I’m the complete opposite of Becky. I don’t really shop unless I absolutely need something and wasn’t really into shopping for hours and hours growing up. (Except for that one time I had to find an outfit for a wedding I went to. That was definitely an adventure). I thought personal finance just meant saving money for your retirement. But after educating myself on finance by way of the personal finance blog The Financial Diet (TFD) I gained a different perspective on things like credit, investing, negotiating salaries, etc. While I appreciate the financial advice that experts like Suze Orman and Jean Chatzky have given, and while I still save my money, reading The Financial Diet and learning about those things showed me that having credit isn’t always a bad thing and that you can save money but also you can allow yourself some nice things once in a while as long as you take the responsibility to manage it. And nice things doesn’t just mean material things, it can be donating to your favorite charity (or the two go hand in hand, you can buy from companies where the money goes to a good cause). I like donating to social causes, that is one way I’ve been treating myself.
Also, several of the people who speak on the TFD blog remind us that people who work in personal finance are human beings who have dealt with things like credit card debt and living paycheck to paycheck in their own lives, so it’s not like they’re just shelling out advice just for kicks. They actually went through those issues with their own money and are totally fine talking about it without feeling ashamed. At one point in the book, Becky gets publicly shamed when people find out she is in credit card debt. They assume she has her finances totally together just because she talks on a show about personal finance and managing money. But let’s face it, if she had all her finances together, there probably wouldn’t be a Confessions of a Shopaholic book series at all. There is a very loving and supportive atmosphere whenever I visit The Financial Diet blog and channel because Chelsea and the other people who speak on the channel remind us that personal finance isn’t just about saving every penny, it’s deeply tied to class, privilege, access, and other factors such as race, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. There is a wider stigma attached to talking about money in our society, and I think Millennials and Gen-Zers in particular have challenged that stigma by having these honest conversations about personal finance without making someone feel embarrassed or like a failure just because they haven’t paid their bills in time, etc. Also a lot of people in these two generations have graduated in school debt or graduated during economic recessions (the 2008 one in particular was pretty bad). Also, we’ve had to deal with rising home prices, stagnant wages and a general increase in the overall cost of living in a lot of places, so shaming someone for money problems is counterproductive and does nothing to address these wider issues. Even though it’s of course important to take responsibility for your finances, there’s some things you can’t control, like the COVID-19 pandemic this year. A lot of people have lost their jobs and with that, their means of making a living, so the stigma around discussing finances is useless at this point because everyone’s finances had been affected in some way, for better or worse. As hard as it is to talk about money, reading Shopaholic Takes Manhattan and the TFD blog have taught me that you really do have to push past those feelings of shame in order to have honest discussions about money. Those conversations are emotionally difficult of course because you end up going back to your past and thinking about mistakes and failures, but the more people feel comfortable talking about money, the less they will feel ashamed to discuss it. Becky is at fist ashamed to talk about her debt, but she learns that through being honest, she is able to regain people’s trust and also trust herself more.
This honesty with herself enables her to win in the end and she pays off her debt by selling all the clothes she bought. Even when the people she works with on Morning Coffee want to feel pity for her and want her to still feel sad and bogged down by her past debt issues, she doesn’t let them tell her how to feel and is able to move on with her life. That’s part of personal finance, too, is not letting past money troubles permanently define who you are. Luke sees this change in her, too, and he changes his attitude towards her as well.
I can’t wait to read the 3rd book in the series, Shopaholic Ties the Knot!
So when I had my old blog The Arts Are Life, I published an (almost) weekly playlist filled with various songs I listened to when I got my first Pandora account last year. I am a vegan when it comes to food, but a complete omnivore when it comes to music, and I like listening just about anything and everything (except for most heavy metal). Listening to various genres of music has also helped me find my own expression as a musician myself, because I learn how different styles work and how each artist expresses themselves in the music. It’s been a beautiful educational journey in listening to all these different artists.
Here is a beginning list of some songs I really love:
“The Child is Gone” by Fiona Apple. Fiona Apple is one of my favorite artists, and this song gives me goosebumps because her singing is just so raw and powerful. It sometimes brings tears to my eyes to listen to it because the singing is also so beautiful.
“Prisoner”: Dua Lipa and Miley Cyrus. I love Dua Lipa’s music, and this song is catchy and also in a musical key that I like, E flat minor.
“After Party”: Koffee Brown. I love music from the early ’90s-’00s, and this song is one of them. It makes me just want to play all of the 90s songs and just dance and groove to my heart’s content.
“Cry Baby Cry”: Santana feat. Sean Paul and Joss Stone. I love all these artists: Santana, Sean Paul and Joss Stone. This song makes me want to get up and do some kind of dance.
“I Say a Little Prayer”: Aretha Franklin: I cried when Aretha passed away a couple of years ago, and this song reminds me of how incredible her singing was and continues to be to this day.
“Stop, Look, Listen to Your Heart”: The Stylistics. I first heard this song recorded by Michael McDonald of The Doobie Brothers for his Motown album. He sung it with Toni Braxton and I couldn’t get enough of it, it was just so incredible. So I listened to the original by the Motown group The Stylistics and it’s just such a beautiful song.
The original.
The Michael McDonald and Toni Braxton version of the song
“It Keeps You Running”: The Doobie Brothers. I first heard this while working at a local supermarket. They played it everyday, but each day I heard it I seemed to feel something new. Also, it’s really hard to get tired of The Doobie Brothers. They’re classic. I listened to this song a lot during this pandemic, and it calmed me down.
“When We Get By”: D’Angelo. Another song in a musical key that I love (E flat minor), this song with its mellow drum beat and smooth piano rhythms, always lifts my spirits. Not to mention D’Angelo’s silky, soulful, sexy melt-in-your-mouth vocals. I watched a dance group perform this on YouTube by Jens Trinidad and it was pure beauty at its best.
“God is a DJ”: P!nk. I first heard this song in the film Mean Girls, and I listened to it again later on. The song took on a deeper meaning as I got older and struggled with my insecurities as a young person. P!nk seemed to be telling me to put my life in sync with the Universe and just live it up with no regrets.
Cello Concerto in D Minor: Edouard Lalo. Lalo was a French composer during the 19th century, and when I first heard this during a summer music camp in high school, it sounded so cool. I bought the sheet music for it this year and every time I practice it or listen to it, I love it even more. It had passion, spice, and everything nice.
Well, that’s my top 10 playlist for now! Let me know if you have any songs you love, too!
The Arts Are Life 