No Squirrels Up Here

I'm on the 86th floor of a building.  The view is incredible.  The sun is out, making the lake glow - I would say like the Bahamas but I've never been there.  The way I think the Bahamas looks?  Maybe.  This is so far up that I feel like I'm in a spaceship hovering above everything.

I'm filling in for someone in their office and hoping I'm not ruining anything.  I'm listening to Pandora and trying to come up with ways to trick it to play me something I like.  I'm sort of surprised that Pandora is not as apt at hitting the musical spot as I had hoped.  Weird...either I have exceptionally eclectic tastes, or Pandora is hamstrung by its silly requirements.  Look them up sometime - it's strange.  Hey, we can play you a bunch of stuff you'll probably like, as long as we don't play the song you say you actually like, or the artist you say you like more than a couple of times.  Strange.

Hilarious - I am in the gooey middle of a wash of sappy, sugary pop music, brought on by the satellite radio in a rental car, so the fact that I can even pretend that I have eclectic taste in music is delusional.  My poor sweetie is so tired of pop music he could throw up, and cracks jokes about the calories that I am burning with all my in-the-seat dancing.

And actually, I gave in and did some street dancing these past few days.  Sigh.  It is ludicrous that I think I am calm, rational and non-dramatic when I will literally dance in the street with my iPod on as if this is just how normal people behave.  Truth?  I'm a weirdo.  I was dancing at band rehearsal the other night!  And here's the thing - I am a bad dancer and yet I can't care.  I can't care about that when some peppy tune is plunking out string pizzacato notes to a funky beat. (pizzicato??  How can I not spell that?  Horrifying...)   

This is in direct contrast to my crying on the bus.  When I think about how little time separates those two events, I shudder and the word manic-depressive flashes through my mind.  You may not be surprised to find it runs in my crazy southern family, manic depression.  

Perhaps it would be better, on this fine, sunny day, to look out over the beautiful city of Chicago in the pearly sunlight and do some office chair dancing to, yes, I can admit it, Sara Bareilles' King of Anything.  Which I am obsessed with but cannot make Pandora play.  You have to approach it by trying to make it play something similiar.  It's like having to aim just slightly left of a target in order to hit it.  Hmmm...  

Oh, lastly, I think Pandora's super high-minded "bios" of everyone are irritating.  Those bios just tell you who the person you are listening to is "like", as if the purpose of the whole enterprise was to link every artist with another, as if music were a big color wheel and you could describe everyone by saying what two other artists combine to make them.  Not my favorite way of exploring people.  I just want to know about them, where they might be from, why they play music, etc.  

Clearly, Pandora has different goals than I do.  Fair, I suppose.