If you were ever in the position where you had to give me a gift, I’d want one of the following things:
1. a letter (but only if you could write well)
2. cash (because it’s awesome)
3. a book (as long as it’s not something horrendous)
4. a mix (either the link to one or a cd, it’s been years since i’ve gotten an actual tape and i can’t even play it in my car anymore)
My parents made me mixes when I was a kid, on cassette tapes with early Beatles songs and the not so well known Madonna songs and old Cole Porter standards. They were something. I’ve lost them over the years unfortunately but the point here is that they started the tradition and set the standard for receiving personally chosen compilations of music as gifts. I’m a sucker for them, especially the good ones. You know, the kind where the person obviously has taken your taste into account but also introduces you to amazing new stuff you haven’t heard before. How else would I have found Saturday Looks Good to Me? I found a bunch of mix cds I’ve received over the years so this will be a series about each and also, the actual mix (or as close to it as possible) itself. Let’s go.
Yep, I was class of 2005. I became more comfortable in my own skin junior year of high school. After two years of monthly highlight touchups and listening to whatever everyone else listened to at my private prep school, I started being myself more openly. This seems ridiculous to me now but when you’re a teenager, everything is changing faster than you can even grasp. My body and mind didn’t seem to match and I felt awkward in any social situation so to start reading comics openly and telling people one of my favorite bands was Pinback was kind of a big deal at freshly 17.
I lost friends, well, lost is the wrong word, we grew apart. We were different. I made new friends, I found nerds, weirdos, and pre-hipsters (those can’t be avoided I guess). Even if I didn’t feel entirely understood all the time, I was closer than I had been in a long while. I met my friend Cori. I haven’t talked to her in about two years now. We grew apart in between college and travel and the insanity that seems to strike you at 21. However when we were 17, we got along splendidly. I remember spending homeroom gushing about the first part of Kill Bill
and making elaborate and ridiculous videos for our theology class projects (pre-YouTube!). She liked calling me An, amused at it being also an indefinite article (“That’s you for sure,” she said). We talked the rest of our friends into going to a Marlins game one Friday afternoon and we met at her house. She handed me this mix cd as we waited for the boys.
“You’re really going to like Spoon, An,” she said. She had drawn a tiny version of what she always referred to as my “tight, sweet ass”. “Plus, there’s another song that makes me think of you.”
Instant bond. I listened to it in my car with my group of passengers on the way to the game. She was right, I did like it. Pretty soon we made our way inside Joe Robbie Stadium (it will always be Joe Robbie stadium to me) and sat in the early May sunshine. I always wore contact lenses then and I had big sunglasses on. Cori passed me her bottle of water when mine ran out. She was good at stuff like that back then. I leaned back and watched the Marlins take a beating from a team I can’t even remember. It was getting dark around the seventh inning stretch and we all stood. Cori hugged me suddenly, her small arms wrapping around my waist, an excellent hug. I’m not sure how to explain what I felt except that I felt liked for the first time in a while, and not the me in halter tops, but the real me. I felt my hair growing frizzy in the permanent Floridian humidity and I couldn’t care less.
Later I dropped off the friends in my car and I made my way home. The mix continued and one of the songs was definitely not Spoon but Flaming Lips. I listened to Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1 and smiled slowly as I realized this is the one that reminded her of me. It had always reminded me of me, too. I saw my own fear of facing things, of not trying as my own pink robots, and I battled constantly to ignore the ways I’d try to wig myself out. I sang all the way home and thought that Cori was Yoshimi, and I was, too.
Three years later, I sat in my tattoo artist’s shop and didn’t move as he sketched in marker pink robots and a tiny dark haired girl battling them. It hadn’t come to life yet but it was there on my right arm. I hadn’t told anyone I was putting it there but it was something I felt I had to do for a while. I felt low at that time in my life. If I thought I had nothing figured out at 17, it was worse at 20. I had no idea what I was doing and all I knew was that the adrenaline from having a needle permanently marking me made me feel alive. I was trying to feel something, anything. Tattoos, riding my bike too fast in the rain, rough sex. I sat in the chair ready to go and it seemed like too much suddenly. This wasn’t for me like my other tattoos, this was for something else I hadn’t figured out yet. I apologized to my artist and ran out of his shop.
Cori and I had both moved to the same town and we were neighbors. I lived in a brightly painted apartment and she lived in a tiny house with tons of kittens. We had even ended up buying the same car the year before. I drove over there and parked behind her. I went inside, knowing she never liked it and walked into her kitchen. She was standing at the stove barefoot.
“Your arm looks cool,” she said. She was holding a bag of lentils.
“Thanks.” I looked at the arm sized mural on me and back at her. “I don’t know. I couldn’t really do it.”
She knew better than to ask about it. She handed me the lentils and went to the refrigerator.
“You want to help me make soup?” She looked at me as she took two tomatoes out.
I nodded and we set about chopping vegetables. We didn’t eat meat then and so we used every vegetable in that kitchen. We sort of played it by ear, adding things as we went, but it turned out pretty great. I didn’t say much and neither did she but it was okay. She was anxious those days and I was lost; she needed to stay busy and I needed the company. We ate lentil soup on her front porch and watched as cars drove by on the quiet street. She squeezed my elbow gently.
That’s the way we get by.
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This mix won’t play anymore (sadface) so I made a mini sampler of my favorite Spoon songs plus, of course, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1. Click here to download and enjoy.
