A Post About a Playlist?!?!?

I’ve received multiple pieces of very stressful news today and I’ve been curled up in a ball on the couch immobile for a little while. I am fine, I am safe, everything is okay, things are just gonna be stressful in my life for a little while. Not that it’s hasn’t been stressful for the past…. always, but it’s been less stressful for a bit and now it’s gonna be more stressful again.

Like I said, I’m fine, but I don’t really have the bandwidth or brain space to write about anything in a super meaningful way, or even take in content and produce coherent thoughts on a page, but I thought I’d take a minute to write about one of if not the most important playlists in my life, affectionately titled “Calm the Fuck Down.”

I love music, but I think we’ve discussed before that I’m not necessarily a very musical person and I don’t feel very confident writing about music. Also, like most people, my music taste solidified when I was about fifteen. With a few notable exceptions, most of my favorite artists came into my life in high school, and many of them I even remember the first time I heard their music. For example, “Eet” by Regina Spektor was in a dance recital I attended. “The Chain” by Ingrid Michaelson was in a dance class I was taking. “Love Song” by Sara Barellies is less vivid, but I’m pretty sure was at a pool party. And to be perfectly honest, a lot of other artists were probably found in movie soundtracks (cough the Twilight soundtrack cough).

“Calm the Fuck Down” is a playlist comprised almost entirely of songs from this formative part of my life that help take me down a few notches on the panic scale. When nothing else is gonna relax me, I know these songs will. They are the Season 2, Episode 15 of New Girl and When Harry Met Sally and the best excerpts from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows all rolled into one. And today I really need that.

I’m on track to finish a book tonight and finish all of Schitt’s Creek in the next couple of days, so I’ll be back with proper arts and culture reflections soon. Until then, if you too need to calm the fuck down, here’s the playlist.