In just a few months, I'll be leaving my current job and location and moving to -- where else -- New York City. I'll be another 26-year-old half-Jewish girl from Oregon going to the big city to pursue her dream of becoming a cultural critic/pop music theorist . . . and I can't wait.
In Bed with Amy Wilson, this current project, will exist until roughly mid-summer at which point I will officially end it. (Officially!) In a very real way this blog is the outward expression of a particular time in my life, the time of living in Ann Arbor and figuring out what my ambitions are. As a person I have difficulty dealing with change which is why I am attracted toward clean endings rather than fizzle-outs. If things have to change, I want to stamp them with a big rubber stamp that says: "CHANGED".
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Because I've been dealing with this major life change, deciding to make it and taking the steps to put it in motion, my taste in music has gone decidedly earnest. (Even more so than usual.)
I've also been exploring the field of what I would call "humanistic science", prompted largely by the re-boot of Cosmos which has been airing recently (and which will continue for many more weeks so you should watch it, no really, I'm not getting paid to say that or anything, just want to fly the flag for Science).
The genius of Carl Sagan, and of the whole group of people and projects he inspired, is to use the principles of science to bring people together in a quasi-spiritual fashion. To generate wonder about the natural world. To increase awareness of the central contradiction of human life -- which to my mind is that we are, at once, the smallest and least significant things imaginable, and also the most complex and beautiful.
(And to convince everyone that we should stop shooting at each other and start building spaceships!)
These two threads in my current mind come together in this song, which is nominally about reincarnation but I take more to be about the continuity of life more generally. In other words, that whether we are aware of it or not, we are all part of something larger than ourselves.
The song: Indigo Girls, "Galileo"; 1992
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Although I know I am part of something much larger than myself, and made of star-stuff, and all that, one can only hold those thoughts in one's mind for so long and so my relationship to pop music and to this song is essentially self-centered. (Is that a bad word? It's just what I mean.)
Thus when I listen to it I can't help but think of this tiny reincarnation I am about to face, of shedding a few old layers and gaining some new ones in the tremendous and varied environment that is New York City.
When I end In Bed with Amy Wilson I plan to continue to document and share my life because that is something I enjoy doing, and my medium of choice will be Instagram. I have a tiny profile there already under the name showmehowever. I am attracted to Instagram for this purpose because it is such an elegant medium, a new form of communication, and I hope to do there with pictures what I have attempted to do here with songs.
But that's all in the future. There are a few songs left in this time!
Yrs,
AW
inbedwithamywilson@gmail.com
