Midlife Musings
Fortysomething. If my life were a TV show, that would be the title, and these are the episodes. Or maybe I am just having an episode.
Everything they don't put in the brochure for your 40s. Work situations that make your blood boil, body changes nobody prepared you for, pop culture opinions held with unreasonable conviction, and the general absurdity of being a grown woman who still hasn't figured out what she wants to be when she grows up. Honest, unfiltered, and occasionally petty in ways that are entirely justified.Music Roulette 6 ~ It Was All a Stream
There is a close link between music, emotion, and memory. I recently read somewhere that there is a major link called “music-evoked autobiographical memory”. Who knew my music roulette explorations had a name! And that there were so many studied done on the subject. In that vein, let’s continue digging into my mental archives via a randomly selected song list pulled from all the songs I have listened to and liked on Spotify. In the words of the defunct Navy slogan: Let the journey begin…
Music Roulette 5 ~ Smells Like Midlife
You know the drill. Set the shuffle loose and see what comes up this round of Music Roulette. If you missed all the other episodes, here’s three and four to get you up to speed. I’m on a journey of self-discovery and self-soothing to beat depression. They say that music enjoyment often returns as depression improves and music therapy can be a helpful treatment for some people. Maybe this round will shake something loose that is lingering in me? Smells like midlife, or is that just your teen spirit?
Music Roulette 4 ~ The Latchkey Shuffle
Research shows that the level of personal enjoyment, not whether the music is happy or sad, is what matters for potential therapeutic benefits. This is an important distinction for me because music for me is all over the place. Symptom of my Gen-X-aphilia. If you’ve missed some of the earlier installments, you can catch them here, here, and here. I’m all about the self-healing and showing improvement of any depressive symptoms. Let’s see what we get this time around:
Deep Thoughts: What If I Made It Worse?
One time when we were living in Virginia, I bought a stranger a bus ticket. I don’t know what possessed me, and to this day I wonder if I actually helped that person? You’re supposed to wonder about the small things other people do for you that you can never pay back. But what if instead we wonder about the things we do for other people that we never hear about again?
Photographic Memory
There is a black & white photograph of me that has persisted in my memory for decades. Let me tell you about it.
