the stages of loving indie rap covers

You are young. You love Kanye but you’re not sure if you love rap ~yet~. Rap is still firmly rooted in things you don’t know (big booty bitches, drugs, THE STREETS). Kanye is different. He talks about being self conscious. You are also self conscious. It is 2004.

You go to college. You’re a freshman so you attend a concert on the lawn called Jam Fest. You listen to too much Jack Johnson sung by hot boys in hammocks playing the ukulele. You find this song and become obsessed. You realize that you can sing “hey ya” through the verses and still have it line up with the beat. You think this is a mashup like all the cool kids are doing but it’s just a way to annoy the hell out of your brother on a road trip. A taste for this genre is born.

morning pages -or- how I really did that thing I’ve been trying to do for years

This is my obligatory blog post praising the practice of Morning Pages. I did not think I would be writing this blog post because I had tried so many other morning rituals before that never really felt right. I’d tried becoming an Idea Machine. I’d tried meditating in the morning (turns out morning meditation turns into snooze city). I’d tried to do sun salutations every morning (because sun, morning, duh). None of these things stuck and all of them felt overly time consuming and not really aligned with my personality.