10. Life’s Musical Score
EPISODE DESCRIPTION: We experience life from the consciousness of thought and perception. Join me today for a fun realization about a few quirky perceptions that infuse my life with joy.
Episode theme song ‘Renewed Time’ by Stephen Keech
TRANSCRIPT
Hi, you! Happy Friday.
My thought today is funny.
I was walking yesterday morning. I started laughing because I was listening to the episode because, you know—I’m a MIND CHALK subscriber—and I was listening to myself talk about state-of-mind.
I was listening to how poorly off I cued my music; totally incorrectly at the end and kind of also at the beginning. And I was just thinking through that and dealing with it, and at first I was like, “Damnit, how did I not hear this?” But then I was started to think like, “Okay, well whatever.” And then I started to think about—I’m couching these episodes between, you know, the beginning and the end of a song.
The thing that made me start laughing was how so much of my life has felt like that episode (or any of the episodes on this podcast). And like I've alluded to in the Bonus Episode, how I hear things in my mind in a very rim-rhyming fashion. Very much like Dr. Seuss's cadence. You can say things to me in a non-rhyming fashion, and it's being processed in my brain in a rhyming one.
This also creates a great opportunity for my Echoacia to take hold, and suddenly I'm either rhyming back to you something you just said, or I'm singing it back to you. This is weird, I know.
And it made me laugh out loud yesterday as I was walking in the neighborhood because I realized how weird and super quirky I am.
Not to mention the episode, has a beginning that sets the pace, right? This sort of crescendoing startup music. And then at the end, the final notes of that piece (or a piece). Okay.
So it parallels, this is what I thought of and made me laugh. It parallels how my life unfolds, I have always felt like I've been living in a movie. And depending on the day, it can be a variety of different genres of movies.
I feel like my life has a musical score to it.
Remember that character Cameron Diaz plays in THE HOLIDAY? Okay. So if you haven't seen that movie, watch it. It's a really good this time of year. Kind of movie that gets you prepped for Christmas.
In this movie, Cameron Diaz is a movie trailer producer and I mean, come on. I would love that job.
And that annoying trailer music. Remember, there’s this well-cast male voiceover guy who interrupts and starts narrating her life as a kind of her conscience. And she, because of her work, she's just—her whole life becomes this narration with this movie trailer background, you know—musical score.
Well besides the voiceover dude, whether I have headphones on or AirPods playing music in my ear holes or not, that's what my days are like. That's what my mind is, like.
My life has a musical score.
And as I was walking the neighborhood yesterday and listening to my Thursday's episode of Mind Chalk, and I just had to start laughing, recognizing that my pods every day are kind of little snippets of my life. They're couched between music.
Okay, and on a little side note, there's someone I used to know who would enter a room and I swear clips from the theme music to Star Wars when Darth Vader would enter—and the stormtroopers’ boots would clomp along, adding that extra beat in the background—would play in my head.
So these musical scores aren't reserved solely for my own solo life experiences. My whole existence has a musical score even for other people, and it's super eclectic. All of it.
I mean, get this, okay. My day begins with a song in my head after I happil— and I say ‘happily…’
My parents, by the way, they say that I came out of the womb happy. So I do wake up happy.
After I wake up, I say, “Good morning, God.” And just like that! Effusive and enthusiastic.
[Oh, and not everyone likes that sort of enthusiasm when you say 'Good morning.’
Anyway, I actually say that or I say, “Thank you, God.” And as soon as I say it, a musical score begins in my mind, and sometimes I'll hum along or I'll belt into song, or I'll just carry on about my day with the musical score playing in my mind.
And then when I go to sleep at night, it's truly like what happens at the end of my podcast as I drift off to sleep. (This, you can also ask Deborah or anyone in my family, I fall asleep in about seven seconds flat).
As I'm doing so, the last notes of a song play in my mind, and then I don't remember anything until I wake up and do it all again.
So my realization yesterday was “I'm living in a movie,” or I mean a podcast. It was hilarious when I realized that my little podcast episode from yesterday made me feel like I was living in the “Day In the Life of Jenée, and how cool that I get to do this every weekday with you guys. So it was very cool.
Nothing super profound about this thought today‚obviously, I don't know why this tickled me so much. I just have to say it, my joy barometer went off the charts high when I realized that my life has always entailed a musical score.
And for a cute little brief moment, I wished I had started this type of self-expression, I guess, in my twenties or my thirties or forties. (I know podcasting wasn't around when I was in my twenties)
It’s not necessarily a regret, but I do wonder why it took me so long to live in the full—or the fuller— expression of who I am as my friend Barb would say. I love that saying, “Living in the full expression of who you are.”
Totally. I’ve got to credit her for that because that is absolutely something that's come out of her mouth multiple times and every time it does, I really embrace it because I love it.
I think that's one of the things and one of the reasons we're here—to find that place where we can be the full expression of who we are.
I guess it's all perfect. I think everything has perfect timing, so I'm not gonna regret not having started this in my twenties or my thirties or my forties.
Anyway. The other thing that dawned on me is what I said earlier on about how freaking quirky I am.
I can't find it right now, so I was unable to include it in this recording, but I wrote a story decades ago that was inspired by all the weird things I do or the weird things I think.
Well, I'm going to find it. It's probably on some hard drive, or better yet, it's likely in a journal into which I scribbled it out back in the day before I was pecking away at a computer keyboard.
But of course, I remember some of the quirks because, well, I still have 'em .
So I decided what I'm going to do is every Friday is—I will announce one of my own quirks.
Today's quirk, it's kind of dumb, but it's also odd enough to include.
I order pickles on my hamburger, even though I pick each of them off individually before I ever take a bite of my burger, and I eat them.
Pickles to me are obstacles. They're textual obstacles on a burger, and if I mistakingly miss one off prior to biting into it, when I get to that part, it ruins the bite.
So if you get a burger with me, I'll have a little pickle ritual before I take that first delicious bite.
There, now you won't be perplexed realizing, “Didn't she order pickles on this hamburger? And I'm watching her take each of them off?” It doesn't make sense to most people.
I told you it was a dumb one.
I’ve already thought of next week's, which is really more of something else I should get checked out about my brain, and it makes me think I'm likely on the spectrum. [Nobody tested back then, so I don't, who knows]
I'll share it with you on Friday on a full belly of Thanksgiving, leftover yumminess.
Oh, and by the way, I'm not ever going to mention to you this whole asking everybody to RATE, REVIEW, and FOLLOW the podcast. You're going do what you want to do. And quite frankly, I don't think it means anything anymore because it's just so monotonously, constantly, always asked for.
It's like podcasts are becoming as predictable as Catholic mass, which isn't a bad thing. I happen to like the predictability of Catholic mass, but they're all sounding the same with the same sign-off of, “Please remember to follow, rate, and review us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
I'll just ask you to share it. And wouldn’t it be cool if the gal who never begged her audience to Follow, Rate, and Review got more, followers, rates, and reviews than any other podcast in all of time? I mean, seriously. How cool would that be?
I just hope you keep listening.
Have a great weekend, and I will see you Monday!
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The podcast is hosted, produced, and edited by Jenée Arthur.
Cover art by Jenée Arthur
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