me love the holidays

When you start to know someone, all their physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in their energy, recognize the scent of their skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That’s why you can’t fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it…
You can love it with your eyes and your body but not your heart. And that’s why, when you really connect with a person’s inner self, any physical imperfections disappear; become irrelevant." - Lisa Unger: “Beautiful Lies”

what bono wrote to describe bob dylan's singing could aptly describe bono's own style.

..from now on, it's not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It's going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth.

To understand Bob Dylan's impact as a singer, you have to imagine a world without Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Kurt Cobain, Lucinda Williams or any other vocalist with a cracked voice, dirt-bowl yelp or bluesy street howl.

The voice becomes the words. There is no performing, just life — as Yeats says, when the dancer becomes the dance.

I like that - no performing, just life.

and here's what billy joel has to say about bono

I never had the feeling he was manipulating the power of his voice to show off.

True. That's bono's singing style- no manipulating or performing, just life. just the truth.

View List: The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time

at the risk of sounding like an insensitive hag, i am so tired of the complaints about singlehood.
i'm being bombarded by it everywhere - blogs, everyday conversations, ym and msn conversations..

it doesn't suck that much, for your information.
get over it.
and get a life. seriously.

sure loneliness sucks, having that hole in your heart sucks, being cheated on sucks, getting dumped sucks, dumping that asshole sucks(eh, wait. shouldn't that be liberating? i'd be dancing if i were you).

but being single DOES NOT SUCK. DESPITE THE PATHETIC LABELS THAT COMES WITH IT, THANKS TO THE STUPID MASSES. BUT REALLY, YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE LIKE THEM. IF EVERYONE JUST SPEND MORE TIME ON FIXING THEMSELVES IN THE INSIDE RATHER THAN WORRYING ABOUT CONFORMING TO THE OUTDATED, UNAPPLICABLE SOCIETAL NORMS, THE WORLD WOULD BE A LOVELIER PLACE.

so i repeat, if it does suck, you really need to get a life. and a brand new attitude.

i think all the stress at work is making me feel all emo.
the wailing at the walls kind of emo.

i don't want to go on psychoanalyzing myself here because i don't want to delve in too deep. i just hope a good night's sleep will cure this.

i'm tired and beaten down, emotionally and physically.
i need a hug.
and a non-judgmental shoulder.

for now i'll just have to be content with bono's voice.

on a random note, you don't know how lucky you are.
you really don't.

Susan Boyle; Sympathy for the devil?

This article said everything I felt about pop stars taking classic songs and butchering them.

Remember Adam Lambert and what he did with U2's 'one'? Say anything you want about his so-called incredible vocals, he ruined the song. You don't take on songs like that and sugar-coat them with your vocal trills and frills, and expect people to lick it up. 'There a bleeding despair at the heart of that song that she can never touch', writes Neil McCormick, and sure, Adam never bothered to get to the heart of that song- the ode to the failed relationship, the underlying rage, the pitless despair, that shaky hope that was born out of that despair. Let’s throw all that in favour of sounding pretty shall we.

Leona Lewis did the same thing with snow patrol's 'run'. Sure she makes it sound pretty, all sugary sweet. Gone is the devastating beauty of the song - the achy longing, the lonely despair, those myriad of emotions that make us human.

I'm all for recycling songs and making them 'your own'. But songs like 'one' and 'run' and 'wild horses' are not for snobby show dogs who are bred and trained for one sole purpose- to show off.

I think all this obsession over technical skills and skin-deep emotions is a disease amongst singers these days.

What I hate about these upcoming pop tarts is that they destroy the sacred elements of the song in favour of sounding manufactured. Self-expression is self-expression, but how can you call it self-expression when it is nothing but manufactured.

I haven’t done anything and yet I feel tired.

Am listening to U2’s rose bowl concert for invigoration. It’s working, but once I set upon doing what I’m supposed to do (urmm..mark papers?) I get bored. And lie down. And flip through cleo. And do anything but that thing I’m supposed to do.

I don’t know how my parents do it. They hardly ever bring work home. I think I spent too much time fuming at school that I had to bring work back home.
Or else it’s nothing but poor time management.

Anyways. Let’s talk about happier things shall we. U2, for instance.
So that’s what a U2 360 concert looks like. Spectacular.

Brother says sonically, they aren’t as tight as before, he prefers the Vertigo tour. And he only likes ‘with or without you’ and ‘Sunday bloody Sunday’. To which he proceeds to explain how he couldn’t hear any of Edge’s signature palm muting, and that there are echoes of the drums.

None of that made sense to me. Except for the palm muting thing. Yea, it is Edge’s signature move and I couldn’t catch it too.

As for me, anything U2 is superb. Edge, benevolent, zenlike in character, and yet there was nothing humble about his guitar play, it was brilliant, shimmering, unearthly, hitting the bull’s eye of the heart. I swear the heavens opened up during his out-of-the-world solo at the end of ‘one’. And bono, my dear bono, his soul was bleeding into his vocals. I loved his vocals on the stripped acoustic versions of ‘stuck in a moment’ and ‘in a little while’.

What can I say, I am a sucker for those subtle, tender inflections over pompous big voices. Ask me to choose between those flawless vocals that run up and down the scales perfectly and a ragged voice so overcome by emotion it breaks...and I’ll choose the latter.

Have I told you how much I hate singers who do nothing but show off their range in every bloody song they sing? Oh wait I think I have.

Anyways. The U2 concert. The audience weren’t as engaging as the European audience. I much prefer watching the European crowds. The non-english speaking countries especially. Because it is astounding to listen to these non-english speaking crowds belting their hearts out in English, with Bono leading them on.

There’s also a possibility where since this streaming concert was set somewhere near LA, land of plastic celebrities and people, those who make a living out of being a shell, they had pretty much forgotten the matters of the heart. And U2 is a band that is pretty hardcore about the heart. (right after the first song, bono asked the crowd ‘how is your heart?’).
Paris Hilton apparently attended the concert. I guess she thinks they are ‘hot’. I doubt she actually appreciates that kind of music, or understands the strong social activism behind some of them. I even doubt if she knows who Desmond Tutu or Aung San Suu Kyi are, both prominently featured in the concert.

I would say that the highlight of the concert was ‘Sunday bloody Sunday’, the pacifists’ theme song, a U2 concert is nothing without an anti-war roar. I was disappointed there was no ‘bullet the blue sky’, that was almost a staple in any U2 concert.

Oh well, plasticisms, ridiculous celebs and the un-participative crowd will not stop me from enjoying the concert. Daughtry calls it a ‘spiritual experience’, in which I vehemently agree.

So yea, my heart is pretty much alive and kicking now.

Who has never killed an hour?
Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish.
So you kill the hour.
You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream.
If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body.
The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)
credits to you carry my love inside of your heartbeat ♥

the loss is too empty to share indeed.

you're telling me the troubles of your heart.
while i'm here tending to my fall.

we're so much more alike than you think.

he's fine. not 100% fine but he will be.
i hope he won't screw it up.
he has to take good care of himself.

i am physically, emotionally spent.
thank goodness for the holidays, i don't know how i would be able to deal with work in this condition.
people expect you to pick up your pace as if nothing happened.
but something did happen and it left me all numb and sore inside.
life goes on, i suppose.

it wasn't all bad. i'm glad i visited my brother. we talked and laughed and argued like there's no tomorrow. sure he annoys the hell out of me, with his growing elitism in music and crazy opinions.
but i'm glad i saw him.
the emergency room didn't feel like an emergency room though, it was filled with kids. only then i realized that kids are very vulnerable to eye diseases. they are pretty resilient though. they won't let their sickness get in their way of having the time of their lives, and i think that is an admirable quality.

and then there was that night out with friends. which was exactly the distraction i needed. thank you, peeps.

time to get back to normalcy or whatever people call it. what is normal, anyways?

he'll be fine. he'll be fine. he'll be fine. he'll be fine.
i have to keep telling myself that.
don't cry, stef. you don't know anything yet for sure now.
he'll be fine, he'll be fine, he'll be fine, he'll be fine...
oh God please let him be fine.