Life Is a Mix CD, Part Eight

Get Busy Living Or Get Busy Dying (Winter 2007)

1. “Get Busy Livin' or Get Busy Dyin'” (clip from The Shawshank Redemption)
2. The Draft “New Eyes Open”
3. Hot Hot Heat “Running Out of Time”
4. Stephen Malkmus “Freeze the Saints”
5. Low “California”
6. Coldplay “Fix You”
7. Liar's Academy “Saturday Night”
8. Bright Eyes “Road to Joy”
9. Fountains of Wayne “All Kinds of Time”
10. Ben Kweller “Sundress”
11. Yo La Tengo “Beanbag Chair”
12. Kaiser Chiefs “Na Na Na Na Naa”
13. Piebald “Haven't Tried It”
14. The Appleseed Cast “Sunlit and Ascending”
15. The Clash “I Fought the Law”
16. Nada Surf “All Is a Game”
17. Further Seems Forever “Someone You Know”
18. The Shins “Phantom Limb”
19. The Decemberists “Summersong”
20. Cursive “Rise Up! Rise Up!”
21. Jimmy Eat World “23”
22. Dropkick Murphys “The Auld Triangle”

My first year of marriage treated me well. It especially treated my waistline well, a little too well. Within the first 6 months of marriage, I gained about 20 pounds. (Liz is a good cook. What am I supposed to do? Not eat it?) The weight actually suited my new station in life. I was no longer the same scrawny kid—I had become an adult, I had started a family. We moved to the small town of Pampa, Texas and began our life together there, Liz having gotten a job at Pampa Junior High. For the first few months we were married, we saw very little of each other. I was working 3 PM to 11 PM in Amarillo, which meant I was gone from home from 2 PM until about 10 PM, and then had a few additional hours of work to do at home. Liz was working a normal-person 8-4, so most of the time we got with each other was on the weekend, which wasn't enough. I don't recommend this kind of arrangement for any newlyweds. There are other stresses associated with learning to live with another person, with the merging of two lives. When compounding the new living arrangements with never getting to actually spend time with each other and being left with each others' dirty dishes and being woken up by the other person while trying to sleep because you are on such different schedules, it creates a lot of stress. Thankfully, after a few months of crossing paths with Liz in the hallway on the way to and from work or sleep, I took a different position that ran from 8-5 in Amarillo, which meant I was gone from 7 AM – 6 PM, still a long work day to be sure, but at least we got to see each other. The long drive time leeched the life, the energy, and the creativity out of me. When I would get home, I usually wanted nothing more than to veg out and watch TV or a DVD. We didn't even have a movie theater in town for the first year and a half we were in Pampa. We were stuck in the house a lot. I ceased writing and my appetite for literature dried up. I probably read 5-10 books each of those first two years, which is extremely sad to me. We had always planned Pampa as a temporary stopping place in life, and I certainly felt like my life was in a holding pattern. No offense to those who enjoy the small town life, but it wasn't for me. It wasn't for us. After two years, we had made virtually no friends there in Pampa and spent many weekends in Amarillo, already trying to escape the confines of the small town. On a side note, I am grateful for the time I got to spend with Liz's grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins while we were there. I wouldn't know them as well as I do today and wouldn't feel as much a part of the family when I get to see them on holidays. Regardless, in May of 2007, it was time to get the hell out of Dodge.

Liz and I certainly had some good times in those first two years. Getting to spend time with each other and learn eccentricities we didn't even know each other had (well, I mean, that's good and bad, but still part of the marriage process). We got to take road trips out of town, usually to Dallas to see friends and feed our culture-deprived brains. We made a trip to Galveston for our first anniversary, which was a great time I still fondly remember. It was probably the most relaxing vacation we have ever taken, instead of being go-go-go all the time. I cherish each and every second that I have gotten to spend with Liz, but during those first years, I had lost any sense of self-fulfillment. My fulfillment came entirely from Liz, which speaks to how great Liz is, but that extent of co-dependence just isn't a healthy way to live life, not for me anyway.

Near the end of The Shawshank Redemption, Morgan Freeman's character, Red, narrates, “Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'. That's goddamn right.” He then breaks his parole and goes down to Mexico to reunite with his friend Andy Dufresne, played by Tim Robbins. You know the scene. The reunion is a joyous occasion. All the two men have left in the world is their friendship with one another. In a sense, I had been dying for the previous two years coming into the fall of 2007, being locked in a creative, spiritual, and intellectual stasis. I was merely trying to make a living, bring a paycheck home, but I wasn't living life to its fullest. I must admit the blame for my lethargic years falls entirely on me. I am far busier today that I was for those two years. I could have easily continued to write and read voraciously, but I just chose not to. I am of the belief that our current state is usually of our own making, even though at the time, I blamed my surroundings, my job, and all the driving I had to do to get to and from work. Though a different kind of reunion than the characters in Shawshank experience, the fall of 2007 marked a reunion for me: the return to Academia. A return to literature and writing and language and intelligent discussions and critical thinking. Liz and I both returned to school, this time at West Texas A&M in order to pursue our master's degrees. Returning to school older, wiser, and more mature was evident. I become a model student. I gulped down the readings in Colonial American literature. Just to be clear, literature before 1900 usually isn't my cup of tea, but I loved reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Catherine Sedgwick. I enjoyed re-reading The Scarlet Letter, which shocked me to no end. I had hated it in high school, but I could see the value in it. I could see new things, new themes, new ideas that I was unable to grasp when I was 16. I was also taking Composition Pedagogy, which sounds like utterly no fun to anyone, but I loved that class. We talked about why our language was the way it was and how to make undergraduate students think critically and fun tricks for grading papers. We got to write argument papers, something I hadn't done since high school probably. How I escaped persuasive writing in undergrad is beyond me. But we had fun with it. Thinking outside the box was encouraged and praised.

While on my creative hiatus, I don't recall making more than a few mixes, but they were uninspired and generally consisted merely of a new track off of each of the new albums I had gotten in the last 6 months or so. None of those mixes stuck with me. In fact, I couldn't even find any of those mixes. I honestly have no idea what happened to them. I can't say I miss them though. Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying certainly has a lot of stuff that came out around 2007, but the song selection and order seem a lot more deliberate. Even though I had less time to get creative, it seems that my creativity was oozing into all the facets of my life. I also dug into the archive a bit with the Clash, Ben Kweller, and Fountains of Wayne. My tastes in music matured with the bands I kept on listening to. Nada Surf showed more darkness and soft-heartedness than those “Happy kid[s] stuck with the heart of a sad punk[s]” that I knew in college. So much had changed. Hot Water Music disbanded and reformed as The Draft. Cross My Heart was long gone and had reformed as Liar's Academy. The music had matured with the bands. I finally understood what it was people saw in Low and Yo La Tengo. Sure, the changes in my tastes might not seem all that dynamic, especially for those of you who have no idea who the hell half of these bands are, but I could see the change in myself.

Being back in Amarillo was refreshing to both Liz and I as people and to our marriage. We didn't make fast friends with anyone in particular (we didn't honestly have the time), but we enjoyed the company of our classmates on the couple of evenings a week we had class. I even got involved in a few extracurriculars in grad school—something I had mostly avoided as an undergrad with the exception of the college radio station. I loved the small class sizes and that I wasn't too intimidated to speak up in class. While getting my bachelor's I was quiet and had to be in the right class or environment to volunteer my opinion on a topic in class discussions. Occasions for me speaking up were rare. I regret not being more outspoken and not contributing more in my classes as an undergrad. I know I would have gotten so much more out of my education. I know I would have made more friends. I know my professors might actually have remembered who I was when passing me in the halls. After my first semester grad school, I found myself with a 4.0. The trend would continue. It was validating to know that I did know something about the subject for which I am so passionate. It felt good to expand myself—growing creatively and intellectually once again.