Our Thanksgiving Playlist
ISSUE #32
Happy Thanksgiving! Thank you all for submitting your songs to this week's playlist. I was a little worried nobody would write in to me at all, and I'd either have to go with an empty playlist this week, or have to populate it with fake songs like when I used to add fake contacts in my phone to make it seem like I had a lot of friends. I love listening to other people's music recommendations, often much more than my own, which is one reason it's so crazy that I do this every week when in reality it hits almost everything that spikes my anxiety, i.e. talking, or demanding people's time, or pretending I have authority over anything at all. All this is to say, thank you for sharing. I love this week's playlist.
And the playlist itself is just to say thank you even more: for reading, for listening, for opening the email just to mark it as unread and tuck it into a folder (my analytics don't know the difference, so it's a great compromise). Earwyrms is a crazy thing for me to be doing, and I work myself into a frenzy every Friday just so I can feel sometimes like the things I say have any meaning at all. Writing itself is a crazy thing these days, as our journals have become public feeds, and it's a dangerous dance with my ego every time I send anything into the world, let alone something as precious as a playlist of the songs I love. Sometimes it makes me cringe to think that, by nature of having an audience, it comes across as me thinking I have an authority over things, be it music, or film, or love, or living. I don't! I know I don't know the truth. I do try not to lie.
The fact that you read these means I'm not just shouting in the dark, and while it's not required of you, I feel incredibly grateful. Writing is, in one of its many senses, a series of pre-workout stretches that help me be a better person during all these social marathons, so I don't break down in the middle when somebody may need me. It's hard to talk about without making it seem glib. These are all just pretty ways of saying that my passions have always been a tug-of-war between dreams and guilt over dreaming those dreams, and I work on Earwyrms to better myself, and so you are actually helping me more than you know. It's a crazy digital handshake we're doing here. I have no idea if this gives you anything of value, but I do try to keep it from dissolving into the empty ravings of a mad ego.
This all became longer than I expected it to. I mean for heaven's sake, we're all on vacation here! So I'll leave you with thank you. If you've read every one of them, thank you. If you've read only three, thank you. If you read but don't listen, thank you. If you've never read any, thank you. I mean it! I'm just glad we're all here still. I hope you're safe, I hope you're secure, I hope you get what you need by the end of the year.