So you know how my blog posts usually aren't very meaningful and are just a bunch of random thoughts? That's because I'm usually just too lazy to put thought into them. It's easier not to have to think hard and just write what I feel. Once in a while I write something meaningful, but usually I don't. I thought about writing something meaningful tonight, but I don't feel like going through the effort.
I'm excited it's Memorial Day weekend, because that's when I start the Fourth of July season! That means I can once again have candies and desserts, as long as they're red, white, and blue. For the past month and a half, I have been using Krave cereal as a dessert. It's cereal, so it's not really a dessert, but it's too dessert-like to eat for breakfast. So I eat it as dessert during the off-season. Unfortunately, red, white, and blue desserts are something that you can't depend on from one year to the next. Last year they made patriotic Oreos and Keebler rainbow cookies, but they don't have them this year. And two and three years ago they had patriotic Dots, but they don't anymore. Fortunately, they still make red, white, and blue Tootsie Roll Pops and star-shaped marshmallows.
I also added my Fourth of July music to my playlist. I have a playlist that I listen to on shuffle. I dump all of the music I care to listen to into my playlist, and it's like my own personal radio station. The playlist allows me to not listen to songs I don't care for (e.g., Coldplay's painfully boring songs "A Rush of Blood to the Head" and "Amsterdam"), but more importantly it allows me to move holiday music in and out, so that I only listen to it when it's in season. I have a lot of holiday music (St. Patrick's Day is the only holiday for which I don't have any music--and I think Jan Terri's working on that). Unfortunately, I don't particularly like my Fourth of July music, and I add all of my holiday music to the playlist, whether I like it or not. Twelve songs are recordings from lds.org of the patriotic songs in the hymnbook and Children's Songbook. These recordings are absolutely terrible. I don't know how they made them so bad.
The rest of the Fourth of July music is from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's album Spirit of America. What bothers me most about the MoTab is that so many of their songs are really slow and really quiet. There are songs on their albums that I have "heard" many times, yet I could not tell you even how the tune goes, because the songs are too quiet to really hear. What's the point of making music if no one can hear it? And it's not like I can just turn it up, because not all of their songs are that quiet, and some songs even start out really quiet but get quite loud. The Spirit of America album has a very rousing version of "America the Beautiful," but other songs fit into the barely audible, painfully slow category. Like "The Star-Spangled Banner." That is not a song that should be slow and quiet! They pick it up at the end, but that just means that all you hear is the end of the song.
I hear stories about mission presidents only allowing missionaries to listen to the Tabernacle Choir. I understand that they may not want Christian rock going on, but I don't think that the Tabernacle Choir has a monopoly on spirituality. I really like the Lower Lights, and I think I get more out of their music than I do out of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. For one thing, I can actually hear the music. For another thing, it's so fun that I want to sing along, and that really gets me thinking about the lyrics. You should give them a listen.
I don't dislike the Tabernacle Choir, I just wish they'd pick more exciting arrangements. (They even sing a really slow and boring version of "Praise to the Man" on their album of the same name, a song that, in my opinion, was not meant to be sung slowly and quietly.)
This week I had instances that really left me mentally exhausted. For my editing class I've had to do some substantive edits, and then after those I had to go to work, where I have to work on a difficult source check. That has left me unmotivated to do much stuff for my clerk calling.
At work I use a Mac, and I don't know if I can say which is better, PCs or Macs. I think they both have their merits. But I get really annoyed with Macs when I have to keep switching between several open programs, which is what I've had to do for my source check. On Windows, I have my taskbar at the bottom that shows me what programs are open and where they are. But on a Mac, I have a taskbar full of programs I don't use, and I can't tell what's already open. The only way I can do that is to minimize the program, but that's an extra step I don't want to take, especially when it does its fancy minimizing graphic, which doesn't take long but feels like it takes thirty minutes. My options are either to minimize programs or to move my windows around until I find the appropriate one. It's like working on a cluttered desktop that can't be satisfactorily organized.
The last two weeks I've tried to do a better job of staying on task. I've done reasonably well, but yesterday and today I've had a hard time staying motivated. I don't know how I get distracted, but I do.
And I'm distracted from writing anything else.
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