It was another New Year’s in a shitty bar with someone whose name she wouldn’t remember by the morning. He had been a last minute choice, having matched a few days ago. He was alright, she guessed. She thought that he wasn’t going to be that much in bed. During conversations, he was selfish and interrupted her. She imagined that he wouldn’t be much better in any other regards in his life. Sometimes it was good enough.

But not tonight. For some reason, she just couldn’t do it tonight. She couldn’t put her finger on what this feeling was. But she knew that she just didn’t want to deal with it. She took one last look at him and decided that now was the moment. It was her chance. She slid out of her booth, pushed through the crowd and out the door.

It was still early. She could find someone else. She could go to a different bar. She could get nice and buzzed somewhere. She could find out what her friends were doing. They had gotten older than their years. Found partners. Got hitched. Made babies. She had thought them boring for so long.

But as she walked into the street. Pushing through the New Year’s crowds. She felt… off. She didn’t feel their revelry. Didn’t feel their joy. She felt something else.

She hailed a taxi and told the driver to take her back to Penn Station. When it got her there, she still hadn’t heard anything from her date. Maybe he had met someone at the bar. Maybe he thought that this was all for the best. Maybe he had forgotten all about her.

Whatever.

Her luck was holding up and she saw that there was a train heading back towards her home in about twenty minutes. She ordered three slices of pizza, reminded herself that her resolution to go to the gym more started in the morning and waited. The train arrived in a rush of screeching brakes and painful smells. The kind that assaulted the nostrils.

She climbed on and finished her pizza before the next two stops. She held onto the pizza box because she was raised right. When she got to her car, she climbed in and waited for it to warm up. Still nothing from her date. She felt nothing about this.

When the car was warm enough, she put it in drive and started going. She put her phone’s music in random mode and turned towards home. She made it about two miles when she saw the red and blue lights in her rearview.

“Well, shit,” she said.

The officer was a young Asian woman. She walked up to her car window, which she had already rolled down and had her documents in her hands.

“Evening,” the officer said.

“Evening,” she said and held out her documents.

“Where you heading?”

“Home.”

“Had anything to drink?”

“One drink about three hours ago.”

“Hm. No plans for the evening?”

“I had plans but my date was kind of boring.”

“Heh, I’ve been there. Give me a minute.”

She waited with her car off and thought that this was another change. Usually, she would have been anxious or nervous when getting pulled over. It wouldn’t be on purpose but the memory of getting in trouble, something that was always dramatic during her childhood, would cause her to feel that way. But now, there was nothing. She would have to bring up this night to her therapist.

The officer returned to her.

“We’re doing random checks, that’s why I pulled you over,” the officer said. “But you seem more than fine. Stay safe.”

“Thanks,” she said.

She took back her documents, rolled up her window and started driving. She got home, pulling into her driveway and got out of her car. She walked into her apartment and heard the chorus of meows. They were wondering why she was home so early and why they weren’t being fed at that instant. She gave them some treats and went to shower and change into her pajamas.

She got some snacks and a bottle of wine and sat down on her couch. Her cats came to her, an orange and black. They figured out their sleeping arrangements and were soon snoozing in their cinnamon roll forms.

Her phone buzzed and she looked at it. It was her date.

Him: Hey babe, my date ghosted me. You around? Want to ring in the new year?
Her: You know that I’m the one you went out with tonight, right? Did you forget what my name was?
Him: What the fuck, why did you ditch me?
Her: You’re boring and you talk too much about crypto.
Him: Whatever. I don’t need you.
Her: I mean, you must need someone if you’re mass texting everyone.
Him: Bitch.

She blocked him and let out a satisfied sigh when she did so.

She turned on a movie and let her mind wander. What was she feeling at this instant? When she stayed in on nights like this she would worry that she was becoming some kind of cat lady. Letting the world pass her by. She looked around at her slice of the world. Her little apartment. Her little world. Her little piece. Piece. Peace.

And at that moment, she knew what she was feeling. She raised her glass to the ceiling. Downed the rest of her wine and smiled a deep, dreamy smile.

Jenny Lewis whether solo or with Rilo Kiley is one of the most unique songwriters and singers in the business. She came in early with the weariness of a Hollywood from her days as a childhood actor and eventually that became the degradations of being a young woman in her twenties to the weariness of an older woman that has just seen way too much bullshit.

The sweetness of her voice is a perfect camouflage for the merciless way that her lyrics cut like a knife or reveal truths that make us uncomfortable and that we don’t want to admit to ourselves. I’m going to cover a few of those and the genius of them.

There is Does He Love You? from the Rilo Kiley album, More Dangerous, that I’m going to cover in a future post in depth. It’s an amazing song that you should check out right now. It could be a movie in and of itself. We’ve made movies about dumber things than this.

Anyway, let’s get into it.

“I never felt so wicked/as when I willed our love to die” – Silver Lining, Rilo Kiley

This is one of the coldest lines I’ve ever heard in a breakup song. There is some thought that she might be feeling bad about ending this relationship with the use of the word, wicked but I don’t think so. Because the other lines in this song are her saying that “I was your silver lining/but now I’m gold”. In that second line, it points out that she knows that he’s putting too much on her shoulders. You should never get together with a woman to make your life better. That’s not what your partner is there for. So, with that consideration I would say that the guilt she feels is more that she knows he’s kind of pathetic and it’s going to make his life worse.

“But the lows are so extreme/That the good feels fucking cheap/And it teases you for weeks in its absence” – A Better Son/Daughter, Rilo Kiley

Well, that is a perfect summary of the feeling of depression doesn’t it? When things are so bad that you can’t imagine anything being good ever again. But you know that it’s still haunting you down the line. Things are going to be good but how can I believe that but I know it was at one point. It’s an insufferable feeling.

“But you are what you love/Not what loves you back/So, I guess that’s why you keep calling me back” -You Are What You Love, Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins

A beautiful bit of self pity and defeatism. Jenny knows that the person that she’s dating is not great but she knows that she loves him so that drags her into the mud with him as well. But their love is an ouroboros and he’s feeding into her as much as she’s feeding into him.

“And if there’s no ring, I will have to say goodbye/Nah, I’m just playing, John I look terrible in white” -Aloha and the Three Johns, Jenny Lewis

For our last one, we just got some straight up old school country lyrics. Conversational, little bit funny and sad.

In conclusion, all of Jenny Lewis and Rilo Kiley’s are amazing and you should check them out.

According to Wikipedia, it’s an English expression that came from a Chinese curse. I think it’s a silly thing to say. We’ve always lived in interesting times. The fact is if you don’t think of it that way, then you’re not paying attention. Below, I’ve added some of my favorite dialogue in any movie, but specifically from the movie, Adaption where Nicolas Cage’s character has to write a screenplay about a very boring book and he doesn’t know how to do it.

I fully agree with Robert, if you can’t find anything to write about, then you’re not working hard enough. Your very life, existence is a source of conflict. When you eat, breath, drink water, live somewhere, you are taking those opportunities from someone else. Do you deserve them? Well, that’s a question you have to answer yourself. Given recent events, we’ve learned that there are people that think they deserve everything in the world and there are people that are very angry about that.

There’s a story. A story that the news would become obsessed with, has and will. Think about your character’s journey. They see the injustice in the world and what do they do with it? Do they fight back against it or do they accept it? Do they join with it?

Going back to the concept of interesting times. I want you to consider how ordinary we think of birds. We see them doing their thing and going about their business. We daydream of being among them. One person imagines a young boy getting too big for his britches, his father making him a pair of wax wings and flying too close to the sun. Suddenly, we have a parable that lasts for all of time.

A pair of Jewish teenagers take the concept of Moses in the basket and the idea of flight and turns it into the first superhero. An image that has existed for near a hundred years.

Hell, two brothers create planes and open up the world for everyone to travel and see everything. They license those planes out to the post office to deliver mail, a post officer finds a bomb, throws it out of the plane and it blows up a building. The army who had once dismissed the military applications of the plane now create the air force.

Even if you think it’s boring, consider how your life could have changed if you made a different choice in that moment? You went out for a quart of milk. You see a baby carriage charging down the sidewalk towards a cross street. You jump in the path of it. You pull the baby out of it. Oh, shit, demon baby. The baby screams at you. There’s only thing to do. You dunk that baby in the local kids’ hoop. The baby is NBA jammed straight back to hell.

You could do something that makes more sense. A car pulls up with a beautiful person of the gender that you’re attracted to. They ask you if you want to take a ride. You wake up missing a kidney but having gained three livers. What happens now?

It’s such a big, beautiful world with so many stories and strange things in it. I want you to think about the weirdness and the ordinary and how you can turn it into a story that’s uniquely yours. There’s something you did today that’s worth telling everyone about.