Kept for My Occasional Nostalgia

Last week I sent in my first email as a listener to my favorite podcast Too Beautiful to Live (abbreviated as ‘TBTL’. If anyone happens to be reading this, go check it out. It’s meta). Each week they have this listener mail time where, as the name suggests, they go over some of the emails submitted by listeners that are in any way relavent to the show, and the cool thing is today they read mine!

The email is as follows:

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I am writing because over the past few days I’ve discovered a new use for Rebecca Black’s “Friday” as a day planner and procrastination stopper. 

I know you have said on the show multiple times how you hate the narrative style of songwriting by Katy Perry and how “Friday” is guilty of the same thing, but it can become the perfect style of choice when you want to stop loitering around put your to-do list into action. For example, when I was procrastinating my time away this morning reading news of train crashes, passengers trapped in burning buses and gun shootings instead of doing my boring intern work at home, a good and helpful tune to stop this would be to take the music of “Friday”- for me the part that works the best is  ”Kicking in the front seat, kicking in the back seat…everybody’s looking forward to the weekend” - and put in the to-do items: “buy buy buy buy buy lunch, e-e-e-e-eat lunch, [I somehow shudder at the thought of inserting “fun fun fun” into the mix], then I am going back to wooork”. 

I think the magic to it in stopping procrastination is that it eliminates the intimidation of the pile of work that tends to be messy and orderless and gives it order plus a somewhat childishly positive spin by packaging it into a (however badly) regulated musical form, which says “control”.  Haven’t thought about how a longer list would fit into the song or any other songs yet, but am definitely going to try. 

This is by all means one of the coolest moments of my life so far, but having my writing vocalized out loud has alerted me to one big problem of my writing: I simply use too many long sentences that make comprehension just a little bit too cumbersome and thus making my reading a bit unpleasant to read. The dear co-host of the show Jen actually stumbles at the part where I talk about what I am loitering around about and the subsequent part about how I used the song as a procrastination stopper, which certainly I would rather not happen in one of my happiest moments.

My professors have commented several times in my essays about this problem, which I regret to say that I’ve all brushed aside in my mind. But having some of my favourite people pointing this out to me certainly is weighing on me and I’m as of this moment determined to have more clarity, shorter sentences, and less digression in my future writings. 

Proud to be a ten.