this was really hard

Moises FOOLISHLY told me that he didn't like any Mariah after her #1's album.  I told him he was mistaken.

When I first sat down to make this mix I thought it would be easy as I had room for a lot of songs since I wouldn't be including the standards.  No Emotions, no Vision of Love, no BREAKDOWN!  So I started with Rainbow and just dumped all of my favorites in to a playlist, intending to organize them and then burn the CD.  Unfortunately my original playlist was way too long for one disc : /

This is even after I eliminated a bunch:

As you can see I had to get down to the very basics to get it all on one disc.  I messaged Kyle and Jonathan for their approval and got, "What about For The Record?!" and, "What about Migrate?!"  Yes, clearly, I could have just burned every album and called it a day but my goal was to get it down to one mix cd.

I will be delivering it today, it will be hard to not listen to it on my way to work.

for gala

Gala sent me a text saying that they covered Vision of Love on the voice and that I should watch it, which reminded me that I got a bittersweet All I Want for Christmas is You at work the other day.  It was a cover.  Really?

I texted Gala back telling her of my disappointment and she made some comment about how it's not her song so it's not like they have to play her version.

INCORRECT.

"All I Want for Christmas Is You" is a song written by Carey and Walter Afanasieff, recorded by American singer-songwriter Mariah Carey. It was released by Columbia Records on November 1, 1994 as the lead single from her fourth studio album, Merry Christmas. The song's writers were also the producers.

source

That being said, they do HAVE to play her version, so Gala, please let me know who I need to contact in H.R. about this.

Otherwise, yes I give props to Trevin for his take on Vision of Love, he certainly out sang Amanda.  Also, like with Kelly Clarkson trying to cover Always Be My Baby, clips like this are good reminders of how amazing Mariah is.  She just makes it seem so effortless.

I had a vision of love

When I pulled up to this Audi at the light his back windows were down but there was no activity in the backseat that I could see.  I had the top down and this was playing:




As soon as she started belting that handsome guys head popped out of the back window with his ears all perked up.  That's the power of Mariah.  It makes me think of this.

Animals get it.

i'm struggling

Sarah and I were talking about Mariah one day at work and Sarah said something like, 'I used to really like Mariah, like her Butterfly album, but I never really got in to anything else she did'.

I made a promise to Sarah on that day that I would make her a Mariah mix cd that would open her eyes to what she's been missing.  This was actually the main impetus behind me getting my music sorted out on my computer.

Well now I have all the songs I want (I think) and I'm just trying to decide what order to put them in.  It's really hard.  I tried to mix it up between songs she would know like Dreamlover, Vision of Love, Fantasy, and my favorites like Up Out My Face, Fly Like A Bird, or Crybaby.  I also wanted to include a couple that showcase her vocals, namely My All, and Bliss.  I'm feeling guilty for completely leaving off classics like You'll Always Be My Baby but as Jon put it when I made him skype with me last night and pick out songs, "You should leave her wanting more".

The song order is proving to be as stressful as I anticipated it would be.  It has to have a good flow to it and keep her interested so she won't skip past songs like All In Your Mind before she even gets to the AMAZING ending.  Ugh, this is so hard.  I'm so nervous to give it to her.

Ok, I'm going to finish it up and then I have to go out and get blank cds.

Oh yeah, and I didn't even include Obsessed on the cd, is that wrong of me?  Heather came in last night to say hi to Jon on skype and saw how much Mariah I had on my computer and was like, "look right there, Obsessed, you are obsessed".  I hadn't even thought about including Obsessed until she pointed it out.  I don't know if Sarah would understand the amazingness of Obsessed without me explaining it though.   I feel like I need to make a companion cd with commentary on each song, why I chose it, why it was significant, etc.  UGH this is getting out of hand.

I had a vision of love

And it was all that you've given to me.

I like when he smooshes one ear down like that because I feel like it makes him look like he's wearing a fascinator.

He was actually completely asleep when I took that picture, in fact the noise I made taking it caused him to close his eyes completely after this, but then eventually I did wake him up.  And he was angry, so very angry.

Who would have guessed with a serene face like that.

fool me once

source

Yesterday wasn't a particularly eventful day for me but I did have several errands I had to run and places I had to be at specific times.  So in the morning after my coffee was drunk and my shower was taken I was all ready to go when I had vision.  A vision of love.

I pictured little Meghan sitting at her desk, surrounded by dressmaker forms in various stages of undress, deciding to take a break from her emails to so and so from the house of such and such and check out my blog.  But oh well, I didn't have time to post anything because I was too busy rollerblading down the boardwalk in my hotpants, so little Meghan is left cold and alone buried deep underneath the temple of dendur.

So before I can leave the house I drop everything and do a post, just in case I don't make it home before 5, thinking, 'my fans need me, i can't let them down' or some self gratifying bullshit like that.  Oh, yeah.

It wasn't until I met my family for dinner at our usual monday night hotspot when I stopped to consider, 'hmmm, there sure aren't the usual amount of people here today.  Come to think of it, there have been people in all sorts of weird places for a monday, and then other places seem completely empty'.

And then it hit me, like that time at Alex's when I defended Andrew and Brittany slapped me across the face.  I haven't forgotten, I will never forget.

It's MLK day, everybody has the day off.  I bet not a single person is even going to go to my blog today because they are all out enjoying their day off.

And so it was true, and you guys got two posts yesterday, and they weren't even throw away posts of kitty looking handsome either.  They were legit posts with stories.  Well enjoy, I'm way past my one a day quota so don't be surprised if one of these bleary eyed thursdays that you dread so much you crank up the old interwebs thinking you'll entertain yourself with your little dancing monkey, and it's just the same thing from the day before.

Or I'll probably just continue to post pictures of kitty.  Esp because yesterday we got him a handsome new collar.  It has a bell, his favorite!

sand castles

This is part one of my two part series entitled "The Lost Posts".

When I first got to Florida for thanksgiving break my dad started in on one of his stories that I hear every time I go down.  This one is about the app that he has for his phone that lets him find things just by asking it.  For some reason the thing he always asks it about is sand castle competitions, then shows me with pride how if it were May we could go to a sand castle competition.

This time however there actually was a sand castle competition going on down at Siesta Key.  I don't think my father was prepared for me to say that I actually wanted to go, so it became kind of like that episode of Seinfeld where George drives Susan's parents out to his nonexistent house in the Hamptons.

The sand castles were pretty cool I guess, here is the one from above from behind:

I mean the detail and craftsmanship was really intricate and cool but my father was reading me the article about the competition from the newspaper and they said that in order to get the sand to stick they mix it with Elmer's glue, which hardly seems fair to me.  I mean doesn't that just make it a sculpting competition?  I feel like the whole point of a sand castle competition is dealing with the medium and it's unreliability, not just mixing it with glue.

I think it might have something to do with the fact that the sand in Sarasota is so powdery that it would be impossible to build a sandcastle sans glue, but I don't know that that's really an excuse.  Maybe Sarasota just wasn't meant to have a sand castle competition.

Here is another one I liked:

For some reason I only took the back of this one and not the front but it was a cool design.  It was a castle on the other side and it wasn't until you walked around to the back that you realized there was supposed to be this giant dragon wrapped around it.  I think I liked this one the best because it was the only one that actually had a traditional fairy tale castle as part of it.  The one above was cool because it had the M.C. Escher thing going on, but sometimes you just want a good old fashioned castle you know?

And then there was this one which I guess is supposed to be characters from some Disney movie (Madagascar?), but I thought it was Nathanael.  Just chillin' in the hot tub, making the face he makes when he's watching tv.  I mean the resemblance is uncanny!

If the artist doesn't know nathanael directly then he must have had a vision, a vision of love.  I have those every night, and every morning when I wake up to find nathanael laying in bed next to me stroking my hair.

my musical morning

I had a really funny morning with music. The first part of my morning was spent putting away my clothes from my suitcase and clearing the floor so I could do yoga. When I finally got everything away I went to the kitchen to make some tea before I settled down for my morning yoga.

When I returned to my room I walked in on a nice clean room with a handsome guy just snoozin' on the bed, and this was playing on my itunes:

It really was bliss.

So when I go to do yoga I'm rockin' along and i get to the point where i'm ready to do my first down dog. I usually hold the first down dog for as long as I can, and this morning my timing synched up so that a new song was starting and I decided to just try to hold down dog for the entire song. Here's the song that I had to hold down dog for:

Now at first I was like, "ok i can get down with this, nice inspirational, whitney come back, i get it" and I really got in to it. I know that whitney is talking about God but I like to think about it like "I look to you" meaning that I look to myself. That I think so often for me I am looking for other people to validate me or make me feel like i'm on the right track, but when it's just me by myself in my room trying to hold down dog for a whitney ballad, there isn't anybody that's going to help me but me. I literally have nobody to look to for help but myself, and when I really have to I will pull it together and help myself.

Of course by like 2 minutes in I was no longer thinking about how inspirational the song was, I was instead thinking about how it was written by R. Kelly and how he got caught on camera peeing on some underage girl. Classic.

And by 3:30 in to the song all I was thinking about was the burning in my shoulders and how I just wanted whitney to finish the damn song. In the beginning I was like, "ooooh good for whitney, she's back, she's singing a ballad, she's still got it" but by this point I was like, "omg whitney, it's over, let it go, you don't need to sing a whole other verse, we get it, just end this misery". I wasn't sure how close I was to the end but I knew she had to do one final attempt at hitting a strong note before she would sing several, "i look to you"'s while she faded in to the background.

When the song was FINALLY over I collapsed on the floor in to child's pose. There was a brief moment of silence and I wondered what the next song was going to be. It was beyond appropriate:

it was like, "you're right mariah, you were my sweet destiny, it was worth waiting through the shadows of that jank-ass whitney song, classic mariah, you are my vision of love". Also can we talk about how she's wearing a unitard?

Basically the moral of the story is that i listen to some pretty gay music.