All Dingdong'd Up, again

Apparently the FGF found a way to my blog the other day, because she greeted me with an instant message that spurred a heckuva conversation.

“I am sorry that the female race are jerks in disguise,” she popped. She told me she’d been reading up on my review of the fair evening, and I told her, honestly, “If girls weren't jerks, I'd have nothing to write about. And actually, girls are evil, guys are jerks.” “It’s all stereotypes,” she shot back. I said, “Well, there’s gotta be some truth to it; I mean, where there’s smoke, there’s a spark” [actually, that’s my problem, there ain’t no spark; probably not even a match or lighter fluid].

“Well, we all have mean in us. It’s the good we have to develop,” she advised. I’ve tried that though, and it’s gotten me across that really good friend line more times than I can count. I’m tired of being a nice guy. And, I told FGF as much: “I’d rather develop my bad into sinisterly evil and take over the world.” “No. You don’t need to lose that thing that makes you special and untouchable to 99% of the women.” Crap. I thought the point was for women to touch me (no, Shay, not like that). “I wanna be touchable to women, though,” I told her. After she quit laughing, she said, “Well, you are, but only to a select few.” A glimmer of hope? “Like SHF?” I asked. “No,” she said. Junk, shut down again.

“If you saw the scars you would see she isn't all that wonderful. Looks can be deceiving and I am sad that she pulled the wool over my eyes,” she said. Hmmm, that’s a pretty dang powerful warning, coming from a close friend. What gives? Well, honestly I was thinking “She’s hot, who cares?” but I can have literary creative liberty, right? Anyway, I didn’t question her, because it looked like a touchy subject, and I’m not one to get involved in touchy situations; it’s just more responsibility I don’t need. “Well, is there a consolation prize?” “The most amazing love you can have,” she said, and referred me to II Corinthians 12:10 (Since I know it is all for Christ's good, I am quite content with my weaknesses and with insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong—NLT). Good fuzzy thoughts if I were in a good fuzzy mood; I really wasn’t. “Don't give me that. I know all that. I want practical nuts and bolts answers to my practical nut and bolt problem” (no pun intended—I’m not into the Bob Dole stage yet, I don’t think).

I asked for it, and I got it. She said, “Practically speaking you just have to keep moving, because girls like guys that appear to not have time for them.” WHAT¿! “That makes no sense,” I told her. “Well if you are waiting for them to walk up to sweep them off their feet then they have no time to observe and realize they don't deserve you. Girls like to be spoiled, and thus want what they don’t deserve. That is why there are so many girls falling for the jerks. They don't pay attention and the girls are just waiting for a guy to reveal what is special about him, and unfortunately they will just keep waiting.”

This is the best, most fantastic bit of information I think any man has gotten in the history of the world in his quest to understand women. It’s a brilliant idea, and also seemingly doesn’t conflict with the “bad guys get good girls” postulate of the box theory. If the confident guys exude something similar to success or “specialness” (and probably not in the short bus kinda way I do), and girls want what they don’t deserve, then it’s pretty obvious that two and two are gonna add up to five eventually. When it does, the jerk guy, again, got something he didn’t really earn or deserve, and the girl got what she thinks she deserves, even though she doesn’t.

Why is life so bass ackwards?

Sound Off

Allow me to take a break complaining about life and actually digress (likely into a complaint) into a topic that people might actually be interested in reading.

You’ll recall from before that I spent a week or so out at the annual city/county hootenanny (the fair, for short). Aside from wanting to declare myself as the next candidate on the bachelor and turn another perfectly innocent girl into a psychotic babbling idiot (it’s my spiritual gift, I’ve decided; so if anybody has an enemy they’d like to see turn into a psychotic babbling idiot, I’m available), I also got to talk to quite a few people about southern gospel music. Whether its been mentioned before or not, I’ve got a little gig at the local sg radio station. From the way the new ratings looked, you likely haven’t heard of it. Apparently, though, I am a hit with the ladies 55 and over. Maybe some of them have to have hot granddaughters.

Alas, I digress. If it’s not obvious, I sorta stray into the more progressive side of southern, whether it be toward country or inspo or newgrass or whatever. It’s not that I don’t like the traditional stuff; it’s great in concert. But in the age of modern compressors, equalizers, and other wonderful gadgetry, the majority of it sounds flat and hollow over the airwaves. Some of it, I’m sure, can be attributed to poor recording and production, as southern has always played catch-up to the better produced devil-music of the world, and I’m sure I’ll at least have an overnight stay in purgatory for listening to it.

But some of it is also inherent to the style. It’s been said all over the bloggy internet that southern’s a vocal-driven musical style, which is fine and all, except that (if I remember my sound theory correctly), the human voice likes to hang out anywhere from 800Hz to 4KHz (give or take—please correct me if I’m wrong and point me to an adequate sound theory book I can read in my non-existent spare time). Considering most people can hear stuff from 20Hz to 20KHz, there’s a lot of open space to fill. The piano does a decent job to fill out some of the low- and mid-range with its 28Hz to 4KHz range (ish, again). And I applaud those few individuals who can masterfully craft together an accompany track to sound rich and full with only the buck-toothed coffee table. But you really need a bass to get a full solid bottom end from 200Hz on down. An nice acoustic guitar, at 600Hz to around 8K (granted, that does cut the bottom end, but it would only muddy the bass and piano), would also gracefully enhance the middle ranges of the mix and mold them with some of the upper frequencies (the better choice for enhancing the mids is a good electric, but the electric guitar’s the debil, kinda like the foozeball). To continue to round out the upper end, add some synthesized stuff, and don’t forget about those worldy drums and insanely high cymbals.

Alas, I’ve digressed again. I told you that story to tell you this one: I like full sounding music. It doesn’t necessarily only mean rock or pop or whatever, because even a five piece bluegrass band can sound astoundingly full. But in context with this southern gospel topic, that means I play lots of instrument-driven groups like the Crabb Family , LordSong , Isaacs , Christlike, etc). Needless to say, I catch the occasional flack with the traditionally minded folk, and become more and more irritated with each and every phone call. “Are you changing formats?” “That’s not southern gospel.” “Do you read the Bible?” Comparatively, purgatory doesn’t sound too bad.

What the bloody Hades is wrong with it? Since I refuse to debate the issue on the “it’s not Christian music” point (because nobody’s gonna convince anybody else to swap sides of that fence), I give you point one: its better sounding radio. Granted, to accept this argument, you’ve got to agree to a large extent that sg radio is 1) a business that must survive alongside other businesses in a competitive market and 2) as such needs to pull down a decent slice of the listenership pie to secure the advertising dollar necessary to sustain the business. Once you’ve accepted those points, why in the world wouldn’t you want to play the fullest sounding, best produced stuff you’ve got in the library (single or no single, because we also know that sg is notorious at releasing non-radio-friendly songs)? Of course, you’ve also got to have the on-air talent to back up the music (which is another blog entry entirely), but I’ll venture a guess that the majority of the population listens to the radio to hear good music.

There’s one more assumption to the argument to accept: 3) the listenership you’re competing for is largely non-Christian and/or favors modern-sounding music. To me, that’s the final nail in the coffin for empty, hollow and (especially) the poorly produced junk that floats around sg radio. Playing inferior music to try to attract listenership is like nailing your foot to the floor so you can hit your leg with a sledgehammer. Okay, well, it’s nothing like that really, other than the results of both are extremely painful and something’s bound to get broken. But, and point number two of the argument: what good is having a message if nobody will listen to it? Again, you’ve got to largely view sg radio as an evangelistic tool to the unchurched more than a ministry tool to the average Christian, but I’ve never been able to hook my friends (churched or unchurched) on traditional sg music through anything except a live concert (and it was like beating their legs with sledgehammers to get them to go to that). But I have had friends bum a Crabby, Isaacs, or Martins CD and show interest in the music.

I now relinquish control of the musical soapbox. Your regularly scheduled insights on the stupidity of girls will return shortly.

All DingDong'd Up

Ah, life, how I’ve learned to despise thee.

When I last left this whole virtual think tank of mine, I’d taken it upon myself to get out of geekdom. So, I did. For two weeks, I limited myself to only one “geeky” activity per day—-alas, PlayStation won out most often. And even during this “geeky” PlayStation time, I tried to play the “cool people” games, like baseball, basketball, NASCAR, and golf. Most of the time was spent thinking of arrangements for the original music our church praise band has written and are going into the studio to record. Since this will likely be crown jewel of my small portfolio as a producer, I figure I need to make the most of it. So I thought I’d try the whole plan twice, record once thing out to see if it really works.

I even made it out to into the real, social world for a whole week. The work place put a booth out at the city fair, so I took the evening/night shift, thinking that’d be the most opportune place to meet “people” (yes, Shay, that means girls). Unfortunately, the fair caters mainly to 1) teeny boppers, 2) couples or 3) old people, so I was doomed from the start. It should come as no surprise, then, that this story doesn’t have a happy ending.

Sawyer Brown was in concert the very first night of the fair, and my brother’s fiancé-girlfriend (FGF: not exactly a fiancé, but not exactly a girlfriend) had tickets to it. So she, her mom, her dad and her smokin-hot friend (SHF) wandered up to the booth before the concert. Her parents had never met me, and I tried to concentrate on the conversation instead of SHF. And I succeeded, for the most part, at balancing the attention thing between the parents and SHF, because the parents thought I was a riot and I got a phone call a couple days later from the brother saying the SHF thought I was “cute” and that brother, FGF, SHG, and I should set up an outing (hmm, fancy that, Dingdong’s got social skillz). I thought about it for a whole nanosecond and finally agreed. I give the situation a week to fester up and hit the brother and the FGF up about it while they were in town on Saturday. “Yeah, SHF decided she didn’t want to because she started dating someone.” Hmm, fancy that, Dingdong loses again.

Welcome to the realm of Dingdong. I should have known better, because this came not more than a week or two after a similar incident. Another girl from church (GFC) was just as smart, saying she “didn’t want a commitment” right now when the church matchmaker shot my name at her. GFC didn’t even take me up on free David Phelps tickets, saying she “had a big project from work” she “needed to get done.”

What gives? What’s wrong with saying, “Oh, I don’t think you and I would work out” or, even better, “you’re not datable material” instead of this whole "dating somebody else" or “non-commitment” thing? I’m not as concerned about having a horrible batting average as I am about girls not telling the truth. It would at least help me prioritize life a little better knowing that the social life is a lost cause. Guys always get the bad rap for “hiding our feelings,” or, my personal favorite, “not saying what we mean.” Ladies, I present two cases that prove you are as guilty (or more so) than we are.

Besides, guys already have dibs on the “don’t want a commitment” line anyway. It’s not fair to use our own weapons against us.