i've gone cross-eyed

Driving home from beer and wings with the parents—and a quick stop-over at the old place of employment to see Carly and Leah—Adele’s “Someone Like You” came over the radio. I sang it out at the top of my lungs. Adele is one of my favorite bands, coming in third after Florence & The Machine and Led Zeppelin (kinda tied for first). And Adele, she’s pretty freaking hot. And that voice? Just hit PLAY and watch it. Or at least listen to it. Disappointment isn’t a risk here.

My heart’s floored. The enjoyment of her music reaches multiple levels, and it’s fascinating to look through her discographies and read interviews and see how the different tracks are integrated together yet distinct in nature, blossoming from circumstances in her life and reflecting on them from various angles and degrees. She wrote “Someone Like You” following a pretty nasty cluster-fuck with her ex. Prior to “Someone Like You” became popular, her other song “Rolling In The Deep” swept Europe and the United States. While “Someone Like You” is birthed from the heartache and loss she felt over the situation, essentially emotionally crawling back to him, “Rolling in the Deep” is angrier, like a volatile cocktail. Essentially an “FU” forged with the resolution of moving forward without looking back and leaving in her wake only a middle finger. “Someone Like You” shares a resolution, that of finding someone like him. We have the rage over betrayal mixed with the despair of heartache, and throw into the basket her jealousy over his success and how she wants him to remember her or else it’ll all be meaningless. Stop reading and start listening:

And the reason I love these songs is that they’re all spawned from a single event. One of the greatest mistakes we can make is to assume that when something happens, the emotional result will be easily hypothesized and then carried out. But one size doesn’t fit all here, and how we react to different events is based less on the events themselves and more on all the meaning we have attached to those events. So one person may endow an event with a certain meaning leading to a certain reaction, whilst another person will have a different perspective on the same event producing a different reaction altogether. Compounding this is the fact that our decisions and feelings towards events are influenced by all sorts of twisting, turning, interlocking and interchanging aspects of our worldviews, personalities, hopes and dreams, fears, everything. All of this comes together into a river upon which the event is carried through our hearts and minds. This river isn’t smooth like the Potomac, either; it’s the god-forsaken Amazon, constantly branching and meandering and weaving in churning rapids and through tumultuous ravines. How we “feel” about an event can’t be adequately nailed down with one precise word. There’s a cluster-fuck of emotions charging and reeling and retreating and assaulting, and thus we can say, when asked how we feel, “I don’t know.” Hell, I see it all the time in my journals: one event with various meanings, various feelings; resolutions of all calibers, and hope blossoming and dying and blossoming again as the event’s meaning twists and contorts in kaleidoscopic fashion as I myself change the event in my mind through my writing and thinking and daily living and I’ve gone cross-eyed.