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I suspected Beatles Week might run on past Christmas this year and I wondered what I might do when it did. Luckily, The Beatles themselves solved my problem for me.

On December 4, 1995, the group released "Free As a Bird," their first new single in 25 years (source), using a tape John Lennon had recorded in 1977 and building around that with harmonies and more music by the remaining band members. The song was released on a mini-CD with three other studio recordings, one of which was "Christmas Time (Is Here Again)." I'll let the album notes describe it from here:

From 1963 to 1969 the Beatles gave members of their official fan club a special gift at Christmas: a record unavailable elsewhere. The 1967 disc was titled "Christmas Time (Is Here Again)" and extracts from a song of that name were scattered among the sketches. Issued here for the first time is an uninterrupted recording of the number. Superimposed near the end are some spoken-word seasonal greetings, taped in 1966, followed by a John Lennon.

So this year for Christmas, I would like to wish you and yours a very merry Christmas and would also like to let The Beatles do the same from 1967. Click the following link to stream the song or right-click and save it before listening (it's a little over 4 Mb):

Labels: Beatles Week, Christmas

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Song Info (from Beatlesongs):"We Can Work It Out" was released in the US on December 6, 1965, as a double A-sided single with "Day Tripper." It was 70% Paul and 30% John, with a similar mix of optimism ("we can work it out") and impatience ("life is very short and there's no time"). Paul's inspiration was his then-girlfriend Jane Asher.

I've always liked this song. Aside from it being the basis for my favorite Beatles Tie, (I've always regretted not buying it when I had the chance), it always seemed so upbeat and encouraging. I'd always thought this song was an exhortation to, you know, work things out. I mean, it's right there in the title, after all.

I have this weird relationship with music, though, where I can hear a song a bunch of times without really hearing it. I can't hear lyrics all that well, which has resulted in me hearing things like "Benny took and he ate a ball of my corn" from the Beach Boys' "Sloop John B" (real line: "Then he took and he ate up all of my corn"). But this song seemed pretty straight forward:

We can work it out,
We can work it out.
Life is very short, and there's no time
For fussing and fighting, my friend.
I have always thought that it's a crime,
So I will ask you once again.

"We can talk this through, we can figure it out, and we should stop fussing because it's not important in the grand scheme of how long we're given on this earth."

Those are great sentiments and things we could stand to put into practice... but it's only half the picture of the song. Since that's the chorus and it has the musical hook, that's the part we tend to remember. But the verses tell me a different story:

Try to see it my way,
Do I have to keep on talking till I can't go on?
While you see it your way,
Run the risk of knowing that our love may soon be gone.

Try to see it my way,
Only time will tell if I am right or I am wrong.
While you see it your way
There's a chance that we might fall apart before too long.

Turns out what he's really saying is "You're wrong, I'm right, and the sooner you figure that out and start doing things my way, the better off we'll be." That seems a bit more familiar, since that's pretty much what we all do. At the same time Paul's singing this to Jane, Jane's singing the exact same thing back to him.

We're never going to find someone who agrees with us on everything. Every topic, every issue, has two or more sides, If both sides are completely convinced theirs is the correct view, a compromise won't make anyone happy. and it seems the answer to Rodney King's question of "Can't we all just get along?" is a resounding "NO!"

As I've gotten older, I've come to the conclusion that the best I can do is state my position and my reasons for having that position. Getting angry with someone because they don't have the same views I do is, well, dumb. Its basis is an unrealistic egocentric worldview - "All others must conform to my way!" - and will forever cause that person to be angry at any and every one.

I'm trying to level up my ability to disagree with someone without hating them or getting angry at them. I'm still in my starting area, so I'm pretty low-level just yet, but quests are constantly presenting themselves, so I should be able to get more and more XP as time goes on. The real difficulty in most of the quests is that questee usually doesn't have the same goal, and there are many instances of anger and namecalling. I get more XP and the rewards are greater if I don't respond in kind, but it takes a lot longer to play that way.

Proverbs 20:3 says that "Keeping away from strife is an honor for a man, But any fool will quarrel." (NASB) While that doesn't mean "run away from problems," it pretty clearly says quarrelers aren't a special breed.

Labels: Beatles Week, WoW

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Song Info (from Beatlesongs):"If I Fell" was 100% written by Lennon, who said "It's semiautobiographical, but not consciously" and "that's my first attempt at a ballad proper." Note from me: This is my second-favorite Beatles song, as I love the harmonies and think it is a beautiful piece.

The building where most of my high school classes took place was over a hundred years old, and four floors if you counted the basement, which you have to. What we referred to as "the back stairway" was a sort of square spiral that went from the basement all the way up to the third floor, with about an eight-foot open square down through the middle. Centered above the empty space was a five-bulbed chandelier, from which Jonny V. removed the bulbs and dropped them the four floors to the basement, and made the President of the college (the high school was on the grounds of the college and shared several rooms) very, very angry.

I get the dates confused, and I'm not sure if it was my freshman or sophomore year in high school, but my first high school girlfriend had just broken up with me -- you'd think that' be the sort of thing I'd remember more clearly, but I can't figure it out. Hrm.

Anyway, she started sorta seeing someone else (Jason W., if you're wondering - I include that here strictly so I can mention to his brother that I mentioned his brother on here) which is why she decided to break up with me. Well, I mean, I'm sure there were other reasons she decided to break up with me which probably also led to her seeing the other guy, but the seeing the other guy was the thing she decided to do right before breaking up with me.

I was new to this whole breaking up thing, and wasn't really sure what I was supposed to do. I figured I probably still needed to go to classes and eat and stuff, but what to do around her? Or him, for that matter? He was an upperclassmen, so I already was beneath him socially, and this just compounded the issue. And, as mentioned, he was my friend's older brother. Far too complicated for my teenaged brain.

I decided avoidance was the best method, a device I would turn to quite often in the ensuing years, even though it never seemed to work out all that great. If I saw either of them, I would find some place else to be. The high school area was fairly small, so this happened more often than a person would have liked, but oh well.

The snack shop was located in the basement, and it's where the majority of us high schoolers went for lunch. The snack shop wasn't very big, but our class of 33 was the biggest that had ever gone through the school at the time, so it worked all right. Like most teenagers are wont to do, we'd stay at lunch until the last possible minute, and then run up the back stairs as fast as possible to the second floor where our classes were. We weren't supposed to do this, but we did.

I learned somewhere along the way that if I grabbed a corner post as I was sprinting up the stairs, I could keep my speed up while turning, just like in Batman when the Batmobile uses the cable to make the corner. On this particular day, I must have been running particularly late, because I was making good time up the stairs.

I had made one or two turns already when I passed a couple that was meandering slowly upwards. As I passed them, I realized it was them. Now driven to make even better time, I grabbed at the corner post to make the turn and hurry on my way.

And missed.

I don't know if I was hurrying to quickly or if I was rattled by my urge to avoid, but I do know what happens when you're trying to make a corner upstairs at top speed: centrifugal forces do what they were designed to do.

Not only did I fall, I fell spectacularly. I really wish I could have seen it. I fell into the corner across from the post, a good five feet away. I smacked the ground and the wall both. I was in pain, but I needed to get up and out of there, as this had happened not five feet in front of my ex and her new boyfriend. I got up as quickly as I could and continued on my way as fast as I could. I was a floor above them when I heard them start laughing, and I suspect the only reason it took them so long is that they were initially stunned.

I took those stairs at those same speeds many times before then and many times after, and that was the only time that ever happened.

Labels: Beatles Week, school memories

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Song Info (from Beatlesongs):"Carry That Weight" is on the Abbey Road album and was 100% written by McCartney to show the difficulties he had trying to hold the group together during 1969, a very tough year.

We're a funny lot, humans. Despite having plenty of things on a day-to-day basis that worry us or cause us concern, we take other things on specifically, knowing they will weigh heavily on us. We do it for various reasons, some good, some bad. I have friends who seem to thrive under pressure, who are at their best when their plates are full. That is not me. Not by a long shot. I'm a procrastinator and a task-specific-perfectionist (meaning: not in everything, but certainly in some), so I end up doing a lot of things at the last minute. While some of those things turn out okay, many do not. Suffice it to say, I don't tend to take a whole lot of extra things on.

So why oh why did I buy a house?

I've mentioned before that I am clearly the wrong sort of person to be in charge of a house. I am not a handyman even slightly - the only things I can assemble correctly are LEGO kits that have very clear instructions - and I live in a semi-constant fear that something is going to break. Still, I get the impression some of you out there are all "Oh, pfft! You'll be fine!" It is for those folk I would like to offer two proofs that, no, I am not, and that it would clearly be in the house's best interests if I were taken away from it.

Proof 1:

Two weeks ago I got home from work and crashed on the couch for a while, doing my best to ignore the "We're so hungry!" meows from the cats until it was closer to their actual feeding time. Finally I could take it no more, and fed them. They were out of water, so I went to fill up their dish... um, why is no water coming out? Bathroom faucet: same deal. Hmm. Call the water people: "Yep, we turned it off this afternoon for lack of payment." D'oh. "What can I do?" "Well, I can meet you downtown and see you deposit a cashier's check for the bill and then I can turn your water back on."

Sigh.

I haven't had to pay a water bill in I don't know how many years. Five or more, I'd guess. And I've been moving to paying my bills online and hadn't gotten the water bill set up that way yet, so I somehow overlooked the bill... twice. Yeah, apparently I missed two bills. I think this qualifies as Proof #1 that I shouldn't have a house.

Proof 2:

While Melissa was visiting last week, we thought it might be fun to play a game of Scrabble in front of the fireplace in the basement. I got some of those easy-to-light firelogs from Walmart (because me with a chainsaw getting my own wood sounds like a surefire recipe for dismemberment), and the inspector had said the chimney looked good, so we were all set. I followed the directions on the firelog and pretty soon we had a nicely blazing fire going.

We'd only played a few turns of Scrabble when we realized the basement was kind of smoky. Hmm. And, hey, look at that - pretty much all the smoke in the world is coming out of the front of the fireplace. And, yep, sure enough, a quick check upstairs revealed there was plenty up there, too.

So now what? These firelogs say they're good for four hours. Clearly we cannot have four hours' worth of smoke in the house. She hit upon the idea of throwing wet towels on the firelog, so I got my rattiest towels and soaked them down and we threw them on the firelog. Success! Of course, now we not only have the smell of smoke throughout the house, we also have the smell of steamed towel, which is not pleasant. But no more smoke is being produced, so at least some win came out of this houseful of fail.

Further examination of the fireplace revealed what 99% of you already figured out: the flue wasn't opened. Sure, I'd heard of flues and knew they needed to be opened, but I hadn't seen one before and didn't know what to look for, so I thought maybe I didn't have one.

I have more firelogs (aside from the half-burnt one), so I'll have to try the fireplace again some time, but I think I'll wait until after I've read "Fireplaces for Dummies." If there is no "Fireplaces for Dummies" book, I will wait until it's written and then try again.

But there you have it, proofs I'm in over my head. I've signed on for 30 years of this house-buying business. If I'm not the death of it, I'm sure the house will do its best to rid itself of me long before that. You can't blame it, really. It's only acting out of a sense of self-preservation.

Labels: Beatles Week, house

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Song Info (from Beatlesongs):"Eight Days a Week" is on the Beatles For Sale album and was written mostly by McCartney with some additions by Lennon, who also sang lead on it. The title is a direct quote from Ringo, who was talking about being worn out.

This isn't actually an official Beatles Week entry, I'm afraid. I had an overdue article that needed writing, so I did that instead.

However, the belated start lets me take advantage of a suggestion by Jeremiah, one I can't believe I didn't come up with on my own: in true Beatles fashion, Beatles Week shall henceforth be eight entries long, not five. It makes perfect sense, and I'm still kicking myself over not coming up with it!

So what is your favorite Beatles song? Leave it in the comments and it just might make this week's list.

Labels: Beatles Week

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