In the spirit of giving me some writing prompts and getting me writing with some regularity, I’ve decided to start a weekly post.  I may organize most of my posts by some sort of system, but I have yet to decide what that system will be.  But this particular one I like – it is called Friday 5 (some call it Five for Friday – I’m going for brevity … in titling at least).  Each Friday I will post a list of five things on some topic.

Today’s Fiver will be five songs that remind me of my high school girlfriend (it may sound sweet, but read on before making any such assumptions).  I want to preface this list with a few disclaimers:  first – I’m very happily married and have no regrets about the relationships I’ve had; second – this list should in no way be construed as either pining or resentment as it is far from either.  I came up with this particular list subject because I happened to hear two of these songs in the car yesterday on my way home from work (and, well, as I said – they remind me of her … for various reasons as will be specified):

1. Promise – Violent Femmes: this song was on a mix tape that she made for me when we first started dating.  While I was already a fan of the Femmes, I hadn’t heard this one prior to that tape.
2. Sympathy for the Devil – Jane’s Addiction: this song was actually the topic of an argument we had.  See, having been a high school kid at the time, I was not well versed in a lot of music.  But this is a song that she played a lot and it seemed familiar for reasons I couldn’t place.  After a while I put together that it was a remake of a Rolling Stones song and tried to find a record in my dad’s collection that had the track (which I couldn’t).  I mentioned the origin to her anyway (sans evidence – no internet at the time) and she wouldn’t believe me.  She was adamant that Perry Farrell would never opt to reuse someone else’s work and suggested that maybe the Stones copied it.  That festered with me for some time.
3. Loser – Beck: the memory associated with her and this song falls in my brain under the category of irony.  See, when this song became popular, she was in her third year of Spanish (I took French – I’m a lover).  And yet she couldn’t even begin to tell me what the Spanish line in the chorus translated to.  After some research and thought, I figured out that it meant, well, “I’m a Loser” (which in hindsight should have been obvious).  But she found my results to be dubious.
4. Fly Me to the Moon – Frank Sinatra: the summer that things went south for us, she somehow got into a Frank Sinatra phase (I never quite understood that – probably because I wasn’t around her enough after that to get a chance to).  She even sent me a mix tape with this and a few other songs of his on it.  It never really grew on me.
5. Brick – Ben Folds Five: following our split, it took me a while to grow past it.  This song actually helped by letting me imagine her as the so-described brick of which I needed to let go.  Oddly, while this song definitely was very cathartic for me at the time, hearing it again in the present pulls me back to those feelings it helped me move past (again with the irony).

So that is my first list for this new meme.  I hope you found it insightful.  Feel free to leave comments or maybe your own song list.