Songs

I'll admit I had some trouble with the song/emotion assignment. I was thinking of songs that make me feel a certain way, but I wasn't sure how to explain why those songs brought up those emotions. This is because I don't often pay attention to lyrics...a lot of the time it's how the song sounds that elicits emotion for me. Since I knew people in class would be listening to lyrics, my explanations might not have made any sense and it would have been weird.

For example, I heard a song that reminded me of my boyfriend just because of how it sounded (well it makes sense to me). One day in the car I started playing the song and told him that it made me think of him. So we started listening to the song intently, and this was the first time I actually paid attention to the lyrics, which as it turned out included lines such as "I don't really like you" and "On the cold wet dirt I cry." Oops.

Fortunately, he knows that I don't tend to listen to song lyrics and thought this was really funny.

So, I guess the moral of this story is that if you ignore the "language" part of "language and self," you pave the way for some potential misunderstanding. "Language" and "self" truly go together, and genuine self-expression is not complete without a full recognition of both elements.