Bring on the Breakfast

My sleep schedule has become more hectic than ever. I'm currently sitting in my bed waiting for breakfast to start in a few hours. Here are a couple of lists that I drew up in my boredom:

List of those I at least at some point called my best friends as I remember them chronologically:

Kindergarten: Ethan Something-Jonathan Foster
1st-2nd: Jake Something
3rd: Dylan Something (although he stole my third grade first crush Ashley Something)-Kendall Brown
4th and on: Scott Baumgarten-Trey Stanley (I believe my first two good friends upon my moving back to the states)
I still don't remember when I became friends with either: Jonathan Schindler-Andrew Roberts.

Many thanks to you all though I know for a fact that only one on this list will ever read this. You've all made my life much more enjoyable or bearable, depending on the situation.


Synesthesia (basically one sense evoking another) linking songs/artists and the stories I have come to identify them with usually just coincidentally):

1. Dreaming by Loudon Wainwright III - Life of Pi by Yann Martel
2. Greet Death by Explosions in the Sky - White Nights (short story by Dostoevsky)
3. Com(?) by Mono - Under Fire by Henri Barbusse
4. Pagan Poetry by Bjork - Dante's Inferno
5. Another Town by Regina Spektor (and really just all of Regina) - Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
6. Gates of Eden by Bob Dylan - Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

I find these connections I have in my brain infinitely interesting. The most firmly implanted one would be Life of Pi and Dreaming. Literally anytime I hear the first notes of the song, my mind immediately summons up an image of a young, emaciated boy, laying on his back within a small boat in the middle of the ocean. Of course, this was not the intention of the song and only vaguely relates, the two have become fused - all because I happened to get the album: So Damn Happy at the same time as Life of Pi. In the song now though, I have a specific example of one who simply wishes to be done with life and all its pains, but still holds on with his last. The song thus has changed into one of significant hope, and of a boy's imagination shutting out the horrors of reality.

The Mono and Explosions connections are only natural, as I listen to instrumental music when reading typically, but the nature of the songs matches scenes of the book and a close tie is still drawn.

With regard to Bjork, I decided to start listening to Vespertine to match the mood of Dante when we were assigned The Inferno and thus anything Bjorkish brings about scenes from the depths of Hell, most often the second circle, with the lovers cast about in a whirlwind forever. It was really just an attempt to add an eerie atmosphere to my reading. The Spektor-Frazier connection was also a conscious choice, and maybe not one completely fitting, but some songs certainly share the sentiments of the novel, as with Another Town. There's love, death, and melancholy all wrapped up in a nice package.

The Dylan connection I still have no idea how got settled in my brain. I know that when we read Frankenstein for class I was listening to a lot of Dylan in preparing to write my speech on the man for Decathlon, but in listening to the hundreds of songs left to me by my brother, this one stuck. The folk sound and the harmonica parts don't fit with any of my feelings on Frankenstein at all, but I suppose the chorus words describing the terrible world that exists outside the gates matched my feelings of sympathy towards the forlorn monster in some way.

The brain will always remain a strange and mysterious device in my mind. Does anyone else have any of these strange connections of memory and sense?