Swinging in the backyard
Pull up in your fast car
Whistling my name

Open up a beer
And you say get over here
And play a video game

I’m in his favorite sun dress
Watching me get undressed
Take that body downtown

I say you the bestest
Lean in for a big kiss
Put his favorite perfume on

Go play a video game
Refrain:  It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you
Everything I do
I tell you all the time
Heaven is a place on earth where you
Tell me all the things you want to do
I heard that you like the bad girls
Honey, is that true?
It’s better than I ever even knew
They say that the world was built for two
Only worth living if somebody is loving you
Baby now you do

Singing in the old bars
Swinging with the old stars
Living for the fame

Kissing in the blue dark
Playing pool and wild darts
Video games

He holds me in his big arms
Drunk and I am seeing stars
This is all I think of

Watching all our friends fall
In and out of Old Paul’s
This is my idea of fun
Playing video games

Refrain – 2x

[Lana Del Rey is Elizabeth Grant, a singer-songwriter whose music is hard to classify. It's sort of indie rock/neo-disco. The song, especially the vocals, has an angelic, almost ethereal quality. The sad, somber tone of the vocals clashes with the lyrics that seem as if they should be much more upbeat.

The speaker in this song is a character reminiscent of the film "The Stepford Wives" (1974). She is submissive. She wears what her lover wants her to wear. She puts on the perfume he likes. She lets him play all the video games he wants. The titular "video games" create another kind of tension in the song - between old and new. The song sounds like it may have been written forty or fifty years ago, yet the references to "video games" thrust it into the present time, as it seems clear that the man is playing a home console, not arcade Pac-Man.

One part of the song that gets me every time is when the speaker seductively purrs, "I heard that you like the bad girls/ Honey is that true?" There is a bit of a paradox here. If he likes bad girls, should she pretend to be a bad girl because that is what he wants? Or does being a bad girl mean deliberately defying him and thus being something other than what he wants? This song has an unshakable melancholy and it comes from the idea that a good relationship cannot survive on pretense. She's pretending to be his fantasy, but that's not who she really is. She's asking him to love this fake version of herself. Ultimately, she will resent him and he will tire of her slavishness.]

As Deliriously Free

Here’s a video I shot today of me reciting one of my poems. Watch for the magic troll at 0:29 – if you blink you’ll miss it

To paraphrase Jon Bon Jovi, “Every now and then someone writes an essay that you wish you wrote.” Read http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/being-here/is-that-all-you-can-do-when-so.html. Although this is on Roger Ebert’s blog, the author of the post is Pablo Villaca, a film critic based in Brazil.

The message of the post is that people are becoming increasingly hard-hearted when it comes to death. When someone dies, many people tweet RIP So-and-so. Some people send text messages to the family expressing condolences. A few people take the time to call. Hardly anyone visits in-person.

What’s worse is that a few minutes after a person tweets something like, “RIP So and So. I was devastated by the news.” the SAME person tweets, “LOL did you see the last episode of Glee?” How can that be sincere?

I don’t want to be a downer and I don’t want to come off as self-righteous, but we all need to take a serious look at our behavior.

When someone you care about dies, go to their house and tell their family how you feel. If you can’t do that, pick up the phone and make a voice-call, not a text message and not an email. If someone you didn’t know personally but to whom you feel a connection dies, you can mention his or her passing online, but don’t let that be all. Take some time to really reflect on what he or she meant to you. If you pray, pray for God to give the grieving family patience and strength. Pray for mercy and for forgiveness for the one who died.

Always remember that you too will die. When that moment comes, you will hope that people treat your loved ones with good manners and grace.

Please subscribe to this blog using the “Subscribe” link on the right side of the page. It’s below the Blogroll where it says, “Zen habits.” When I switched the new URL, I lost all my subscribers, so if you subscribed before to Asad123, you need to resubscribe to continue getting new posts. I would like to have a positive number of subscribers.

This post is about two great tools for personal finance – Wolfram Alpha and Mint.com. Using these tools will help you track your spending, assess your investments, compare salaries for jobs, and plan your financial future.

1. Wolfram- Alpha
   1. Assessing stocks

The first thing you need to know is that the URL for Wolfram Alpha is www.wolframalpha.com. Wolfram Alpha is not a household name, yet. I think it will be in the not-too-distant-future. If you have a math or engineering background, you may have used a program called Mathematica. That comes from the same people at Wolfram.

To assess a stock, simply enter its ticker symbol or its company name. For instance, if I want to know about Microsoft, I can enter “Microsoft” or “MSFT” into Wolfram.

Wolfram spits out a terrific amount of information relevant to understanding the performance of Microsoft’s stock. I learn the current price of the stock, its price-to-earnings ratio and annual revenue, I get a clear graph of the stock’s performance over the past four months. I can adjust the graph to show any time period from one week to thirty years. Wolfram doesn’t point me to other sites like Google would. Instead, it computes ANSWERS.

1. Compare salaries for jobs

Let’s say I’m a college student and I want to decide whether to become an accountant or a lawyer.

I can simply enter “accountant vs. lawyer” into Wolfram. (It doesn’t work equally well with all professions. For instance, if you type “doctor,” Wolfram asks you to specify a specialty.)

Wolfram produces some great data. I learn that the average salary for an accountant is $59,430 while that of a lawyer is $110,590. I also find out that the number of accountants went down 2% last year, while the number of lawyers went up 0.6%. In addition, I discover that both accountants and lawyers experienced  median raise of 4% last year.

1. Mint.com
   1. Tracking spending

Mint, www.mint.com, does an impressive job of putting your finances at your fingertips. There’s simply no better tool for tracking exactly what’s happening with your money at any moment of any day. You do have to take a leap of faith by giving Mint some sensitive account information. But the rewards are worth it. You will be able to see how much you spend in a day, in a week, in a month, or in a year.

1. Assessing investments

You will be able to check how mutual funds, CDs, stocks, and bonds are performing once you have a Mint account. You can get a weekly report that tells you the percent gain or loss on each investment.

What tools do you use to manage your finances?

Song Analysis – “Not For You” – Pearl Jam

Restless soul, enjoy your youth
Like Muhammad hits the truth
Can’t escape from the common rule
If you hate something, don’t you do it too…too…
Small my table, it sits just two
Got so crowded, i can’t make roo
Oh, where did they come from? Stormed my room!
And you dare say it belongs to you…to you…
This is not for you
This is not for you
This is not for you
Oh, not for you…ah, you…
…scream…my friends…don’t call me…
…friends, no they don’t scream…
…my friends don’t call…my friends don’t…
All that’s sacred comes from youth
Dedication, naive and true
With no power, nothing to do
I still remember, why don’t you…don’t you…

This is not for you
This is not for you
This is not for you
Oh, never was for you…f#$% you…
This is not for you…
Oh, this is not for you…yeah, you…
This is not for you…
Oh, not for you…
Oh,

Vocalist Eddie Vedder about “Not for You”:

I believe…that there is something sacred about youth, and the song is about how youth is being sold and exploited. I think I felt like I had become part of that too. Maybe that’s why sometimes I have a hard time with the TV end of music and much of the media and the magazines. When I pick up a magazine, I just count how many pages of ads before the first article starts. You go one, two…up to fifteen to twenty or more. And then in the back you have phone sex ads. So I’ve pretty much had it. I don’t want to be the traveling medicine show where we go out and do the song and dance and someone else drops the back of the wagon and starts selling crap. I don’t want our music to sell anything—or anyone else use it. There are a lot of middlemen, somewhere between the band and the audience. I know you need some people to help facilitate things for the live show, and I’m not saying that I don’t appreciate these people but…In the last ten or fifteen years, there have been a lot of changes in music, and somehow the percentages being charged [by the concert industry] got out of hand. We also don’t want to be part of all the marketing tools or whatever, but believe me, we have been. [That happened] on the first album and that’s probably why we are where we are now, but it was hell and I feel awful about it and I’m not going to do it anymore.^[2]

He also noted that writing a song like “Not for You” felt like therapy because instead of writing about a character, he was able to express what he himself was feeling.

In another interview, Vedder stated:

These attitudes out there…that it’s the industry’s music… And it’s not. It’s mine. And it’s yours. Whoever’s listening to it. It’s mine and it’s yours. And everybody in between, they’re the distributors. I think that something like a music channel can be very powerful. Sometimes they think they’re the ones who decide what’s heard. I think that’s a dangerous situation. And, I think, what’s more dangerous is that they think it belongs to them. That’s probably what “Not for You” is about.^[3]

This song caught my attention because Eddie Vedder mentions Muhammad, peace be upon him, in the second verse. I even had the typical American Muslim reaction. I thought, “Does this mean Eddie Vedder is Muslim (hands open in prayer)?“  The answer is fairly clear – No. Then what is Vedder trying to say? He says, “Like Muhammad hits the truth. Can’t escape from the common rule. If you hate something, don’t you do it too…too…” He’s saying that Muhammad (S) taught the Golden Rule, usually stated in English as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And he’s being historically accurate because Muhammad (S) said, “None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.”(An-Nawawi’s Forty Hadith 13 (p. 56))[1]. Also, he said in a similar vein, “If anyone harms (others), God will harm him, and if anyone shows hostility to others, God will show hostility to him.” (Sunan of Abu-Dawood, Hadith 1625). Interestingly, he didn’t say in the song that this is something Jesus (peace be upon him) said. It’s ingenious that he quotes Muhammad (S) and not Jesus (pbuh). Can you see why? Most of his audience already knows that Jesus (pbuh) said this, but many of them likely do not realize that Muhammad (S), a man often reviled by Christians, said words to the same effect. This allows Vedder to make two points at once – one, regardless of who said it, treat people how you hope to be treated by them; two, if you focus on the moral teachings of different religions, you will see universal themes repeat over and over. These two ideas go hand in hand because Muslims and Christians, as well as people of all faiths and non-faiths, ought to treat each other with reciprocity because equality is a universal human value.

In addition, Pearl Jam is talking about the absurdity of the music industry. He describes how he attempts to have an intimate moment with a woman, not necessarily sexual, but part of a relationship, only to have it invaded by rude people. There is this inevitable conflict between his identity as a rock star and his role as a human being. I wonder if the couple at the table is a metaphor also for his relationship with his fans. This is something I’ve seen in U2’s lyrics as well where you can shift perspective and suddenly a song about a man and a woman becomes a song about a rock star and a fan. He wants to connect with the fan directly, even intimately, but all these barriers, middlemen, and pitfalls come in the way.

When he says, “This is not for you,” he’s referring to all those middlemen – agents, promoters, managers, perhaps critics, and others. He’s not dissing his fans, even though some might interpret it that way. He makes it clearer that his fans aren’t his enemies.

Look closely at the lines, “All that’s sacred comes from youth/ Dedication, naive and true.” This is his expression of his love for his fans. They are full of passion, innocent, sincere. Don’t think I skipped the line, “All that’s sacred comes from youth.” That is an immensely profound line. In fact, in another time, in another culture, thinkers could write volumes on that one line alone. There’s even a subtle yet poignant sense of guilt. I think he feels guilty that he’s taking money from these kids who he finds so honest in their devotion to him. The best he can do is to try to be the musician that he would want to see as a fan. And if he can do that, he will be paying back the young fans who pay him.

[1] “Religious Tolerance” http://www.religioustolerance.org/islam.htm/

[2] Hilburn, Robert. “All Revved Up (As Usual)”. Los Angeles Times. November 20, 1994.

[3]Chiam, Lynn. “Pearl Jam Interview”. Singapore’s BIGO (Before I Get Old). April 1995.