three easy steps to sad

My song this week is Calendar Girl, the last track on Stars' wonderful, wonderful album Set Yourself on Fire. Amy Milan sings a lot more on this album than the not-nearly-as-awesome Heart; she has my favorite kind of hauntingly pretty voice. Here's my lyric:

I dreamed I was dying; as I so often do / And when I awoke I was sure it was true /
I ran to the window; threw my head to the sky / And said whoever is up there, please don't let me die

I wonder sometimes why I'm sad sometimes. And then I realize, I'm listening to depressing shit while reading books about genocide.

Hannah Arendt writes some of the most lucid prose I've ever read as she breaksdown what happens when people are 'just following orders.' Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is both a history lesson and a moral one, more than I got out of Aryeh Neier's War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror, and the Struggle for Justice this summer. A still more disturbing read is Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak. I'm pretty commentless right yet, and I don't even know that I can recommend it... it was gratuitous and rough and terrorizing. And that's where I'm at right now, working on my presentation, staving off studying, and overly sad.


I'm listening to:
Stars- Set Yourself on Fire