"The Rest Is Silence."

After I met and started dating Ross last year, something very strange happened. 

I stopped liking music.

Not all music. But a huge percentage of the music I used to love suddenly became dead to me. It wasn't a huge spiritual cleansing, a deep conviction, or anything along those lines, really. It was just that so much of the music on the radio - and so much in my own personal collection - no longer "applied" to me. I could no longer access the emotional strains of being lonely, hating an ex, being driven by lust, or unable to think straight because of romance.

My inability to connect with this kind of music was a gradual change. Even now, I still listen to it sometimes, but I am not moved by it anymore. Time was when that stuff would drive me to write, to draw, to connect to another part of myself, a deeper part that was aching for something more than what I had.

This isn't a case, exactly, of trying to fill the "God-shaped hole" we are all born with, but more a matter of trying to express feelings of frustration and loneliness by relating them to music. When those feelings - in relation to a romantic relationship - went away, so did my ability ro relate to that same music.

The irony of all this is how deeply I have always been connected to music. When he was younger, my father was the guitarist in a band (Yazoo Fraud, 1795; look it up). He sang me Beatles songs as lullabies (until I was 14, I believed that my dad was the one who wrote "Yellow Submarine"). My maternal grandfather was an phenomenal drummer who actually died of a heart attack while playing a concert. His ex-wife, my grandmother, played the accordian. My sister Gina and I grew up singing along with musical soundtracks: "Les Miserables", "Phantom of the Opera" and "Hello, Dolly!"   We must have sounded ridiculous to our parents; during the ensemble numbers, we would evenly divide all the parts and make sure we sang them all.  In character.  Loudly.  Sometimes with costumes.

Music has always helped with my writing and drawing. Even now, when I sit down to work on a play or skit, I find I need a soundtrack for it.  There are mixes I have for each kind of literary mood I'm in.  All of my characters have a theme song (the latest, a reluctant superhero named Five, has "Don't Call Me Baby" as hers.  You remember 1999, right?).  I envision scenes played out in front of me when I hear certain songs.  Maybe I am too connected to it.  I don't know.

I can tell you something, though...since I started listening primarily to K-Love (a national Christian music station), I have really lost interest in a lot of pop music.  It's not that I don't like the sound, or that I think the artists lack talent (well...some do).  I mean, I listen to classic rock, oldies, some pop.  But, overall, it's just that hearing Christian-raised Katy Perry singing about "going all the way" in a motel room with her "teenage dream" and listening to barely-old-enough-to-legally-drink Ke$ha talk about "brushing her teeth with a bottle of Jack" don't really inspire much of anything in me.  

Except disappointment.  

There is so much more to life than what pop icons sing about.  Maybe that's why I can't relate much anymore.  Because I have found Life, and His name is Jesus.