Author Archives: Spencer J Smith

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“What’d I Say” About Trying to Force Things

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I wrote a post a while back about listening to jazz while I do work. Recently, I fast forwarded to listening to 1950s R&B, and I think that was a marvelous decision. Ray Charles has been one of my go-to’s

Ray has this one song called “What’d I Say.” It’s almost a six minute song and Ray wrote it by improvisation at a show one night, and it quickly became a crowd favorite. It became so popular that he made his producers record it.

The problem was that at the time, singles didn’t really go over three minutes. In the dramatized cinematographic version of Ray Charles’s life, the producers threaten to cut out a verse or two. I don’t know if that’s true. But I imagine something like that is. We always want to put new things into the mold of old things.

Ray and the studio came to a compromise – they would record the whole song, but they would split it up into an A-side and a B-side. While that worked out, I suppose, the entire six minute song is really worth listening to all the way through.

And the song deserves a full listen. It almost brought on the genre of soul all by itself.

The point of all of this is to say two things.

1) We should probably stop trying to make new things like old things. New things would be more successful if we let them be new.

2) Sometimes, though, even when we mess up and think that new things need to be like old things, magic still happens.

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As Relient K Says, We Should Get Jerseys

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When I was in the fifth grade, we had these teen mentors that came from the high school. I think their purpose was to get us all ready for junior high and the halfway high school things we would experience there like kissing and truth-or-dare sleepovers. They railed against peer pressure and taught us about character. I was totally into that sort of thing. I’m still into that sort of thing. I wish I had an adult mentor or something now.

Anyway, we had a boy and a girl. And I remember that our class was obsessed with the fictional idea that they were dating. We used to put questions in the anonymous question box about it. The girl would always answer. She would blush a whole lot and then talk about how great of friends they were, but no, they weren’t dating.

I’ve been thinking about that idea a lot because I am now a leader volunteering with middle school students. And I wonder if they have fictional ideas about my love life.

I think the tendency of kids to think a boy and girl team are dating actually tells us a lot about love in a really simple sort of way. In college, I see a lot of people thinking that love is having a warm body with which to cuddle, or having somebody to whom to complain, or having someone with whom to go on dates.

None of those conceptions really gets to the heart of the matter, though. The married couples I see as successful and the relationships that I admire are the ones that operate like a two-person team. Love is a beautiful, half-choreographed, half-improvised dance duet.

Children understand this. That’s why when they see a boy and a girl working efficiently together, they assume dating status. At some point we forget it, though. We get caught up in doing the same-old Electric Slide and never really think about the beauty of creating something new and original with another person.

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A Story About a Bagel from Which You Can Draw Your Own Moral

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The other day, I burnt my morning bagel.

When I moved into my apartment a couple of months ago, I brought along this pretty janky toaster. It’s old school. Back then, when I had just moved in, I burnt things regularly. There was a learning curve. I had to learn the proper settings and techniques to make my bagels, Pop-tarts and English muffins the perfect golden brown.

Back then, I didn’t mind burning things so much. It meant that I was learning. I was getting better at the whole toasting business. I was on my way to a post-burnt society.

The other day, I burnt my morning bagel.

I was devastated. This burnt bagel served no purpose! I knew the mistake I had made. I couldn’t really learn from it. It was a lesson I had already learned. My biggest regret was not taking a picture of it before I threw it away so I could post it here.

I begrudgingly put another bagel in the toaster. And I watched over it diligently, not wanting to make the same useless mistake twice.

The other day, I made the most perfect bagel ever.