The Only 4 Madonna Songs I Don't Hate

When I started this blog, I committed to doing it for at least 6 months, and keeping at it if I thought it was good and if the format was still interesting after that long.  Well, it's a little past the midpoint of the year, and I do think there is a lot I can do with this that I haven't done yet.  The inventory-esque format means that I can't always avoid things seeming contrived, but I do think having some restrictions can cause me to approach a subject from angles I wouldn't have otherwise thought of.  Sometimes I know what I want to write about, but can't think of an object that corresponds, or sometimes I start out with a specific message to convey about something, which then changes halfway through.  Either way, I'm interested in the variations of the results.

I've gotten much better, and also worse, at writing posts.  Better, in the sense that it doesn't take me an entire night of agony to get finished - I can now whip up something I consider acceptable pretty quickly, when I need to.  Worse, in that I can do this with only about 1/2 of my brain involved, and I'm not even talking about the nights where I'm tired and write 2 lines.  I'm talking about whole weeks of content that I've written while only distantly engaged in what I'm doing.  It's conventional wisdom that if you're bored writing something, then the reader will definitely be bored reading it.

Recognizing this bothers me - it is disrespectful to the reader to take the easy conclusion and wrap it up, and it's disrespectful to me not to go after the whole truth.  It's a matter of conscience:  often the determining factor of how I feel when I go to bed is not the events of that day, but how I feel about what I wrote.  So I have to try, in other words, to force myself to go deeper, get to something new, even be willing to have the same kind of early agony so that what comes out has heart and blood in it.

Anyway, the blog will continue, I estimate, until the end of the year.  I may do some playing around with the format, however, like I am now by declaring it the Week of Lists.  I would just like to note that whenever a song by Madonna comes on the radio, I immediately change the station, unless it's one of...

The Only 4 Madonna Songs I Don't Hate

1. Beautiful Stranger
I love this song, especially the disco version from the Austin Powers soundtrack. It contains this classic line: "If I'm smart, then I'll run away / But I'm not, so I guess I'll stay."

2. Take a Bow
This song wasn't around when I was in high school, but it reminds me of a sort of helpless my-emotions-are-making-me-act-really-stupid feeling, which I rather enjoy from the distance of the intervening years.

3. You'll See
A slower, quieter version of I Will Survive, so determined it's a little bit scary.

4. Burning Up
This one just makes me laugh because I always end up singing along to it.  Like this line:  "Unlike the others, I'd do anything / I'm not the same, I have no shame..."  It's funny because this is a persona that's so not mine that it's almost like taking on the inverse of myself.  It's probably inevitable to do that from time to time, and, now that I think about it, that's not always funny.