Urge Overkill - "Girl You'll Be A Woman Soon"

Never put this on a mix tape for a 21-year-old girl who is finishing her junior year in college, especially if you are her graduating-senior boyfriend who is dumping her and moving across the country. It's just demeaning, and vastly irritating. I never really liked the song to begin with , never really cared for Neil Diamond, nor for Pulp Fiction, and this didn't help at all. Although the moving away and the breaking up were ultimately very, very good. Also, when you are reliving the past in the present via Facebook, don't select "It's Complicated" for a three-month relationship that happened six years ago. Seriously.

The Clash - London Calling

I listened to this at Justin's old house, just off of Roosevelt. It was winter break of my last year of university, but was followed up in bulk that summer. I waited years, and among other things (a box full of uniforms; grounded; a copy of Anna Karenina; the inclination to stay in Seattle; a wide variety of emotional baggage) that I got from again living in the same city as him was a love of this album. "Train In Vain" is my favorite song. This is perhaps the most prominent entry in my ledger of "100% tension, 0% compatibility" relationships. Fortunately, there is good company in this group, due if to nothing else than to the law of large numbers.

Cat Power - "Cross Bones Style"

This is the only song that I can play on the guitar, and when I say "play," I mean half-assedly pluck with awkward zombie hands. And I spent a long time learning how to make those zombie hands, sitting in the crappy Brooklyn apartment trying to find some dexterity. Cat Power (by which I mean Chan Marshall) represents emotionally-broken girls everywhere, particularly those in college (and I would have probably been really into her in highschool as well). This song was first given to me on a mix cd my senior year of university, and fascinated me from the start. Some of the her songs are heartbreaking because of the hurt and pain, though others because of the ineptitude of their protagonists as they make their ways through a world shadowed by the inevitable misunderstandings and sufferings that arise and people try to interact with one another and claw their way through each day. I've never seen her perform live, but I hear there are a lot of tears shed by her on-stage at nearly ever show. I don't know whether I should applaud her raw, surface-level emotions, or give her a psychotherapist's business card. Probably both, which is why I can't listen to her most of the time. Too close to home.

Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American

2002-03, my room at The Rectory. It was clearly the former living room or library of the house; a big fireplace with mantle in the middle of the outside wall, four large windows, wood floors, and shelving around three of the four walls. Definitely top five biggest rooms on campus, and all mine. I listened to the same few cds the majority of the time that I lived there, with my loveseat perpetually covered in clothes and the makeshift king-sized bed. Living all isolated in the house definitely creeped me out, especially during holidays when campus was deserted - how I remember being alone on campus over Thanksgiving break, walking to the bakery during a blizzard, buying an entire pumpkin pie and eating it straight from the dish with a fork while watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer Slay-a-Thon on Thanksgiving day. It got dark around 4 pm, and I was totally freaked out, holed up in my room with all of the lights on in the house (sorry, global warming). This cd was my default for a big part of that year, the one that just lived in my stereo and was constantly playing, mostly because I couldn't be asked to change the cd. I recall sitting at my computer, IMing with Kate, and I can hear the intro to the first track in my head.

John Mayer - "Body Is A Wonderland"

Bringing on the sentimentality in full force. Spring 2002, my ill-fated junior year at university, my ill-fated faux romance. We kept different hours. He studied natural science, I was immersed in social science. I liked to read, he thought it was "too sedentary." I liked to talk, and I certainly did so when nervous, and he - didn't. Truly, I suppose, this was a case of affection, or at least tension, without a solid basis, which is why it was good that it only went on for a few months. People must have thought we were mad; that, or that I was flailing wildly coping with my messy life and disheveled emotions (true) and that he was just getting laid with no real commitment before graduating (doubtless, also true) (although I wouldn't define anything having to do with me, especially with dating me, as "easy"). It's hard to think back and come to any solid conclusions - all I know is that we haven't had two words to say on the couple occasions we've been in the same place, and it's bloody awkward. But this was our love song, "our" song, and I wrote the most pertinent lyrics in a picture frame twinned with a photo of us. It was all a very sweet notion. I was going through a popular music phase, and hoping some romance was out in the world for me. I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being at this point. I kind of failed.

Liz Phair - "Fuck and Run"

Ah, 2002. I have been a very bitter young lady at varying points in my life, and this song really embodies that spirit. I got into Liz Phair in spring of 2002, toward the end of my junior year in university. After my year-long dramatic relationship fell apart across the winter months, and I got into a new relationship one week later, I spent this spring being all swoony over dating a graduating senior who would end up moving across the country. While I was around campus at the very end of the year for JA training and reunions and graduation and trying not to fail out of school, I was holed up with my way-too-many belongings in my tiny, terrible temporary room blaring Liz Phair non-stop. It felt like everything around me was changing or ending. And this song just summed up everything I felt at that point, although it maybe didn't underscore the absolute misery and hopelessness and existential flailing that I had going on at that point in my life, beyond the simple desolation and abandonment of the unavoidable end of a relationship between two individuals poorly suited to one another. And thank god for that. Not to mention the fact that the song says that the cycle is a lifelong one.