Stay

Just like Hal Sparks did on I Love the 90s, we are going to go way back to 1994 and listen to some Lisa Loeb (download here if you so desire). Everyone sing with me now (don't forget this is the part that she sings fast and she gets a little crazy):

"You say I only hear what I want to. I don't listen hard, don't pay attention to the distance that you're running to anyone, anywhere. I don't understand if you really care, I'm only hearing negative, a-no-no-no-baaaad. So I, I turn the radio on, I turn the radio up and this woman was singing my song..."

Good times. Good times. This song came on yesterday as I was driving home and I recalled being back in high school and writing journal entries in English class. It was my freshman year, and we had a teacher named Mr. Reeder, aka Mr. Reefer (I'm not entirely sure this was a bad nickname for him, which is probably the reason why he only lasted one year at my Christian school). In almost every class, Mr. Reefer had us write a journal entry in our composition books - Remember those? They were the ones that were black and white and had the black binding on them, you know, the ones that the pages were not meant to be ripped out. Man, school supplies. Greatest. Stuff. Ever. - and most days, these journal entries were open. Rather than writing about a given topic, we, as 14 year olds, were to write whatever was on our minds. I was just as paranoid and private then as I am now, and asking me to write my innermost thoughts on paper in a crowded classroom was like asking me to sing the National Anthem at the Superbowl. It wasn't going to happen. I must not have been a very creative teenager because rather than writing something original and fun, I chose to write the words to songs that I was listening to at the time from memory. I remember writing out all the words to Stay one day in class.

So last night on the way home, stuck in traffic (funny the ideas that you can come up with while inching along at 3 mph for 30 minutes), I had this great idea to find that journal and post one song per day all week. Only when I got home last night I couldn't find the composition book from that year. I did however find one from my sophomore year. Apparently my sophomore English teacher didn't give us as many open entries because there was only one song that I found in that book. It was Ironic, and at the top of the page my teacher had written, "Why do you and Michelle have the same entry?" Dang her. How could that Michelle have stolen my idea.