The Soundtrack of my Youth

„Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind“ - Marlene Dietrich 

This is the ultimate song to my childhood. Played and sung by my Dad as a lullaby when he sat by my bed. I remember being cozy, feeling loved, safe and warm under the blanket but with a sense of melancholy and sadness of a time that wasn't mine and struggles that I would never meet. For a long time I was too little to understand the meaning behind the song, I only felt that it wasn't a happy one. I often pretended to be asleep and when my Dad left, trying to be very quiet, I felt a rush of being lost and living in a secret world inside me, noone would ever know like me.

In the end, the song's about death and how to go on.

“Zu spät” - Die Ärzte

The first lyrics I knew by heart. Liking this German band was a family thing. My dad loved the music when he was younger and brought me and my brothers to it. Around the time I started to take guitar class (in third grade), it was also one of the first songs I could play on my own – more or less fluent and harmonic. The song talks about a disappointed love and a person who was dumped. He sings about the glorious future that he'll have as a rockstar and how the girl who dumped him is going to regret this very very badly. But with a sassy “too late” he rejects her like she had did earlier. Lyrics always play a role for me when listening to music, this was maybe one of the songs that started my enthusiasm about it.

“Sk8ter Boi” - Avril Lavigne

Avril Lavigne was kind of my heroine when I was younger. She was all I wanted to be.

And I think of Punk-Avril, 17, with ties and baggy pants and not her later version with pink skirts, skulls and strands of hair. She was cocky, sometimes rude, she made punk music – she was everything but a girly girl. “Sk8ter Boi” was the first song I was able to translate to German, when I was, let's say 11 or 12 years old. It was my Sims 2-phase and I loved the fan-made video of the song, too – It truly inspired me. I was digging it!

And let's be real, I still sing along today.

“Cornerstone” - Arctic Monkeys

A story I never told my ex-boyfriend, but still was my best moment on a music festival ever: That moment, when a guy behind me in the crowd agreed to lift me up on his shoulders and I could sit there, enjoying a much better view on the Arctic Monkeys playing on stage at Southside 2013. When Cornerstone came up and everyone was singing along, I had goosebumps. I felt magic. All along, I petted the hair of this guy I didn't even know the name of. I only remember someone had spider pig (from the Simpsons movie) drawn on his arm with sharpy marker and he was hella proud of it. As a thank you he received a kiss on the cheek. I never ever saw him again.

“Stolen Dance” - Milky Chance

One true friend who I've been so lucky to meet in Paris last year, introduced me to the song. I was kind of late liking it (a year earlier, it had been all over the radio but it kinda slipped through my field of... listening?). The song was one of those you listen to a thousand times until one day you get tired of them. When I catched a bike at République and cruised down the Boulevards, it was the soundtrack I would listen to, over and over. For me, it symbolizes all this year meant to me: Freedom, being young, living life like a party. For sure, I never danced like this before! (We don't talk about it)

"She Moves in Her Own Way" - The Kooks

First of all, I thought it would have been a shame if my favourite band was not represented on this list, so they had to be here. Secondly, this was the first song ever I knew by The Kooks so it was the song that introduced me to them. Thirdly, I still can blast this tune even though I listened to it a million times and lastly, maybe I like to think of myself als the girl "that moves in her own way". The girl that leaves a mark, that dances to her own melody, that is herself and herself only. I wish to be that girl.

“Today” - Joshua Radin

The ultimate Goodbye tune. This song was obviously only written to make people cry. The impermanene of life, of love of frriendships – The uncertainty of looking forward, of parting from people who have grown so close to you that you don't want to lose them ever. You don't want to get them out of your sight in the fear of never having them back in there.

"Kiss" - Prince

More recent, but still my youth (I just turned 20, okay?!), I got to be addicted to this song. My "new" (*coughes* SIX months already!) boyfriend showed it to me. He is kinda into old films and music - one of the many things that I like about him. And he loves to make his own playlists for occasions when he hasn't got a vynil record of that artist. The song kind of represents our relationship to me. It's fun, it's nice, it's exciting. I remember that one time when I visited him in Cologne where he lives with his Dad when he's home. When this tune came on on his stereo we both jumped out of the bed and started acting crazy. 
Dancing like we were in an embarrassing 80s music video. 

One thing for sure: If not one of the others, this song will get stuck in your head!

I hope you've enjoyed this soundtrack. Of course there are many more songs that I love and that were and are important to me, but I just selected these few spontaneously. Check out my friend Philipp's approach to the soundtrack of his youth. And have a really nice day! :)

Hard to remember

On: Memory

I wish I had a Polaroid ...

So I could remember - Shwayze

Memories get blurry after a while. Do you remember who you spent this day with?
I do, because it was only last weekend when we jumped into the April-cold Belgian sea together

So this is something was occupied with in Uni a while ago (in my cultural studies lesson). But since then, it hasn't left my mind completely. It keeps spinning round and round and I'm still trying to figure out why it concerns me this much.

Remembering. And, inseperably connected to it, Forgetting.

I reflected on changing in the past. And changing goes along with creating different versions of yourself. The past-version of you is different from yourself today. If not superficially, I'm sure, under your skin. We learn, we evolve, we grow, we make mistakes and so we alter our habits, interests, lovers, opinions, friends and lived spaces. 

Nights out. Getting french fries at 3 am.
But what did we laugh about again...?

But we are able to remember our past-versions, so these things don't get lost forever. 
In a round of friends we discussed past-versions of ourselves in a bar. One said she used to be a total punk when she was younger, wearing ripped gloves and studded belts and she even had dyed her hair neon pink at the time. 

Another one told us about a wild phase of hers when she was desperately (but successfully) trying to get into night clubs even though she was underaged. Except the one time she and her friend got caught by the police and she recalled how frightened she was back then.

We wouldn't know and we couldn't tell these stories, if we weren't able to remember them. I read that (following recent research, but not for sure though)  the amount of data our brain can store equals 2500 hard drives of 1 terabyte. That means you could remember three million hours of TV shows and maybe there would be still space left to fill up in your brain. 

But still, all day long we perceive millions and millions of things, we see a lot of strange faces (if we decide to leave Netflix alone for a minute and actually leave the house - I know... absurd). I read (but I don't remember where...badum tss) that all the people who play roles in our dreams are real or parts of real people we have once encountered. Even though our consciousness can't remember them, unconsciously, a catalog of faces is stored in our mind and re-used to fill up random characters in our dream world. How crazy is this???

A picture I took  when I visited my brother the last time. How does his face look again?
(I'm kidding)

The point I wanted to make is that we are not only able to conserve a ton of things, thoughts, places, feelings - but there are at least another ton of things a day that we immediately (or after a short while) forget. Mostly things that our brain sorts out as "not important" or "irrelevant" for our life. That's why it is so hard to recall what you had for lunch on Tuesday, two weeks ago.

And why you may better remember that big fight with your brother you had on the exact same day. Memories that are connected to strong emotions, such as anger, are more likely to be categorized as "relevant" by our brain.

Sometimes our brain works in mysterious ways. What we keep can seem random. For example, I am very good at remembering song lyrics and exact lines from comedians or youtubers I enjoy watching... Pretty random - But who knows maybe someday this will save my life...? Well, rather unlikely. 
What we lose is terrible. Maybe we wanted to keep it - beloved childhood memories, nice days with friends and family or things you did with your boyfriend. But hey, it's gone. At least I don't remember having a good time with him. Do you?

Remember cuddles in the kitchen, 

yeah, to get things off the ground...?

It was up, up and away - Arctic Monkeys

No, for real: I am afraid of losing my memories. It is losing a part of yourself at the same time. 
What am I when I have no memories? I can't tell my story. I don't have a story anymore. I'm so sad and sorry for Alzheimer's patients. I am afraid of getting the disease. I don't want to forget. Noone wants to. Not being able to recall your own child's features. Imagine, your mom doesn't know who you are anymore. Just imagine.
Another fear of mine is that my memories aren't real. It's scientifically proven that we alter our memories everytime we bring them to our minds again. Which means that our favourite, most beloved memories are the most fake of them all.


So what are they, in the end? Memories are such blurry, unstable, unclear thoughts, emotions, they are partly or completely changed fragments of our past.
What do we do with them? - We build on them, we base our identity on them. We live and decide in ways that "experience told us". We trust them blindly. We cry over them. Constructs of our minds leading us. 
But in a different way, they are not solid, always changeable, always adjustable for now and the new actuality. The same story, concluded by a different moral. Or different way of telling it. It's fascinating. It's frightening. Is anything of it real?

Hey, remember last summer when
we decided to make "Guerilla Street Art" for one night?

In the movie of "Divergent" (I'm sure you know it, don't you?) it is possible to view the dreams of the protagonist on screen. That's utopic for us today (Or dystopic?). 
But I am quite convinced that we will be able to do this in reality in the future. Will we be able to see our memories, too? Like literally seeing them on screen, letting other people be part of it like they are watching a movie? Whaaat?!
We would be able to compare memories of different people of the same incident. We would realize why they are so sure about what "really happened" - each one telling a different version of the story. Awesome!

But in some way, it would be creepy and unpleasant, too. Because, like our dreams and inner thoughts (as long as we don't brag about them on the internet, like I love to do), our memories are private. They are some of the most intimate things. Some of them are even secrets. 
There are others we love to share, of course: Funny things that happened, good news, wedding plans, a good book we read last week... But some are restricted. Some may never be told at all. Not forgotten till the end - but not told to anyone EVER. How would we react if there were people that were able to show these memories on screen? Maybe using them against our will and against us? 


Away from this dystopic, controled(-by-evil-leaders), futuristic world! 
Back to my memories. I remember a line on the receipt of a bar in Paris. The bar was rather shitty. It tried to hard to be an Irish Pub and showed a lot of soccer and Rugby matches on badly placed TVs. The drinks were too pricy and the seats uncomfortably high set. 
But on the receipt it said the name of the bar and after it "Easy to find - hard to forget". In a way, this saying was ironic. In a way, I thought, in a sudden semblance of melancholy: This is what I want to be for other people. Or maybe this is already the case. 
Thought of my ex boyfriend. Thought of people I don't know anymore who were close friends 10 years ago. Thought of how many people I had forgotten. Thought of all the people who met me once and had already forgotten me. 


But mostly I thought about the people who will remember me.

 "I could die right now, Clem. I'm just... happy. I've never felt that before. I'm just exactly where I want to be."
(katarinavelika.files.wordpress.com)