And Everything In Between
Listen at spoti.fi/2VNoHmN • Collab 6 • 11 December 2020
Notes On Notes is a monthly listening exchange series. One collaborator creates a customized playlist, and the other listens and responds with a selection of non-musical pairings. Collaborators don’t know the themes or motivations beforehand, which helps to keep the process focused on discovery and surprise.
“And Everything In Between,” the December 2020 collaboration, features guest collaborators Dipali Anumol as playlist curator and Shining Li as respondent. Shining’s response features an assortment of pairings, from a UCLA survey instrument for measuring loneliness to the Bachelor In Paradise (Season 5). Together, this collaboration prompts us to think about the (e)motion sickness that comes from the highs and lows that 2020 has brought.
Playlist by Dipali
By all accounts, 2020 has been a bad year: a global pandemic, democratic backsliding, climate change, economic precarity, and growing uncertainty. I’ve felt lonely, sad, angry, exhausted, anxious, and overwhelmed. At the same time, we have also witnessed some moments of care, resilience, and courage: record voting rates, interpersonal acts of kindness, civic involvement, and protests. These silver linings have brought me joy and hope. With all its ups, downs and everything in between, 2020 has given me (e)motion sickness. While we’ve been forced to shelter in place through lockdowns, I feel far more connected to the events of the world through the internet, books, and social media. I’ve travelled while standing still. I’ve felt a multitude of emotions while largely anxious.
The playlist is meant to evoke these constantly evolving moods with overlapping emotions. Musically, the songs engender a sense of dissonance. Upbeat and cheerful music accompanies sad lyrics, and vice versa. Additionally, when listened to in order, the songs alternate between honoring positive and negative emotions. I use the word “honor” purposely. The precarity of 2020 has made me rethink my relationships with the intimate and the abstract—whether that’s meant finding solace in poetry, feeling calm in nature, recommitting to old friendships, or creating playlists to articulate my thoughts.
Dipali Anumol, a PhD candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, finds solace in feminist activism, tea, books, and art.
Listen to the playlist here.
Response by Shining
Is it callous to admit that it was really fun to listen to this playlist? Like Raveena, I took my sweet time—absorbing the songs’ emotional beats, making myself comfortable in their lyrics of longing and loneliness.
Listening felt like an indulgence, even an intrusion into someone else’s reality. It’s been many years since I’ve explored this affective terrain in my own life. In fact, I stopped listening to music around that time too, after I’d spent my adolescence curating a collection of beloved artists. Music had suddenly felt like too much to me—not piquant but searing, its vibrancy irradiating my senses. I began preferring the even-toned chatter of podcasts, which I could play on 2x speed without much loss of fidelity.
These days, I’m much more practiced at using my intellect like a cold knife against the world. I’m no longer used to vulnerability and its soft, exposed belly. But listening this week, I am jolted into remembering an earlier self, one who could sprawl herself out over a difficult experience, lovingly and patiently bearing witness to its full depth and nuance. I wonder what became of her — whether she has “matured” or whether she will re-emerge with coaxing. This playlist has offered re-entry into her realm, an unexpected door at the back of a wardrobe that I didn’t know I needed to find.
Shining Li spends her days thinking about how businesses get stuff done at frog (an innovation & design consulting firm). She spends the rest of her time living in a co-operative and figuring out what it means to be a good person in strange times.
Notes on Pairings
I was reminded by these songs of the specificity of different kinds of interpersonal pain—of being alone, being unseen, having a crush, an unwanted crush, etc. The dance of Schopenhauer’s hedgehogs, rendered in musical form through the playlist, made me think of other ways I’ve grappled with the question/experience of intimacy—mostly at arm’s length.
First, the discursive potential of reality TV is severely underplayed. Case in point: the relationship arc of Kendall and Joe, two contestants on Season 5 of Bachelor in Paradise, whose onscreen breakup and subsequent Reddit analysis were actually revealing about healthy communication.
Second, I’m fascinated by efforts to account for loneliness through “scientific” measures. There’s a cottage industry of psychological surveys trying to distinguish social vs. emotional loneliness. I find the questions for the UCLA Loneliness Scale particularly poetic (e.g. “I feel starved for company”). Comparing its first iteration (1978) with its latest iteration (1996), I wonder about the shift from first to second person—did they intentionally want to further isolate the respondent?
Quantified self efforts to unpack emotion (e.g. Robin Weis’ crying project) also offer a rich tapestry of emotional experience, though I’m not sure to what end.
Third, I think sometimes about the social life of sadness—when I hear about someone else’s pet sadness, I often end up catching their sorrow and making it my own. I’ve been gathering some of these sorrow seeds, like Leigh Stein crying over Timothy McVeigh’s last meal of two pints ice cream (as told by Elisa Gabbert), Tim Urban’s “cluey”-ness born out of social carelessness, and a Quora user’s story about eating a 25-pound lobster that has haunted me since I randomly stumbled across it two years ago.
Main artwork by Kaspars Eglitis on Unsplash.
