Her skirt ascends for a watching eye It's a hideous trait on her mother's side

I got my secondary, simpler sewing machine to practice on! I *think* I figured out what was wrong with the other one, and maybe this weekend, I will play with it more! Tonight, I hope to finish the skirt-project I was working on. It might not be the best thing ever made, but I hope at least that it's going to be cute!!!!

I am trying to do more things that require me to be away from my phone. Sunday was a very blissful day where I was hardly using it because I was deep in the sewing trenches. I am also trying to revisit things that had previously made me happy.

For many, many, MANY years, I was a huge fan of The Smiths. They were a seminal part of my life, and they really were "the songs that saved [my] life." Unfortunately, Morrissey ruined all of that. I think The Smiths also became associated with a really terrible era of my life, perhaps I had also over-listened to them. Couple those factors with how horrible Morrissey is, and you have me not being able to listen to The Smiths for years. The only consolation is knowing I already own all of the music and listen to it on my iPod, on top of Morrissey also hating when people listen to The Smiths. The above song (the live version with the "His Latest Flame" intro) was so seminal to that era, it makes my heart ache to hear it. I also keep rewinding the intro over and over again.

The Smiths were a perfect band that made perfect albums, 4 studio albums, a live album, and two very important compilation albums of b-sides and non-album singles. The Smiths were a perfect band that spoke to generations of the poor and working class, with themes of poverty, anti-capitalism,  anti-monarchism, anti-war, anti-corporal punishment, anti-meat/ fur,  and confronting the bleakness of said poverty and the way it makes the poor confront their own mortality. The Smiths were us. The Smiths were a perfect band who made perfect albums who were fronted by a deeply flawed, insufferable person, who had marketed himself as one of us. He certainly was, and is, not.

I love The Smiths and I hate Morrissey.

I will never give him my money again.

But I WILL start to listen to the songs that saved my life again, the ones that live in my iPod, the ones I already own, and delight in knowing he hates it when people listen to The Smiths.

Revisiting old things that brought me joy, and finding new things that bring me joy. I am forever just searching for joy.