Things I Pay Attention To (whether I want to or not)

You know how there are things that you never noticed until someone points it out... and then you see it everywhere.  And you can't go back to NOT noticing it.  Here are some of the things in my life that I never noticed, and probably never would have noticed, had someone not pointed them out to me.

MusicPart 1:  Okay, I notice a lot in music, because I studied for so long, so I'm not going to list everything.  But the only thing I can never turn off, and that I figure out in the back of my mind without even putting any real thought into is the meter of a song.  And if it's in anything other than common time, I will most definitely comment on it.  If you have ever listened to music with me and I point out how "hey, this song is in 3/4"  "or hey look a song in 6/8, that almost never happens with stuff on the radio" you've gotten a little glimpse of what my brain does to every song, every time.  Also, if there is ever a meter change or complex rhythm like a hemiola (believe it or not they happen even in pop music) I will get ridiculously excited.  I'm nerdy when it comes to these things.

Music Part 2: A specific melodic pattern that is used in improvisation a lot.  My jazz teacher (I only ever took one jazz class) made us memorize all these short licks and standard progressions that are frequently used.  I hear them all the time.  ALL THE TIME.  Actually I should credit this same teacher for training my brain to never stop critically listening to music.  I may have written about this before, but one day when we got to class (it was a super early class), he was playing a CD.  Class officially started, but he didn't say anything, just let the music play for a few more minutes.  Then he stopped the song before it was over and said "pop quiz-- what was the structure of that song and where in the structure did I stop it?"  Um, yeah I failed that because aside from the fact that my ears were hearing it, I wasn't actually paying any attention to it.  And also, he loved to do really random off the wall things like that: pop quizzes, make us play a song without music in all 12 keys on the spot, force us to use a metronome but shift the down beat we played to the upbeat of the metronome, also to play with a metronome--mute it in the middle of a passage while we keep playing--unmute the metronome--show us how sucky our internal beat is when we were way off.  It sucked.  But damn it if I didn't learn a lot in that class.  (also this is the same teacher who told me at the beginning of my final playing exam that I was a terrible pianist "but go ahead and finish the test anyway"... gee thanks!)  Okay, I got a little bit off topic... moving on.

Literature:  The approximation of "my foot found purchase" as it appears in nearly every novel ever written in the English language.  Well, not really.  A friend of mine pointed out this phrase after she read a book that I had suggested to her.  A book that I had read, and yet did not remember coming across that phrase.  She said the author used it a lot and she found it distracting because it's not a commonly used phrase.  And I swear 75% of the novels I've read since that have used a phrase about something finding or not finding purchase.  It's really comical at this point and I always smile and think of my friend whenever I come across it.  One of these days I'm going to work that phrase into a conversation.

Photography:  In a word... light.  In many more words... light in the morning, light in the afternoon, is it cloudy?  What kind of light comes into the house in which window at various times of day.  Look at that shadow.  Huh, look at how the trees on one side of the road seem to be a different color from the trees on the other side because of how the sunlight is hitting them.  I notice how much darker it is inside even though our house gets tons of natural light.  I notice how my eye sees so much better in different light situations than my camera.  It won't turn off.