Saturday, February 21, 2009

That

16 years I have lived. 16 years since the awesome Meatloaf released the single for "I Would Do Anything For Love" and yet in all that time, every time I heard that song I never knew what "that" was. “That” which he would not do for love remained a dark mystery for me. Like the heart of the Congo it was only a vision in my mind.

And now, to be honest, I’m just a little disappointed in myself. I mean I know I'm not the best listener, I think every ex of mine would concur with that fact, but given that the mystery of “but I won’t do that” has been scratching the far reaches of my brain for the better half of two decades, I just expected that I would have to do more than listen to the duet part to figure out what “that” was. I expected that I’d have to do some PhD level psycholinguistics analysis of the lyrics or perhaps offer to let Meatloaf sodomize me with a cucumber…or an actual meatloaf. If the “that” of the song was such a deep mystery, surely getting the answer would require effort, ad resources, and deep spiritual insight. Or at least an encyclopedic knowledge of the various deviant forms of sex acts.

The crazy part is that it took YouTube for me to figure this thing out. I must have seen the music video dozens of times, perhaps a hundred, and yet it was YouTube’s crappy video quality that forced me to actually listen to the lyrics. Thank you YouTube.

I tip my hat to you Mr. Loaf. I would have expected some kind of freaky sex act involved corn cobs, chinchillas, a trout and perhaps melted cheese but no, you’ve got more class than “that” and your refusal to do “that” seems, in retrospect, very civilized. Oh, and Google says Michael Bay directed to the music video, so I also applaud you for not exploding in a giant fireball that could have destroyed 20 square city blocks, or crashing a moving vehicle of some sort into a stationary object of some sort.

I now feel among the lucky few for whom “that” is no longer a secret.

Stuck

For some reason I've been watching a bunch of foreign TV shows recently. But they're subtitled. And now I'm kinda stuck. I'm trying to figure out if it's easier to learn a foreign language watching something spoken in English but subtitled in a foreign language, or watch something in a foreign language but subtitled in English....Except for Korean 'cause I can't read any of that