The Music Meme

When Melody emailed me and said "You've been memed" I knew it meant I'd been asked to answer a bunch of questions, but I wondered what the heck "meme" meant. On her blog, Melody fretted about being older than some other bloggers out there...but heck, she knew what a "meme" was! Ah well, what I lack in youth I make up for in curiosity and persistence. I googled it and found this definition: "A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. (Term coined by Dawkins, by analogy with "gene".) Individual slogans, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. "

I guess it's a sort of a bloggish chain letter. (Um, Melody, can I expect to get a flood of dollar bills in the mail too, as well as good luck for the rest of my life?) It reminds me vaguely of seventh grade, when my friend Junko and I spent an inordinate amount of time writing each other lists of questions and then answering them for each other and passing the letters to each other between classes.

1. Total amount of music files on your computer? Hah. I've been fiddling with Itunes for a while and just got an Ipod. My computer tells me that I have 2 gigabytes of music on my computer. Does this make me stylish and cool?! I do love being able to download selected songs for 99 cents each.

2. The last CD you bought was: The Gypsy Kings, Cantos de Amor. Great background music. And I just downloaded "Daughters" by John Mayer.

3. What is the song you last listened to before reading this message? Kenny Loggins, singing "Alive and Kicking". Kenny Loggins is major nostalgia for me--in college my roommate and I saw him in concert whenever we could...and, coincidentally, on the night Roger and I got married, he was performing at the site of our wedding (a winery that also had night-time concerts.) So, we got tickets for the whole wedding party and went that evening to the concert. I bought his newest CD because I've just always liked the guy, but I have to admit that this is really the only good song on the CD.

4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:
This is hard for me to do with individual songs, so I'll do general CDs. "Fields of Gold" by Sting. "One All" by Neil Finn. "Mirrorball" and "Afterglow" by Sarah McLachlan. Anything by The Gypsy Kings.

5. What 3 people are you going to pass this baton to and why?
Julie at High Fiber Content , because anyone who celebrates Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day is my kind of woman;
Pam at PaMdora's Box because I love her whimsical quilts (and I know she'll contemplate the questions while doing yoga); and
Deborah at Deborah's Journal because I enjoy her blog a lot!