Jane, Divided, But I Can't Decide What Side I'm On, Jane Decided Only Cowards Stay, While Traitors Run, Jane, Jane

--"Jane", Barenaked Ladies

The girl works at the store sweet jane st. clair
Was dazzled by her smile while I shopped there
It wasn’t long before I lived with her
I sang her songs while she dyed her hair

Chorus:
Jane, divided, but I can’t decide what side I’m on
Jane decided only cowards stay, while traitors run
Jane, jane

I’d bring her gold and frankincense and myrrh
She thought that I was making fun of her
She made me feel I was fourteen again
That’s why she thinks it’s cooler if we’d just stay friends
Jane doesn’t think a man could ever be faithful
Jane isn’t giving me a chance to be shameful
Jane, jane
I wrote a letter, she should have got it yesterday
That life could be better by being together
Is what I cannot explain to jane
The girl works at the store, sweet jane st. clair
Was dazzled by her smile while I shoplift there
No promises as vague as heaven
No juliana next to my evan
Jane, desired by the people at the school and work
Jane is tired, ’cause every man becomes a lovesick jerk
Jane, jane

When I first started going out with Tara it was our custom to send each other small trinkets in the mail. It wasn't much, but after a half-liftime of writing people missives of enormous size, I used to get very gleeful when she would surprise me with something mailed out to me. Nothing, however, could match the immense pleasure that overcame me when she sent me a small hand-mixed tape of The Barenaked Ladies, one of her more favorite bands. Mind you this was way before they hit it huge by first going on Beverly Hills 90210 and then later on releasing "One Week." No, back when she gave me this tape it was a few years before the world at large knew who they were. Yet when I first started listening to them I knew they were going to quickly become one of my more favorite bands.

It wasn't so much that they mixed humor into a lot of their work--though that was a part of it. I still think "If I Had a $1,000,000" is one of the funniest songs I've ever listened to. It was more that in their more serious songs they adopted an attitude that for some reason always seems to draw me in. A variety of their songs seem to adopt the notion that it is possible for one person to be in love with somebody else and for the other person just not to be. That's a notion I always thought was true, but everyone else seems to adopt the attitude that it isn't possible to have true love with somebody that doesn't love you back. Most people in general seem to think that if it were true and real then it needs to be reciprocal in nature. Songs like "Straw Hat and Dirty Hank," "Break Your Heart," and "This Old Apartment" all meditate in different ways on this theme and those were always the songs, even though they weren't my absolute favorites by the group, that made me think about what my expectations of love were.

One song, though, was a favorite of mine and managed to push this philosophy to the forefront on my ruminating on the subject. "Jane" as a song and as a thinking piece works for me. To me, it's a classic song about someone who knows what he wants out of life and out of love in general who has the misfortune to fall in love with someone who's grown jaded and cynical, and basically is ambivalent about her chances of ever finding real love. As much as it is a song about a boy trying to convince a girl to fall in love with him, it's always a song about a boy trying to convince a girl that there is such a thing as true love. Ultimately, he fails at both, but the attempt is what always surprised me because of how hopeless a task it is. Every time I hear the song I get emotional. It isn't like the tracks by The Cure which can make me cry on cue, but every time I hear the song I get choked up because it always reminds me of Tara and how it subtly reminds me of how our situation slightly mirrored that of the song.

For us, though, it wasn't a matter of one person believing in love and the other didn't. For us it was always a matter of one person believing that one's first love could turn out to be the one and the other one believing that you needed to experience lots of firsts before you could decide which one is real. It became a constant squabble over whether we should stay friends or be a couple, and then whether or not to remain a couple or go back to being friends. Every time I hear "Jane" I remember what it was like to try and fight for a relationship that apparently only one of us wanted and how, like the song, it amounted to nothing.


that life could be better by being together
Is what I cannot explain to Jane

But this isn't a post to celebrate sadness. I think I do enough of that on here. This is a post to say that for as much hurt and as much sorrow our relationship drew out of me, I shall ever be thankful that a girl named Tara shared a small part of her with me in sharing her favorite music. That shall ever be a reminder, to me at least, that something substantial did exist between us once and that, for a time, we experienced an approximation of love.

It's just like Blake says. If it wasn't love, then it was the closest I'd come at that point.

So, thank you, Tara wherever you are now.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers