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So, on the radio, my show is now called “The Independents” and I’m now called “Meatball.” Today’s show featured music by bands who are on, or have worked with, labels associated with Beggars Group. Indie powerhouses like XL, 4AD, Matador, Rough Trade, etc.

Here is what I played:

Bon Iver – For Emma
The National – Terrible Love
Iron & Wine – Naked as We Came
Frank Black – Headache
The Mountain Goats – No Children
Ra Ra Riot – Dying is Fine
Stereolab – French Disko
TV on the Radio – Staring at the Sun
Arcade Fire – Ready to Start
Belle and Sebastian – I Fought in a War
They Might Be Giants – Dr. Worm
The Pixies – Broken Face
The Hold Steady – Stuck Between Stations
The Breeders – Cannonball
The Strokes – The Modern Age
The Fiery Furnaces – Here Comes the Summer
The Decemberists – Sons and Daughters
Sufjan Stevens, Springfield, or Bobby Got a Shadfly Caught in His Hair
Modest Mouse – Whenever You Breathe Out, I Breathe In (Positive Negative)
Badly Drawn Boy – The Shining
Beirut – Postcards from Italy
Thom Yorke – And It Rained All Night
Sonic Youth – Teen Age Riot
Sigur Rós – Gobbledigook

Next week, maybe a SST and Dischord show? East coast vs. west coast. Or maybe a midwesterners show. Tune in next Wednesday, 2-4 p.m. Eastern on scadatlantaradio.org to find out.

According to the Meyers-Briggs personality type tests, I am categorically INTJ. This means Introverted-Intuitive-Thinking-Judging. Of Americans, 2.1 percent are INTJs (about six and a half million people, or approximately the same number of people who live in Massachusetts). It’s something I regard as any of my other personality traits  — good or bad, they’re what I am, and better to try and embrace them, and nurture them positively, than try to hide them.

Some traits of INTJs: independent, creative, logical, problem-solver, analytical. INTJs also care more about ideas and efficiency than other people’s feelings, and are not very good at pretending otherwise. Hence my abhorrence of bullshit, intolerance of most other humans and my ruthless application of “Yeah, but does it work?” to nearly everything I (or those around me) work on. I don’t care whose idea we use, only that it’s the best idea in the room. I hate wasting time (mine or others’). If there’s a better/easier/more efficient way to do something, it will kill me to do it in a wasteful way. I like to be the person on the inside, building the system and improving it, figuring out efficient ways of working and implementing them, then testing them and changing them and making them better, so that the people on the outside, the pretty people or the people who speak well or are however in the spotlight can count that their stuff is being handled right, because I did it. Behind every great man/woman, there’s an INTJ somewhere managing the SHIT out of things. (And then, also, hopefully, some kind of intermediary manager person to keep them from the mutual unpleasantness of having to talk to each other.)

Not surprisingly, this personality type is rare among women*, and people with this type are most likely to be engineers, lawyers, scientists, etc.** While I’m none of those things, I do have a career where I solve (sometimes complex) problems all day, develop systems and test them and tweak them, help other people solve problems through logical reasoning and creativity, and usually spend at least 2-4 hours (sometimes entire work days) completely alone. Days where I spend a lot of time in a large group of people, or talking to lots of people, or being sociable, wear me out. It feels like for every hour I spend at some large-scale event, or talking to lots of people, I need to spend at least an hour in my bedroom alone being quiet and thinking. There’s a tipping point, I bet, between “INTJ” and “Avoidant Personality Disorder.”

I tell you all of that to tell you this. If I know you, and we’re friends, or acquaintances, or we work together, or are colleagues, or however, I’m usually very happy to see you, even if I don’t seem like it. Sometimes, we really don’t have to talk. I don’t think silence is awkward. (Some of my favorite days spent with my mother we’re both just sitting around the house reading books and not talking. It’s lovely.) Yes, I am alone a lot, but I’m hardly ever lonely, so don’t worry about that.

If we work together, and I inadvertently hurt your feelings by not being emotionally supportive, well, I acknowledge that. I can’t really say I’m sorry, because such a thing does not compute. To me, in my head, work=logical and rational. Work is about ideas and doing things to carry out those ideas in the most efficient, practical, useful way possible. If you want warm and fuzzy, get a puppy.

If you tell me a problem you’re having, and I interrupt you to give you practical advice, feel free to tell me “No, I really just want you to listen to me as my friend.” Seriously. Otherwise, my brain is reacting as the problem-solving machine it is and just wants to pump out solutions. People who are my friends can tell you that, if I’m aware that advice is not wanted, I can be a compassionate, friendly listener. I can be a good friend, I just have to know what you want upfront.

All this heavy self-analysis is making me hungry.

*Side note: I wonder if it really is, or if women lie when they take these tests to choose traits more stereotypically feminine like caring a lot about other people’s feelings.

**Blech. Also careers not considered stereotypically feminine. I hate this crap.

My hair is gray. Only about 25 percent of my hair, but enough of my hair that it’s noticeable (most of the gray areas are in the front). The other 75 percent is dark brown, but I don’t have much of an issue with that hair. It’s this other hair I don’t know what to do with.

I started having gray hair when I was about nineteen. This is unusual. I read a bunch about it, and among Americans, 40 percent or more have some gray hair by the time they are 40 years old. I am not 40 years old. Your hair goes gray because the melanin-producing parts of your hair follicles stop working, so your hair grows without pigment. (Melanin is also what’s responsible for skin color and eye color, as well as other pigmented parts of your body on the inside.)

I would describe my skin as “fishbelly translucent pale.” Really. And it’s not of that beautiful, sensitive, alabaster quality either. It’s of the “don’t go outside because you might catch on fire” quality. I don’t tan. I burn, quickly, and to a lobstery red. Or, I freckle, to the point where any of my skin exposed to sunlight is freckly. My face is always pink, like I’ve been running (or drinking whiskey for days). My eyes are green, but since I also have a round, pug-shaped Irish face, they’re small and deep set. This is all just for context. I’m having a raging hair debate here I need to talk about.

So, I’m going gray a la Anne Bancroft in “The Graduate.” (Note: she was only 36 in this movie, and Dustin Hoffman was 30.) Previously, I dyed my hair. From age 18-19, it was bleached and processed into hot pink, purple, light blue and dark blue. It’s been dyed black, and brown, and highlighted blonde and caramel and red and other classy/appropriate/ladylike combinations. But now I don’t know if I want to keep dying it.

It feels like there are these “Adult Woman Things” that I am expected to do that I don’t remember signing up for. Like manicures and pedicures. I hate that stuff. When they bring out that metal scraper thing and shove your skin back into  your finger between your skin and nail, I want to pass out. The only thing worse is when they start cutting it all off. (Seriously, isn’t that skin growing there for a protective reason?)

Same with eyebrow plucking and waxing. I occasionally now will pluck errant stray hairs, but I used to go get them waxed. (A lady puts hot wax onto your face with a popsicle stick, puts a piece of cloth on top and then rips your sensitive eye-area hairs out by the roots.) And yeah, it hurts. And, since my skin is the aforementioned transparent-pale, it gets really really red. And swollen. Like two bloody slugs are laying on my face. Getting a wax meant immediately going home and staying there for at least 24 hours or risk being asked what fight club I belong to.

Ditto makeup (that’s a lot of work, plus I hate the feeling of stuff on my face, I do wear a daily dusting of mineral powder to even my face out, but that’s it). Ditto contact lenses (I’m not functional enough in the early morning to put my finger into my eye). Ditto other hair removal ickiness (I do shave my legs, under my arms, and neaten my lady areas, but beyond that, really, is terrifying.) I do personal care things (shampoos, conditioners, fancy face washes and lotions and sunblock all day every day and deodorant and sometimes even perfume, and on fancy occasions I’ll wear lip gloss and maybe a little mascara, but then I have to be crazy careful not to rub my eyes and turn all raccoony). I take care of myself, my body, etc., I just don’t go farther than that.

I feel like dying my hair to disguise the gray (either by dying it all brown to match, or getting some blonde/caramel/whatever highlights to blend in) is one of these “Adult Woman Things” that I REALLY SHOULD be doing. I’m not being rebellious here (at worst, I’m just lazy, and don’t like things that hurt, or take time, or feel slimy), or trying to strike out against whatever prescribed woman’s roles/responsibilities to the beauty dynamic whatever stuff. I just don’t LIKE these things. Just like I don’t like spinach so I don’t eat it, and I don’t like gin so I don’t drink it, and I don’t like brown so I mostly wear black and gray as my neutrals. I like coffee better than tea, but nobody asks me if I’m trying to make a statement whenever I order at Caribou.

I’m 29 years old and single. A lot of women (yes, women) have tried to coax me to makeup, clothes I don’t like, lifestyles I don’t like, etc. because it will make me more attractive to guys. This is the reason they offer. The benefit. Really? I’d be more likely to wear makeup if you told me it would summon a magical delivery of those big, soft pretzels you get at the mall. Sure, I’d love to be more attractive to guys, but I would also love to not have to do things I don’t like.

I’m sure other women (and plenty of dudes too, and plenty of people of other gendered-or-non-gendered self-identifications) love makeup. Or love getting their eyebrows waxed or having their nails done or would just simply die before letting gray hair show. And I respect their choices. I want them to do what they like, and I want to do what I like. When I see girls in Sephora (yes, I go there for fancy lotion and body wash and lip gloss) getting giddy over makeup or whatever, it makes me happy, the same way it makes me happy to see a little kid be excited about a balloon, or a cookie. I want them to love things and to be happy, even if they’re things I don’t love myself.

(For the record, there are plenty of things I love, like shoes, and dresses, and specialty shaping undergarments that are not exactly comfortable. But I’m willing to make that sacrifice for how I look or feel in them, just like other people are willing to make sacrifices and endure discomfort for the way they look or feel with other things, like pushed-back cuticles or botox.)

I don’t think I’m going to dye my hair. I just want to see what happens with it. Will it all go gray? Or just the front? It will be a surprise. And there are so few real surprises possible in our modern world that this little, nothing surprise might be worth it. It’ll be just like when I dyed my hair hot pink — I didn’t know how it was going to turn out, but I knew it would be something I’d never seen before, and that was really exciting.

Today’s show was about great independent record labels. I tried to represent as many of the classic indie labels I could, and I also played a lot of new new stuff. (New stuff is marked with a *. I am calling anything new if it came out in 2011 already. Some stuff on here came out this week, or hasn’t even come out yet.) Labels represented included: 4AD, Matador, Sub Pop, Merge, Saddle Creek, Kill Rock Stars, Jagjaguwar).

I absolutely loved planning, scheduling and playing every second of this show. Love love loved it.

Bright Eyes – First Day of My Life
Best Coast – Boyfriend
The Babies – Sun Set*
Dum Dum Girls – Take Care of My Baby*
Deerhoof – No One Asked to Dance*
The Mountain Goats – This Year
Spoon – You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb
J. Mascis – Very Nervous and Love*
Built to Spill – Liar
The Decemberists – Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect
Guided by Voices – Big Boring Wedding (by request! Hi there James in Massachusetts!)
Animal Collective – Grass
Modest Mouse – Breakthrough
Thao with The Get Down Stay Down – Bag of Hammers
Cursive – Sink to the Beat
Okkervil River – Singer Songwriter
Wolf Parade – I’ll Believe in Anything
The Shins – The Past and The Pending
Bon Iver – For Emma
Mogwai – Letters to the Metro*
Wye Oak – Civilian*
Shearwater – I Was a Cloud
Sparklehorse and Radiohead – Wish You Were Here
Iron & Wine – Boy With a Coin
Bright Eyes – Shell Games*

This is a wildly self-indulgent post that doesn’t make much sense, and for that I apologize. But really, it’s my blog, and if I can’t be nonsensical and self-indulgent here, where can I be?

In 2002, I lived in a ramshackle house with my friends near the railroad tracks in Columbia, S.C. Sitting between what we thought was a halfway-house and a vacant lot, and for some reason diagonally cornered from the back of the governor’s mansion, the place was perfect. Just dumpy enough that you didn’t worry too much about damaging it, and just nice enough to sleep easy. Right now it’s for sale and listed at $94,000. It also calls itself a 2-bedroom, 2-bath. One of those bathrooms is as big as a bedroom, but all the fixtures are crammed over in one corner, and the other is the laundry room with a toilet and sink. The back yard is brick pavers. The sewage lines are made of clay pipes, and would overflow into the yard.

I moved in with three of my friends in April or May, from a dorm. I was graduating in December, so signing a full-year contract with the college’s res life department was dumb. Our rent was $800 a month, split 4 ways. I still can’t believe it.

I was 20 years old. I didn’t know what to do with my life, and the days were counting down to when I’d graduate and need to have that figured out. I alternated between feelings of complete panic and reluctance, and a strange satisfaction with my everyday life. Classes were going well, we lived near a park, I was dating someone I liked to be around. I had great friends and a sports car and things to do and was generally okay with everything. But any thoughts of what would happen after December 2002 sent me into a wide-awake nightmare. What do I want from my life? What am I going to do? Why don’t I have this figured out yet?

That year “Lifted” by Bright Eyes came out. It was one of a few albums I listened to constantly.

To be honest, I can’t remember buying it, and I can’t remember how I found out about it, or how I liked it, or who told me about it. Did I read about it? Did a friend tell me? I have absolutely no idea.

There’s something about it (as well as subsequent Bright Eyes releases) that I just love. Something about the simultaneous simplicity and grandiose sound. Conor Oberst’s strange and imperfectly perfect voice. And a general feeling of anxiety, excitement, sadness, joy and everything else. It felt how I felt, in a way I couldn’t put into words.

When I moved to Atlanta last year, my friend Matt introduced me to his friend Jason. Jason is a couple years older than me and he’s great. Funny, loves good food and friends and lives in a house perfectly suited for wonderful evenings of cooking, eating and enjoying good company. He’s really easy to be around, and has a spirit of adventure combined with a sense of down-to-earth-ness that’s very comfortable. He and I got along great from the start, and I don’t know how it took so long, but we discovered we have the same ridiculously weak spot for 90s-2000s indie rock.

(And not to sound stereotypical, but before this, I’d only ever met very typical guys who like indie rock: dangerously chubby or skinny, socially awkward, timid and brash at the same time, straight and with jerkily high standards for girls, working at record stores or copy shops or as designers or artists, etc. Jason is a tall, good-looking, has-his-shit-together gay guy with a law degree.)

So last night, Jason and I went to see Bright Eyes. They’re on a farewell tour of sorts. I read that Oberst wants to wrap up that alt-folk-country-rock-amalgam that is Bright Eyes and close the door, with a nice loving goodbye. It was a fantastic show, entertaining and brilliant and beautiful, at the Tabernacle in Atlanta, a huge dramatic old church downtown. The floor was filled mostly with people our age (late 20s, early 30s), but near us in the crowd was a teenage couple I couldn’t take my eyes off. They sang along to every word of every song, even the new ones, with their heads thrown back and their eyes closed, or jumping and waving their hands.*

Simultaneously I felt old and jaded and boring and somehow incapable of feeling that kind of unrestrained joy publicly. That unjaded, reckless enjoyment of something. The feeling in the crowd was so positive, so lovely, even Oberst himself sounded genuine and honest when he told us how much he loved playing here, and how we were just the nicest audience. I love seeing and being around people that are just so happy and enjoying what’s happening and who have an energy that’s palpable almost.

People who know me are aware of my reluctances and difficulties with being emotional. I get easily overwhelmed with feelings and can’t function like a regular, sensible person in society. It’s not that I don’t have feelings, it’s just that it’s almost physically painful sometimes to feel this much inside all at once. If I had to feel things all the time, I’d probably just stay in bed crying all the time — not just from sadness or happiness, but the combined, compounded effect of 29-years’ worth of feelings I can’t let go of. And then how would I get any work done?

It’s so hard to be happy sometimes, but I was happy when I went to bed last night. Thanks to Jason and Matt and Conor and a little bit, I guess, thanks to me. Not everything is perfect, and my life isn’t figured out or settled, but there’s something to be said for feeling OK about it, even just for a little while.

Playlist for today: I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning by Bright Eyes, of course.

*The show had a lot of really fantastic moments. For example, during the encore, Oberst introduced a song by saying “This song is a little mischievous, and for that I apologize.” Then they launched into a loud, boisterous “Lover I Don’t Have to Love,” which is a song I wouldn’t call mischievous (it isn’t cheeky and cutesy or told with a wink, it’s about love and hurt and using people, which is a lot worse than just mischief). But something is really interesting about the dichotomy. Let me apologize for this song that’s pretty hurtful and severe, but while I’m apologizing, I’m going to totally downplay that it’s so harsh. That conflict, somehow, is just so human. So flawed and so perfect all at once.

This week’s theme was Desert Island Discs 1994-1996. So many of my favorite records of all time came out during these three years it’s crazy.

Pavement – Gold Soundz
Picked by Pitchfork as the #1 track of the 90s.
Weezer – Getchoo
Elastica – Connection
Matthew Sweet – Sick of Myself
Radiohead – High and Dry
Apparently, nobody likes this song but me. Not even Thom Yorke likes it.
Belle & Sebastian – I Don’t Love Anyone
Modest Mouse – Dramamine
The Rentals – Friends of P
Trivia: Maya Rudolph from SNL sang backup and played keyboard on tour with The Rentals.
Tripping Daisy – Got a Girl
Members of this band eventually went on to form The Secret Machines, The Polyphonic Spree and School of Seven Bells.
The Specials – Pressure Drop
Green Day – Welcome to Paradise
And punk becomes mainstream.
Rancid – Time Bomb
Sounds like Operation Ivy, who sound like The Specials.
Jawbreaker – Accident Prone
This is my favorite song of all time.
Bjork – It’s Oh So Quiet
Fiona Apple – Criminal
Beck – Devil’s Haircut
That dog on the cover is a Hungarian Komondor.
Eels – Not Ready Yet
Cake – Sad Songs and Waltzes
Actually a Willie Nelson song.
Fountains of Wayne – Everything’s Ruined
They Might Be Giants – S-E-X-X-Y
Blackstreet & Dr. Dre – No Diggity
This is the song that FINALLY knocked The Macarena out of Billboard’s #1 spot. All hail Blackstreet.
Beastie Boys – Sure Shot
Veruca Salt – Seether
The Lemonheads – If I Could Talk I’d Tell You
Pavement – Rattled by the Rush

Of course, there are tons of things I didn’t play that came out during those three years I also love, like:

1994
Hole – Live Through This
Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik – Outkast
Dinosaur Jr. – Without a Sound

1995
Fugazi – Red Machine
Mercury Rev – See You On The Other Side
Sonic Youth – Washing Machine
Montell Jordan – This is How We Do It

1996
Tupac – All Eyez On Me
Blur – Live at Budokan
ATLiens – Outkast
The Doggfather – Snoop Dogg

Overall, a show I enjoyed doing. Now… what to do next week?