Hang-ups.

1. an emotional or psychological preoccupation or problem

2. a persistent cause of annoyance.

Everyone has them.

I definitely have them. I’ve been thinking about them a lot recently because of the CD I’ve been listening to while driving. The CD is the Ghost Mice/ Defiance Ohio colab CD, and a particular song has brought one of my hang ups in to sharp focus. The song is Austen to El Paso, and I’ll show you a small section of the lyrics because the song is pretty long. The line in bold is what catches me every time.

This road is a long and ugly road but
this road kind of feels like my home
i’m always aching
to find out just exactly where it goes

Icarus made some wings and tried to fly up to the sun
even though everybody told him that it could not be done
so he died, but at least he tried
and i bet that he had fun

Mar Chagall's painting of the fall of icarus.

Great little verse there, except that Icarus did not make the wings.

Daedelus (Icarus’ father) did, and it is an integral part of the story that he brings about the freedom, and subsequent destruction of his son. It is SO important, and they just skim over it.

To a normal person, this would not impede their enjoyment of the song, but to me it destroys it. When I am listening to that CD and that line comes on it’s like my brain hits a glitch and I can’t stop thinking about it, I immediately try to figure out ways within the rhyme scheme to make the reference correct, I start obsessively thinking about greek mythology and by the time I come out of this haze of obsessive thoughts and corrections I am already two or three songs further in the album.

So there is one of my hang ups: being correct.

That is not to say that I expect people to know everything there is to know, but I do expect them to know what they are saying.

You see, I have spent the better part of my life assuming that everyone knows more than I do, and that the information that other people give me is actually the correct information despite anything I had thought I knew or anything I had read. This was often true (for example, in high school I was full of shit, and my teachers were right about almost everything), but it is not always true.

It bothers me immensely when someone who is in a position of power (like a supervisor, or a professor) is wrong. Not ethically or politically wrong, but wrong about basic facts, science, or literature.

It’s so unfair of me to feel this way (after all, they are human) but I cannot help it, it is one of my hang ups.

My apologies to Ghost Mice, though I did figure out that Daedalus had the same number of syllables as Icarus. you guys could totally change that, just FYI.