Piqued

Last week's Piqued involved MUSIC. And sure enough, right after I put it up, more new songs came pouring in... so I've included them below. This felt like a long week, where we had a lot of free time, but didn't do much with it. Eh, it happens. The weekend is pretty packed (our newly married friends had a booze-cruise-without-the-cruise party to help finish up leftover wine and beer from the wedding, and we have plans to rock climb at a new-to-us spot) so I'll take a quieter work week.First off, I heard All About That Bass by Meghan Trainor on Spotify and thought it was adorable, and hella catchy. So here is the original video: All About That Bass.Then my sister sent me this video of Jimmy Fallon and The Roots performing the song with Meghan with only school music class instruments (Fallon's background vocals absolutely make this version).But my favorite version is Postmodern Jukebox's where Kate Davis not the song is not only swinging with fantastic vocals by Kate Davis, but shes ACTUALLY PLAYING A BASS.Then, H and I were driving to the climbing gym last Saturday and Bang by Jessie J, Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj came on and I sort of freaked out. I don't normally care a whole lot about pop music, but this song was catchy, had killer vocals and I wanted to hit repeat as soon as it was over. Plus, I freakin' looovveeeee Nicki Minaj - I have no idea why - but it could have something with Superbass ruling my bachelorette party.In other news, I found this blog Reading My Tea Leaves and am enjoying reading through the archives, especially the Life In A Tiny Apartment series, especially especially b/c H and I just watched Tiny: A Story About Living Small and I may be a tad obsessed with staying living in ~900 square feet or less.I like to stay far away from trending topics (see: NFL players beating their wives, Joan Rivers dying, and anything related to politics) so it's hard for me to see the social media barrage on September 11th (I chose to write a poem for 9/12 this year). But I did see a tweet by a woman who claimed she was trying to return a photo she'd found at ground zero... for 13 years. So, I retweeted it. And then saw last week that the woman succeeded at finding the owner of the photographer and the people in it. And everyone is safe & sound. Yay social media!Lastly, this article on Accidental Creative about staying inspired.

If you want to remain productive and have ideas when you need them most, the stimuli you allow into your mind are important. Because creativity is essentially the combining of existing bits of inspiration into something new, the quality and relevance of your inputs will often directly affect your creative output.

Todd Henry suggests asking (3) people you admire what's inspired them lately and diving into that media a little bit each day. Not only is this a great idea to cultivate what you take in creatively, but it's also a great question to ask in conversations in general. And there's nothing I like more than good conversation.See all Piqued posts.