"Who am I?" "I don't know." "I guess I have a lot of things to ponder." -Derek Zoolander

“You don't know me at all.” –Ben Folds, featuring Regina Spektor, “You Don’t Know Me”

We all know what happens when we say things like, “ You don’t know me at all” to a counterpart—whether it’s a friendship where one’s Batman and the other’s Robin, or a parent to a child. The relationship is cut off and you start at scratch (or at least as much scratch as you can get). But what happens when you don’t know yourself at all? You can’t exactly sever all ties.

Ben Folds and Regina Spektor sang a duet on Fold’s semi-recent album Way to Normal (a route unknown all together), titled “You Don’t Know Me.” With a few small tricks of the piano, the melding of a man and woman’s poppy voices together, and rather depressing lyrics, a song was born. It’s actually sort of like The Weepies’ “Nobody Knows Me At All” from “Say I Am You,” but more about a sour relationship than a statement on repeat like The Weepies.

I was listening to both songs tonight. A friend sent me The Weepies tune earlier tonight, and last week Spektor dropped her follow-up album to hit-machine (though not her debut disc) “Begin to Hope.” The album, titled “Far,” plays sweetly, sometimes sadly, but mostly it’s just interesting. Sort of like this question I posed.

I’ve been thinking about the notion of Quarter-Life Crisis’s. Everyone’s heard of the pending Mid-Life Crisis, but it seems that everything is becoming fast forwarded, and now we’re stressing ourselves out earlier and earlier. This evening I was chatting with a friend from college about how I have these mini crises every day about life choices and the like. It got me to thinking about being 50 and wondering if I’d make the right choices. I guess I’m trying to get my crisis out of the way today, make the correct decisions now, so that I won’t have one comes the big five-oh. See, I can’t imagine being nearly done and thinking, “Well, what was the point? Was this the right path? Or just the path of least resistance?”

The only problem is that I don’t quite know what exactly I want to be doing. Leading me back to the serious issue of perhaps I don’t know myself (not necessarily a completely bad thing). We’ll see how this all pans out. I love that phrase, “It all comes out in the wash.” It makes me feel secure in my own strength, even though it’s meant to make people wary about telling lies.

“When I was a child everybody smiled, nobody knows me at all/ Very late at night and in the morning light, nobody knows me at all.” –The Weepies. “Nobody Knows Me At All”