"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”

New Music List

1. "You and I," Wilco with Feist, off of Wilco (The Album)

"You and I will not be strangers/ However we get sometimes it's like we never met/ But you and I, I think we can take it/ All the good with the bad, make something that no one else has/ You and I, You and I, Me and You/ What can we do? Well the words we use sometimes are misconstrued/ Well I wont guess, what's coming next"

2. "People Got a Lot of Nerve," Neko Case, off of Middle Cyclone

"You know they call them killer whales/ But you seem surprised/ When it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank/ Where you can't turn around/ It took half your leg and both your lungs/ And I craved I ate hearts of sharks, I know you know it/ I'm a man man man man, man man man eater/ But still you're surprised prised prised when I eat ya"

3. "Gone Are All the Days," Mirah, off of (a)spera

"And we were just a child with a myst that children make/ And we were running wild, no thoughts for what we'd break/ But gone are all the days, gone are all the days/ And once we learn to hide, our size did keep us safe/ The sidewalk cracks were wide, but to jump 'em made us brave/ But then the darkness came-a creepin' over every place/ Over time we took to sleeping, and let the weeds take over this place"

4. "Eet," Regina Spektor, off of Far

"It’s like forgetting the words to your favorite song/ You can’t believe it/ You were always singing along/ It was so easy and the words so sweet/ You can’t remember/ You try to move your feet/ It was so easy and the words so sweet/ You can’t remember, you try to feel the beat"

5. "Everblue," Mandy Moore, off of Amanda Leigh

"So you made yourself a new world/ Where even strangers make more sense/ I pay the pain up right straight ahead/ And with the beat/ You can ease yourself into the light/ Or keep that record on repeat"

Favorite Tunes as of Late

1. "Use Somebody," on Only by the Night, by Kings of Leon

2. "Save it for a Rainy Day," on Rainy Day Music, by The Jayhawks

3. "You Don't Know Me," unreleased, by Ben Folds featuring Regina Spektor

4. "At Least That's What You Said," on Kicking Television, by Wilco

5. "Tell You Something (Nana's Reprise)," on As I am, by Alicia Keys

6. "Hard Rain," on Our Ill Wills, by Shout Out Louds