My cure for a bad day was always to blast it louder
A barely-a-paragraph post of mine from 2005 had a simple theory: when you're down, put on a song you love and turn it up. Here's the very Italian, very Eurodance soundtrack I used to do exactly that.
There’s a post from me on the old DragonSiblings forum, from early 2005, that is barely a paragraph long and still gets at something I believe. The whole idea was this:
Is it just me, or if you’re sad or not in a good mood and you put on your favorite song, or a song you love and you blast it, it makes you feel better?
That was the entire theory, and I stand by it. The funny part, looking back, is what counted as “your favorite song” for me at the time. It was almost always Italian.
I had fallen hard for European dance music. The gateway was Eiffel 65, but it did not stop there. In that same post I was raving about a track called “Le Louvre” by Prezioso featuring Marvin, sung entirely in Italian, that I would blast on my little 2.1 speakers until, in my own words, I would “fall into a heaven.” I had no idea what the words meant. It did not matter even slightly. The sound was rich and big and it filled the room, and that was the whole point.
The rest of my rotation was the same flavor: Special D, the English version of Eiffel 65’s “Viaggia insieme a me” (which I was so excited to finally track down that I typed the title with about eleven exclamation points), a steady diet of Eurodance that almost nobody I knew in Missouri was listening to. I did not care about that either.
That is the part I would want a younger person to take from this. You do not need to understand a song, and your friends do not need to be into it, for it to do its job. Sometimes the favorite song is in a language you don’t speak, and you turn it up anyway, and the bad afternoon gets a little smaller. That trick has never once stopped working for me.