Ramble On

Listen while you read here:   2012 in song   on Spotify The theme in this music** is hope beyond hardship, and that’s definitely been the theme for my year. Another theme is the brokenness of man, and how love transcends that brokenness and grants freedom and joy despite it. It is these ideas that have sustained me this year, and these songs have served as reminders, encouragers, and respites. Something brighter is up ahead. I am definitely on the “traditional music” train and have been devouring all the banjo, fiddle, slide guitar, and stripped down production I can find. There is such beauty in simplicity. **Note: Some of these songs are included simply because they sound awesome and I couldn’t stop listening to them. Mostly in the Honorable Mentions. There’s not much depth in my selection of them beyond that. The House that Heaven Built - Japandroids I set this as my alarm for about 4 months this year. I couldn’t get enough of it, my rock-out jam of 2012. ...

I have been listening to the Youth Lagoon album "The Year of Hibernation" at work a lot while burning through piles of transcripts and request e-mails. I find it uplifting and helpful when I need to rise above the tedium. One of my few complaints with the album is that I can't readily understand what the lead singer is saying and I'm a very lyrically-driven listener. The songs on this album are similarly structured and usually start quiet, progressively adding layers of sound, instruments, and volume. They are built around major chord structures and so it's a positively dreamy album, a la Camera Obscura, except with falsetto male vocals and less retro sound. Good driving beats on the toms too. It's not what I would listen to to get my engine running in the morning but it's a great background soundtrack, as I have mentioned already. So today during a spare moment when I was marvelling at the beautiful sonic swell in the last two minutes of the ...

I knew that I loved this band the second I heard their song "Lost in my Mind"'s chorus. I also knew that they have their finger on the pulse of something beyond this life. I'm not sure they're overtly Christian, but their lyrics and the beautiful melodies they produce definitely point me heavenward. However, it wasn't until tonight, seeing them live, that I really got what a journey of redemption their eponymous album of 2011 is. If played in order, you get three very distinctive sections that tell the story of the saving of a soul, simply, in a straightforward and earthy way. The lyrics I have extracted here show three clear stages - 1) The Fall 2) The Redirect 3) The Move In Part 1 - The Fall 1. Cats and Dogs : "Fallin' from the sky There are raindrops in my eyes And my thoughts are diggin' in the backyard My roots have grown but I don't know where they are" 2. Coeur d'Alene: "What will become of these g...

...Gather gladness from the skies; Take a lesson from the ground; Flowers do ope their heavenward eyes And a Spring-time joy have found; Earth throws Winter’s robes away, Decks herself for Easter Day. Beauty now for ashes wear, Perfumes for the garb of woe. Chaplets for disheveled hair, Dances for sad footsteps slow; Open wide your hearts that they Let in joy this Easter Day. Seek God’s house in happy throng; Crowded let His table be; Mingle praises, prayer and song, Singing to the Trinity. Henceforth let your souls alway Make each mourn an Easter Day. -Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1865

... since Good Friday of 2011. All was excitement and anticipation, all was possibility. While I still feel all of those things now, I think they have been tempered with a bit more growth, and a bit more perspective. My hope and excitement remain but they are of an entirely different quality. Last year I had just finished my master's degree and was heading off on an international adventure with the best cousin anyone could ask for. I was about to move into my own place from having lived at home during grad school. I was about to start my first real job. All of those huge life milestones came on the heels of each other in rapid succession over about 3 months. It was a golden summer, that summer of 2011. But I think for different reasons, it was a gold that lost its glimmer once the trees lost their leaves. You see, now I understand that I had built up a hope and a happiness around the things that it takes to count as a person in this world, by most standards. Once that ha...

Again I have been remiss in my posts. It’s not for lack of things to say… I’m sure there are many who would readily debunk any rumor to that effect. However, two things have been swimming around in my head and I wanted to write about them. One of them will be a separate post. The other is just a series of observations that I want to somehow record. Whenever I move, one of my first orders of business is to find a gym. I tend to go a lot, especially in the winter, and I do pretty serious evaluations of prospective clubs. I feel I have become something of a connoisseur. (Sidenote: I am thinking of adding this to my resume because it’s a pretty important skill that I think prospective employers would want to know about.) So after relocating to my beloved Old Town and then starting a new job, I was doing a lot of research again. The most surprising result of this research was the extraordinary parallels to the movie Dodgeball that started to appear. The movie became even funni...

It's 6:07 am. I turn my head and shake the sleep from my eyes. When it clears I see salt marshes to the left and a neat row of brightly colored beach cottages, and docks with boats gently rocking in the water to the right. This is Sunset Beach. The sky is on fire with color and I cannot remember a more invigorating wake up or the last time I was so grateful for my life. I walk out onto the porch just next to my bed and deeply breathe in the humid, salty sea air. Wait, what am I doing? This is the stuff that great runs are made of. Hurriedly, I pull on running clothes and shoes and sprint to the beach as fast as my legs will take me. The three-day rain streak is broken. The sky is blue, the clouds expansive, and the bright sunshine, oh the welcome sunshine, so coy these last few days, has returned and casts a rosy glow over the breakers and soft dunes. The tide is receding and all I see in front of me is flat sand. I hit my stride and before I know it, I've run ...

First thing’s first: I AM DONE WITH GRAD SCHOOL! I have turned in all my papers, finished all my classes, passed comps, and completed all my presentations. It feels great to come home at night and not have schoolwork to think about. About two months ago, my cousin Cara and I were talking about her upcoming trip to Istanbul. She told me about her great set up and it sounded like it would be a great way to celebrate the completion of my Masters degree. So I bought my ticket for the day after my last class. After two months of craziness involving much more than just school and work, I am now on the other side and looking at job searching, apartment searching, and just figuring out the next general steps for life. I am so excited to see what unfolds. Since there is very little certainty in my life, it’s probably best I just stick to writing about what I know, and that is mainly what has already happened. So I will do my best to recount the even...

After having gone to bed so late, we definitely woke up late the next day. I got up to try out the fitness center at the hotel and had a great time listening to the odd Turkish radio choices pumping at full blast over the stereo. When I got back, Cara and I got ready and then headed out for our first crack at the Istanbul mass transit system and to see what the Spice Bazaar held for us. We enjoyed the cheery tune the turnstiles play when you slide in your token to gain access to the trains. It sounds very much like when you win an extra life in an old school video game. Istanbul is built on seven hills. They are VERY steep hills and the city, in all its modernity, has dec ided that no one should be forced to walk them if they don’t want to. So you can take these underground funiculars down or up the hills as you please for a mere 1.75TL. Taksim Square is perched on one of these hills but our hotel was very close to the tram stop so transport was a breeze. ...

I started each day at the hotel with a trip to the fitness center. The floor to ceiling windows in the smallish room overlook the square and I found myself able to block out the painfully outdated radio selections just by watching the crazy flow of traffic around the square. The cars weave in and out of each other and the nonsensical traffic patterns of the square itself make for an almost mesmerizing distraction. I also found that when I did put on my iPod, The Hold Steady and Rilo Kiley made my morning that much better and at certain points, the traffic seemed to be pulsing with the beat. Cara was kind enough to let me have her hotel breakfast because she usually doesn’t have time to eat before work. Well, while breakfast couldn’t replace seeing the original frescoes in the Aya Sofya or steaming in a hamam, it certainly was a fabulous way to start the day. They had acres of food laid out: Breads, pastries, fresh fruit, dried fruit, omelette station, meats...

My day started off with more weird music at the hotel fitness center, another fabulous breakfast overlooking the whole of Istanbul, and a little bit of misdirection from our hotel’s concierge. There is a very out-of-the-way Byzantine church in the western suburbs of Istanbul that was supposed to have wonderful mosaics that I wanted to see. I asked the concier ge how to get out there via public transport. She said I should just take th e number 87 bus and then she gave me very specific directions for where to wait for this bus. It was easy to find the bus stop she was talking about, but after waiting for a half hour there and seeing every other number bus except the 87, I decided she was wrong. Cara had also told me that they had been wrong or unknowing in other areas before so I decided I should ask someone else and try and find it on my own. Then, I was walking back to the hotel and passing the bus stop that the concierge specifically told me to ignore and there, sitti...

And then it was my last day in Istanbul! I too k a little more time in the morning to leave the hotel because my day wasn’t as jam packed as the others had been. I decided I wanted to walk around the city a little bit more and not use public transport very much. That was always my favorite thing to do in Paris. Whenever I had spare time, I would fill it by walking wherever I was going, no matter how far. It helped me get to know the neighborhoods, and get a better feel for different areas. I notice a lot more around me. One thing I got very loud and clear on this day walking around more was that being a blonde in Istanbul makes you extremely consp icuous. I didn’t feel like a target so much as I just wish that I wasn’t so noticeable as a tourist and immediately identifiable as American. In an y case, walking around the city felt a little stranger due to that. I went from the hotel and walked down the steep hill to Dolmabahçe Palace. I didn’t intend on g...