House Music/Home Music

There are a handful of blogs that I read semi-regularly. Many are written by academics, the majority of whom are young-ish, new faculty. A common theme at these blogs has been heading home for the December break. And this also has been the topic of a bunch of student blogs. There seem to be similarly mixed feelings among both groups.

After visiting Olin in Boston I headed to NYC/New Jersey to spend some time with my Dad. It was a nice visit, but I realized how glad I am that I don't live in New York, and especially New Jersey. I'm happy to live adjacent to a national park (even if it seems like all of New York visits here in the summer), I'm happy I'm not a (medical) doctor, I'm happy I have a job that enjoy almost all the time, I'm thankful I don't have to drive through traffic to get to work, and I'm thankful that I escaped from the cultural/social/whatever scene that was my high school. I'm not sure quite how I ended up at this weird school in Maine with a PhD and doing strange/interesting research and living in a house full of strange but mostly friendly creatures. Hmmm .... this is starting to sound like a cross between a dedication you'd hear on the Delilah radio show and something from a Woody Allen movie. This isn't how I wanted this to go.

Ok. Let's try starting again. Mostly what I wanted to write about was driving home. The last stretch of the drive I listened to a CD I got at tower records in the village: Shapeshifters house grooves, vol 2. It's pretty unbelievable. Warm, funky, delicious, in a starburst-fruit-chews-for-grow-ups sort of way.

The track, C-Mos' "2 Million Ways" is my anthem right now. Driving onto Mount Desert Island after a day on the highways that started in Englewood, NJ, it was perfect. It was almost midnight, the moon was shining on the mountains, and it was middle-of-winter cold. One website describes it as funky/vocal/disco/club house, which I suppose is a good start. If there were tropical rainforests in Iceland, forest gnomes might listen to this while they drank pink, minty drinks and danced at night under the tree canopy. I'm not sure what that exactly means, but if you were listing to the CD I was listening to, you might agree.

Anyway, I'm very glad to be home, and there's nothing like going home---in the sense of the home, the place one is from, even though I'm not from there---to make one appreciate home. My cats are happy to see me, the pipes haven't frozen yet, and I can listen to really, really loud music because Doreen is away. This dulls the pain of having to spend most of the week writing grants, writing text for our academic website, and writing administrative memos.