The excitement of a warm day, with an endless variety of smells in the air, seems to have inspired in me a frenzy of musical cravings, as though I need to come up with a sound to intertwine with each fresh-growing smell that comes through the windows. Today, as a strong sun angled in followed by a richly-scented breeze, I began with the Wood's Tea Company's new live album, Standing Room Only, which accompanied some laundry-folding, followed by Splashdown's Blueshift as I did some reading, just before abandoning my room to go read in a tree by the lake. Then, returning to my room as the sun was setting, I put in Bad Religion's Process of Belief. After dinner I agonized for a bit over the proper warm-night music, and decided upon the soundtrack from The Princess and the Warrior, to be followed by the Whitlams' Eternal Nightcap and possibly Mary Timony's Mountains. This is a stark contrast to the winter, when the air was always uniformly crisp, chilly, and dead, and for some reason it seems that my desire for music was likewise frozen.

It is good to be revived again, along with the smells and the songs.

Sometimes the distance between the ideal and the practical seems so huge, and I never know which one to argue for. Eventually I just get frustrated with everyone arguing on either side of the issue, because they are both in some sense blind. You need to see both to get anywhere. But people will insist on being either nearsighted or farsighted, and that's when I get angry and say things like "Sometimes I'd rather get shot in the street or hit by a car than be an activist anymore." Because what's the point, when you spend most of your time involved in petty bickering, and nothing ever really changes? We're all just pretending to have power over the rules that will constrain us for our entire lives. And if we spend enough time arguing about how we should alter them, we won't have time to realize that we can't.

You know, as people keep blathering on these days about marriage being the foundation of civilization, after a while I start to realize what a bizarre institution marriage really is. Isn't it kind of crazy to imagine that there should be one person who is the best person for you to live with, the best person for you to have sex with, the best person for you to raise children with, and the best person to have a close and caring relationship with, for your entire life? No wonder the world is full of people frustrated because the right person is not appearing, or because the person they thought was right isn't right after all. We've created a really bizarre mythology and set ourselves up for failure.

I know that the sort of world I'm imagining seems a little bit upside-down, but I don't think it's so impossible. It's just so far from what we've been taught.

One of my roommates bought this poster recently, and because it amuses me I've been counting pigs running down the highway in order to fall asleep at night instead of the usual sheep jumping over fences. Except that one night last week as I was finally drifting off, the pigs stopped running down the highway and started manufacturing pots and pans, and then they were alienated from the products of their labor just like Marx said they would be, and the piles of pots and pans got bigger and bigger and the pigs looked more and more unhappy and then I finally fell asleep.

I like sociology and anthropology, but this is just ridiculous.

A couple years ago they built a roundabout up by the dining hall, and on it they put trees, a dozen little saplings, each of which had a small spotlight shining on it at night. I thought the spotlight thing was a bit ridiculous, but that is how it was.

Over the past several months the trees have been disappearing, and I was sort of half-aware of it, but since I am not up the hill much these days it didn't really hit me until I was walking home from the station tonight. All of the spotlights are lit, but only six of eleven have trees standing by them. And in the drizzle and fog rising from the hill the beams took on a certain substance, highlighting the emptiness. The ghosts of trees.

I remembered the tree that used to grow by one of the spotlights. I remember peeling ice from it during its first winter here, after an ice storm left campus without power for most of a morning, and left these little trees horribly bent over, looking as though they might break. They didn't seem ready for a Colgate winter, those little baby birches, but even so they managed to spring back up a few days later. But now there are half as many as there once were, and there are a lot of empty spotlights in the fog.

This song is for the soil
That's toxic clear down to the bedrock
Where nothing of consequence can grow
Drop your seeds there, let them go,
Let them all go...

~The Mountain Goats, "Cotton"

Sometimes I find it truly astonishing that people all over the country listen to the same popular music at the same time; that I can listen to the radio in the car with my roommate and, hearing an old song, say "that was a tenth grade song," and have her agree, or perhaps quibble and say, no, it was ninth grade, but all the same, find that we are filled with essentially the same musical memories. Or yet again, that I can sit in Shepardson before a party and sing along with three other girls as John plays "Wonderwall" on his guitar, and somehow we all manage to wrench these same lyrics up out of our past, maybe even recalling the same pangs of angst that went along with them in our personal history. I guess it's just amazing that we are all so different and come from such faraway places, and yet all our lives have had the same soundtracks.

earlier -- later