Of Presents and the Present.

I was going to post last night, but then I got an early Christmas present from Sean, and I was no good at all for 3 hours 41 minutes 29 seconds, by which time it was really really late.

(There was an all-too-brief period in my life where I didn't have to look for new music to get excited about, when friends would regularly force me to sit down and listen to this marvel that they just uncovered, or that had been growing on them for the past two weeks like mold on an unrefrigerated pizza. And if I was really lucky they would explain, in words and gestures that a musical dilettante could understand, how it blew their skulls open to let light in; how it coiled around their hearts with a python's grip; how it hung their dreams and nightmares out to dry.

For years after I moved away from these people who were excited! about music!, I read reviews in Spin and Rolling Stone, looking for that contagious spirit of discovery. But the subtext of every review was: "I know so much about so many bands that I am too jaded to feel passionately about any of them (or too cool to admit it)." Also, they were constructed primarily of run-on sentences.

So my discovery of saidthegramophone two years ago was cause for much rejoicing. There are three guys who write for the site, but one guy whose passion carries it. That guy is Sean. Sean writes about how a song makes him feel, and oh, how he feels. He writes about the pictures a song makes in his head, and ah, what pictures he sees. Sometimes it's music that I love right away, and sometimes it's music that I wouldn't have given a second glance if he didn't sit me down in a beanbag by the stereo and explicate it for me. Either way, I'm grateful.)

Sean's Christmas gift to me -- and you, too -- is a list of his favorite fifty songs of 2007. Fifty little wrapped boxes: here, I picked this out for you. There are wonders and terrors here, tidy griefs and messy celebrations, scraps and shards of other people's hearts, each downloadable for the next week or two. If you are in the least bit interested in knowing about good music that happened this year, start at the top and download as much as your patience, or your bandwidth, will allow. And then read what he wrote about them.

You won't be sorry.

Anyway, yes, I'm back. I took the train home, which I would highly recommend to anyone who is going through a transition which deserves lengthy reflection. I was warmly welcomed by friends and family at several stops along the way. The journey was good, and the homecoming was good, and life is good in general. I've been thinking about some things that have changed in me since I left my library job, and though I hate to jinx it by making any specific claims, I'm optimistic that I've actually... well, grown.

After the holidays, I will be in Portland for several months, and I'm happy about that. I don't know where I'll be working, but it will be on a decidedly temporary basis. My taste for adventure has been whetted, not sated. I already have Big Plans for next summer (which involve boats of a different sort), and enough other ideas to fill the next couple of years at least. I tried settling down for almost a decade; now I'm going to try not settling down for a while, and I think it may suit me a lot better.

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One of my many projects this week is to get all my boat photos sorted. I am gradually posting a selection of the best ones on my photo sharing site of choice. For privacy reasons, there will be no link to that here, but I'll gladly share with any friends who ask for it.