and the night shall be filled with music

Without music life would be a mistake. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

People are, in essence, emotional beings. Whether or not they express it, the current of emotions runs just below the surface like a wellspring. Some people manage these feelings well, emoting at appropriate times; others emote often and at the wrong times (or for the wrong reasons). Then there are people like me...a true product of a very emotionful mother and a stoic father. My emotions run like a hot knife through butter all day long, just itching to be expressed...but I work to stay reserved and maintain objectivity. This can make it difficult to be expressive when I need to be because then it's like the dams were released.

Emotions can make people do damn near anything - good, bad, stupid, funny, and all that remains in between. Sometimes it makes people turn to vices to cope with it...food, drink, drugs, sex. My vice is music.

I am not musical, mind you. I can't read a note to save my life, nor can I sing one. But the kind of music that has been borne and created into the peaks and valleys of sound waves, buzzing out of a set of speakers...I turn to this when I need celebration, a soap box, solace, meditation...direction.

My cd and digital music collection, though not as expansive as some, is eclectic. This is because as wide-ranging my emotions can be, correlates to vast array of musical genres, eras, and popularity (in some cases, a lack thereof!). Sometimes, I keep songs on my iPod for the sake of nostalgia even if I don't actually like the artist or song itself (aka all the "slow dance" songs from 6th grade dances).

Music makes me feel young, old, happy, sad. I go through withdrawals without it. Sometimes I don't know how to be until I find the right song to listen to in that moment of time. It can put me to sleep or keep me awake; it can make me cry or help me share a laugh with a friend. It has even helped me fall in love.

My favorite musician/song/album depends not on the month, week, or even day. It varies by the hour or as often as my mood changes and how quickly my mood can be satisfied by the 3.5 minutes of orchestrated sound and lyric.

What does music do for you?

Regina Spektor - Us from The Staus House on Vimeo.

Home

The ubiquitous phrase "you can't go home again", from the American novelist Thomas Wolfe certainly has truth to it, a truth that often means more to me than I can say. I have indeed moved around a lot growing up and even letting the nomadic nature trickle into my adult life by choosing to move under my own volition so I remember wondering what he meant by this.

Wolfe's saying often is translated as that once you leave "home", leaving behind family and friends, house, employer, etc, that coming back you'll feel like the proverbial square peg in a round hole...that you'll feel the same but you look and see that everyone else has changed in your absence. You become rooted in the past, looking for something to hang onto so you still feel relevant. Conversations are oft reminiscent of the "good ol days", and the longer you stay in town, the less you feel you can move forward. Visits become shorter, less frequent to avoid the awkward silences and voids left by a lack of stories to share that haven't been revisited a dozen or so times already.

A less thought of version of this saying, is the unspoken belief that "returning" home indicates failure, should your return become an apparent permanency. This is my own personal fear. This fear struck me deeply when I lost my job last year...that if I lacked employment for too long that I would have to return, unable to do the one thing all children are raised to do at adulthood: provide for oneself. Pride can be a powerful source of fear I have discovered...for it is because of pride that we fear failure. Failure means something within ourselves that we have done incorrectly, failure many times means having to take responsibility, which pride does not allow us to do in negative situations.

Having the time to be contemplative and/or reflective of the last 3 or so years that I have been living here, 1800 miles away from my family, I think I've established enough experience, felt enough fear, failure, and pride, to say that 'going home again' can be a good thing. Whether it be a brief visit, or taking up residence in your parent's basement while you work your life out, you are still you, and your family is still your family. These are the people who watched you make mud puddles with dirt and soap (yes, true story) as a 3 year old, held your hair when you were sick in the middle of the night, made you feel like a superstar at your high school graduation, and call you on your shit when you act like a total spaz. Living away from your family for any period of time does not detract from that bond, whether you talk every day or twice a year.

Going home, for me, means having family dinners, snuggling with my sister, refusing to adjust the computer chair to my mother's standards when I'm done with it, harassing the family pets, making my father laugh uncontrollably until the veins in his forehead bust out, and being completely at ease with having to drive 30+ minutes in order to get anywhere remotely interesting. It also means ducking behind a shelf at the grocery store from people I went to school with so I don't have to talk to them.

Maybe good ol' Wolfe was like me. Afraid of townies and what it means to be one. Sprawling metropolis life does not a successful person make, but neither does the opposite. What does your measuring stick look like?