Sometimes...

Sometimes I'll be sitting doing nothing (my favorite pastime) and I'll suddenly be struck by how perfect a moment is. That picture of my feet is an example. It's just my feet, and it obviously didn't take a lot of physical effort to snap the picture, but I was taken with the moment: the color of the shoes against the red chair, the way the light and shadow played on the shoes — and it happened during a moment of quiet contentedness.

There are other times when I'm in the middle of what is really an innocuous, everyday situation and I find myself thinking, "Holy shit! What the fuck is this?!" I get that feeling in the mall sometimes — too much noise, too much advertising, too many things demanding my attention. I rarely go to a mall anymore. I never go to Quail Springs, which seems more overwhelming to me than Penn Square.

I listen to a lot of Asian music: Indian, Chinese and Japanese. Most of it is either traditional or classical. Some of the Indian stuff is a sort of jazz fusion — usually found in the record store 'world music' section. I've also gotten interested lately in some of the new age stuff done with Tibetan metal bowls, and I listen to some western classical guitar. But almost everything I hear on the radio now, whether rap, country or pop, sounds to me like grating, obnoxious puerile noise. "Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses?" Jesus god.

I was listening to NPR with a friend yesterday and there was a story about the Wall Street bailout: "Seven hundred BILLL-yun dollars!" the announcer exclaimed. And this was NPR. I commented to my friend that I had heard the phrase "Seven hundred BILLL-yun dollars!" about three DOZZ-EN times and it was okay with me if the newscasters just said "seven hundred billion dollars" without the additional histrionics — as if I won't realize it's a lot of money without that exaggerated first syllable. I would like my news, especially my NPR news, in a nice calm monotone, thank you.

Let me talk about this Tibetan sound bowl stuff some more. The best of this music (if "music" is the word for it - some of it is really just nearly-random sounds) really makes you feel as if you've landed in some calm, distant alien environment. It's not 'soothing,' in the sense that elevator music is supposed to be soothing, but it is calming. I don't know how to describe it, exactly, but I really like it. The down side is that the pieces that are not calming tend to be just the opposite: really annoying and irksome. But those are the minority, and any album is going to have pieces you like better than others.