I've been all over the place today, physically and metaphysically. It was cold in the apartment this morning, which always means that I pull the covers high over my ears and shun the start of the day. When I did get up what I really wanted to do was ride; my rained-out hills yesterday were not enough to get me tired so I set out to ride the Macungie/Emmaus/100-29 triangle which starts with a monster (for me) climb south out of town and then turns abruptly downhill for the second third before finishing the triad with a bit of a cool-down over the three miles back into Macungie.
After the ride I did something very pedestrian - going to Best Buy. For me life is wireless and being confined to the table within 6' of the modem is not acceptable. As such, a wireless router has been acquired to make the whole apartment productive, present and future tense. Then, with some IMDC work to do I logged onto APHC's website and browsed around the archives and settled on Duluth, 24 April 2004. Big mistake. A young folkster named Jerree Small was a guest and she was awesome and got me thinking about music, so I went hunting. To NPR to track down a song I heard a snippet of, "Avenue B" by Ukranian-punk wunderkind Gogol Bordello. Onto the web to track down some Johnny Cash, Juelz Santana, and Black Eyed Peas. And ultimately, back to Jerree Small.
Tonight is also the end of The West Wing. It started off so hot, then cooled before a late resurgence, but I've enjoyed the framework of a fictional government to reflect on our own and Sorkin's teleplays were unmatched. The characters' everyday-people emotion gave us hope that there was more to our country than the starchy talking heads who populate C-SPAN and the outcomes of the ficticional plotlines gave us hope that there was hope for our non-fiction country. And it was funny... the kind of funny you have to be an optimist to get.
Sunday, May 14, 2006