I looked down while waiting at a stoplight today and somehow was surprised to see a wedding ring on my finger, dress clothes on myself, sitting in a car I own, coming from a full time job.

Where did the time go?

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If your goal is to impress, you’ll never stay motivated.

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And it was only at day’s end
Upon hearing joy in her laughter
That the sting of the day
Healed to a scar

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According to Mark Seeley at MPR, these first 6 days of June have been the “least sunny ever recorded” — and I believe it. I hope the days get sunnier before they start to get shorter later this month.

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It’s been raining, dark, and cold all day but when I arrived home today, Mykala had put together an indoor picnic. I walked in the door and there was the love of my life in a floppy sun hat, wearing picnic clothes, cold drink in hand, Beach Boys playing in the background, picnic blankets on the floor, Roman Holiday queued up on the television.

We’ve been trying to figure out our budget and our next place to live and I’ve been drowning in details of financial planning and adulthood. Yet, if we’re safe and warm and happy and in love, well, then those are just details, aren’t they?

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When I was in the college dorms from 2003 to 2007, students could freely exchange music between their libraries: I’ve ended up with over 20,000 songs this way, over 2 straight months of music. Running low on hard drive space, I recently took a closer look at my music library. I’ve listened to 7,033 of those songs. The most number of plays on a single track is 3572—that is the pink noise loop from SimplyNoise I used to block ambient noise when I was in school and studying in noisy public spaces. Anyhow, in college I grabbed entire discographies from artists just because I thought I should like them. The Who. Bob Dylan. 146 Bob Marley tracks.

Critics rave about these artists, all of the musicians they’ve influenced and the paths they’ve pioneered. I just… didn’t like a lot of the music. There were a few nice songs, but I had these enormous, comprehensive collections from artists I didn’t even really like. I just had them because of this powerful should. If only I had time to understand, to listen, I’d learn to like them, right? I was the problem, the music is spectacular. I’m annoying and boring, the music is enthralling and exciting. The music is great, I’m awful. Yes?

Well, it turns out I just don’t like some songs.

I’m such a peacemaker, a compromise and consensus-seeker, that I sometimes don’t even have enough confidence in my position to stubbornly disagree. I’ve always feared that somehow my position, if frankly stated in opposition to another’s, would destroy any potential for an amiable relationship. It’s not true. I may not like it, but it’s the human condition: we disagree and it is OK.

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From an extended interview, whose quality I can not yet attest to as I have not finished reading it, Billy Joel on Not Working and Not Giving Up Drinking:

Some writers can write reams of great books and then J. D. Salinger wrote just a few. Beethoven wrote nine symphonies. They were all phenomenal. Mozart wrote some 40 symphonies, and they were all phenomenal. That doesn’t mean Beethoven was a lesser writer, it’s just some guys are capable of more productivity, some guys take more time. Mozart pisses me off because he’s like a naturally gifted athlete, you listen to Mozart and you go: “Of course. It all came easy to him.” Beethoven you hear the struggle in it. Look at his manuscripts, and there’s reams of scratched-out music that he hated. He stops and he starts. I love that about Beethoven, his humanity shows in his music. Mozart was almost inhuman, unhuman.

I’ve seen unhuman aptitude up close and it always engenders jealousy. It may be false that Antonio Salieri hated Mozart, but I’m sure other contemporaries did.

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