The radio star has resuscitated from the death blow dealt by video.
I have the new 89.3 (Northfield, Minneapolis, St Paul) on right now.
Wow.
I am a little sorry to hear Northfield's Classical 89.3 WCAL off the air, but the new Minnesota Public Radio 89.3 "The Current" is amazing. Music that you don't hear anywhere on commercial radio. Lots of local and indie artists (not "indie" but real independent artists that can't get on the overplayed play lists of ClearChannel Top 40 stations, although, most of them probably are still on RIAA labels, so I'll give them one scary quote - "indie artists). I've never been in this situation before. I now have multiple radio stations to choose from when I want to listen to music. In the past hour on 89.3 I've heard: good hiphop (both local and national), Bjork, Euro-I'm-not-sure-how-to-classify-it but good music I haven't heard a billion times before, electronica (the new Chemical Brothers, I think), and now some singer-songwriter stuff.
If I don't make it into work or to rehearsal tomorrow, you will probably find me in a music induced coma with my speaker lodged against my ear.
Why do I do this to myself?
Oh, right, because I like it.
The semester started last week, and I realized this on the first day of classes. I knew students were going to be back on the day after Martin Luther King Day, but not having attended a school with semesters for over 5 years, I forgot what that meant. I made the mistake of looking up what classes were going to be offered in March. March, I thought, when the spring semester starts.
I discovered, as hinted to above, that I was mistaken and, more damagingly, I found that a class was being offered this semester called "Performance and Social Change". Remember a few months ago when I had a crisis of faith in theatre? Well, this class sounded like the precise antidote to my feeling of superfluousness in my art form. So I knew that I had to be in this class. The first day of class did not disappoint. And our first set of readings included Freire which reinforced my belief that I was correct in taking this class. Of course, now all of you will have to put up with my vocabulary shifting for the next few months to include phrases like "the existing banking form of education between the oppressor and oppressed must transform into a dialogical relationship and not just switch the poles of the existing dichotomy, thus humanizing both the oppressor and the oppressed". Hopefully by the end of this course, I will be able to speak in a more normal voice but with the same liberating meaning.
I had a nice long post written up about the weather, my current reading, and the combination of the two resulting in my book freezing causing the glue between the back cover and spine to crack and the cover and pages to warp, but I guess I with all of my technical support training can't tell the difference between "save this post" and "close this window". So I lost the post. But you get the gist of what I was going to write from my recap above.
It is cold, I am reading a great book (thanks to my aunt and uncle for the Christmas gift), and I am reading the book at the bus stop in the sub-zero temperatures.
At least my radiators have been fixed and I am no longer living in a sauna, nor has the freeze-the-exhaust-from-cars cold penetrated my apartment walls. Now I feel like Goldilocks in that ursine cottage.
I made it down to Kansas and back up without any problems on the road.
A nice break from work and work/class-related travel, which has been the bulk of my vacation hours this year. My time management skills are very useful when trying to spend a limited amount of time with Mom, Dad, Family and Friends. Unfortunately, I still didn't get to spend as much time as I wanted with all of those people.
New Years in Lawrence was fun (Thanks Nenie and Nena for opening your house and making sure the Jayhawks won! That was a particularly nice touch for you guys to pull off.)
I made it back safe and sound (and my apartment is even cooler than the sauna that I left it)
In addition to seeing people (the most important part of the holiday season), I managed to avoid most of the hyper-commercialization and (most, not all, but most) bad holiday traffic. So I count this as a successful holiday.