It rained today.

That's pretty exciting. Of course, you might think, "But you live in Seattle, it rains all the time!" but you would be wrong. It's damp 99% of the time. It mists most of the time. However, we only get an honest to god actual downpour about once a year, and I savor it. No, I will savour it with the extra u and everything. Tomorrow it will all be gone, and the mist will be misting and the bikers will be saftey biking around. But for today, I had my rain.

. . .

I got so much shit done today it was crazy. Word. It was word crazy airwolf extreme. That means tomorrow just leaves a few more things to be done. Yes yes y'all.

. . .

I was thinking about music today. I was dancing around the house while packing things up (like I do), and thinking about the way that I listen to music. Instead of listening to particular things, or building a few mood playlists, I'll actually get stuck on certain bands, songs, or albums for days on end and build upon those things that are circulating in my brain, until nothing else will fit and everything competing for attention finally breaks each other's hold on my mind. And I'll end up with a blank slate for an hour or two.

That was barely coherent.

But it's like this:

I'll start by wanting to listen to a particular Death Cab for Cutie song so I'll make a playlist with that one song in it. But I can't just listen to one song over and over (though I sometimes do when I'm alone), so I'll add a couple more. Probably by the same band, probably off the same album. Or I'll just toss in the whole album because it's the least amount of effort that nets me leisure listening.

After a few go-rounds, I'll want to add The Postal Service to it or three Simon & Garfunkel songs with the same general mood. The next day, I'm probably still in the same frame of mind, so I pick up where I left off, adding a couple more branches and reshuffling my playlist.

This goes on for usually three or four days, until the music tree has grown large enough that the leaves on the north end of the tree are nothing like the trees on the south end of the tree and the discordance between them is terrifying when you're after some soul soothing. That's usually about the point where I'm done with that list and I'll let it go for a while before I start the cycle over again.

I don't mean to imply that I never have general purpose playlists. I do, for very particular occasions. They usually end up undergoing the branching process themselves, albeit much slower, until they're pretty much useless as occasion oriented playlists any longer and get unceremoniously dumped.

On the other hand, when I'm going to sleep, I put on a general shuffle of everything on my ipod, regardless of how I am feeling. It helps me to dream well, somehow.