Have a look at these. Gas stations seem to speak their own language.

Most people who know me well know that I love books. In fact, my secret hope is to build a personal library - I found some good inspiration today here.

This post really began last week when I was at church. A video was shown for missionary work around the world and it struck me, over and over, that the only African's I see within this context are poverty stricken, malnourished children whose long gazes into the camera are designed to inspire pity.

I was thinking of The African Child as I knew him or her, my friends growing up all gifted and rich in so many different ways: Arthur, a skinny 10 year old who made the school's varsity soccer team and dazzled us with on-pitch heroics, or Paul, the rowdy ball of obstinacy who wasn't afraid to challenge authority. I kept thinking about these children and how far they were from that picture and lamenting, as many Africans do, the imagery of Africa as seen in the west.  Arthur is a pediatrician these days and Paul is a social activist and their stories are not unique among the lot of us that grew up in Nairobi.

But back to that voice thing I couldn't find words that were short and punctuated to describe my reaction. I'm too given to long stories and invisible connections. 

So this morning I ran into a talk at TED by Andrew Mwenda, a fellow Ugandan. His words put together everything that I was thinking but with a lot more directness and challenge in their tone.

For some time Justin has been releasing a mix of what he’s had in rotation, riffs from a collection of music that encompasses more than just sound. It’s a novel voice, one which I’ve looked forward to after each week of work. Experiences created: recently it was on a trip to Kansas City that I heard Ryan Adams softly singing Wonderwall, and tonight it was an evening on the deck with bratwurst on the grill while my iPod sounded out Devil Town for the end of my journey through the week.

I was that kid who – upon the rabid crush with girl X – would produce from the very corners of his music collection, a mix tape as a gift. It was no small task of meaning and I can remember the labor, even now, though I did it many times. What I didn’t understand then that I do now was that it wasn’t a gift; it was an attempt of mine to weave a narrative into music to be read by its listener. It wasn’t the lyric, the tricky beat, or guitar chord. It was a language of its own, the language of music, often unheard by the listener.

But I was that kid who heard things: up late at night, listening to Jazz Hour on Voice Of Kenya, that kid who listened to the twice dubbed Bach concerto, the one who would replay songs from memory to pass time on the long bus rides home. There was always something in the music itself, abstracted away from the physical aspects: the tape, the album art, and the logical explanation. Something living in between the sound atoms that were smashing together to form the vibrations on my eardrum that made it more. It was more and it was indescribable.

Perhaps it’s not just hearing. It might be that synesthesia – that you hear a track and it causes synapses in your brain fire off simultaneously: where you were when you heard something, what you were doing, what you are doing, whether you’re up, or down, alone or in a crowd –an all encompassing thing that I have to resign myself to calling the language of music.

I’ve never had real words for music, but I remember going to Hollywood to shop at Aarons and overhearing people talk – a well known DJ I recognized talking about electronic music with the words “pop” and “crunch” and “glitch”, the guy in front of me by the information booth asking about artists in terms of artists “… a soul sound, but more bluesy like a Memphis Minnie sound” – and being amazed at their ability to match human language to music. And that I understood what they were saying the way an amnesiac would gaze at something and recognize it without a context for how they knew.

Things can’t be cemented in spoken language the way they can in music. Perhaps that’s why it’s so special, why crushes get mixtapes, why radio stations and disc jockeys have “followings”, why those who hear the language of music fiendishly collect and listen, recreating and creating moments for the future, present, and why those who somehow bridge what is written and what is heard are to be treasured. It's why, when my friend A's father died in the Ukraine, she packed her things with tears falling, listening to his music. I know she'd never heard it quite like she did that day.

It’s that moment in Boston, with all your friends around you, when an unexpected slide guitar grips you while your head is spinning. A kind of permanence that can becomes an ambience you can reach into at any point along the future.

It’s the first time you hear something and you realize that you’ll never forget that this was when you heard it for the first time, and that the song will follow you through your life like an old companion.

What’s following me to bed tonight is the avant sound textures of Valgeir Sigurðsson. I’ll remember.

My first run after hitting the thirty-two mark was pleasant. It was one of those runs where you wonder why you're not getting tired and have to throttle the urge to over exert yourself.  I thought to myself it was a good omen.

Flash forward to Wednesday this week and I ambled my two miles like a wounded animal.  It seemed as though every joint and limb protested against any movement beyond a lackadaisical walk. And walk I did - as much as I hate stopping, time and experience have taught me that it's better to keep a marathon runner's mentality than that of a sprinter. Alexander the Great chose his horses first for endurance, not speed.

And even though it's the triumph I'm more inclined to celebrate myself in a blog post entitled "Thirty-two and sprinting" or something shameless like it, it's the second run that was more important.  Bad Running is good: it's those moments when you develop the perseverance for the running that is easy.

I was talking to a friend about The Happiness Project, a blog I ran across and how the author's aim is to be "happy" all the time. I'd gone through some sadness about whether or not I'd ever get to see Berlin and told her of a suggested exercise of writing down a few things one should be happy about to pick up one's mood. It was an idea to which M was a little cold: is it healthy to be "happy" all the time?

The notion stopped me dead in my tracks. Is it healthy to be happy, or to try to be happy, all the time?

Down time makes me appreciate what's good. It's the contrast that lets one understand the pleasure of being happy.  But unlike that feeling of embracing a bad run, my usual reaction to it is to try to bounce back in some way: focusing on work, a phone call, my aggregator, an old essay, or the tube.  Or running.

And even though it seems to me that unhealthy distraction is a bad tactic, it's a bit daunting to think about just letting an "unhappy" or otherwise disconcerting emotion wash over while you directly confront it.

The question still stands as something to be pondered: is it healthy to try to be "happy" all the time?

Lost posts always hurt.