Thoughts on Meals

When I think about food I automatically think about the time that I spent at DiBrunos. For the time that I worked at that store I almost never bought a grocery item, I very rarely prepared food in my home, and I almost never was left wanting for things to share if I invited a friend over impromptu. I spent entire days in the midst of food and in a way, the ritual aspect of a lot of my experience of food was lost. For all the amazing things that I had around me, food almost became blasé. I enjoyed most being able to share the things I was around with others. I invited friends over constantly. I loved feeling like I had this huge store of items to share. I liked to spend long amounts of time preparing something exciting for a friend that they had never tried before. The food that I had to sell became an extension of myself. I would only let people I knew try things I personally liked or felt most proud of, despite whether they’d express interest in something else. I often felt overwhelmed by the amount of choice I was always bombarded with. Because of this I think that I would focus on a specific few items at a time, a turkey burger and broccoli rabe one week, chicken salad or baked penne the next and only eat those things until I tired of them.

Even now I rarely make Italian food or think of it as something to seek out when going to restaurants. That cuisine, at least the south Philly variety of it, feels almost part of my body, in my veins or at least coating them. I almost literally ate nothing but the food of DiBruno Bros for nearly 2 years. I contrast this constant presence with the food that I eat ate Thanksgiving or even Christmas, the kind of food that has a specific once a year-ness in my family and part of my wishes I hadn’t been around those foods so much. I talked to cooks while I worked at the store and all of them had an amazing store of food knowledge but an almost disdain for the cuisine itself. I think of how different an experience a person who grows up with Italian food as a cultural icon would feel compared to my business oriented encounter. While I imagine I could rattle off the names of the food with similar ease, and could tell you what exactly goes into each dish, at least according to the chefs I watched, I doubt that the food for all its familiarity has the same sense of history or specialness.

My Maria Garetti Story

I haven't been here in a long while. A 10 months long while.

In the interim I've gotten to France and Turkey, switched jobs, roommates, significant others. Lots of stuff.

And more recently found some reasons to come back to writing.

So I may be bringing more offerings again. Keep in mind they are personal musings often based on memory, permeable and imperfect at best, and may not follow the "facts" of life events for those of who may actually have been there. It's the emotional, or at least creatively most cohesive, story being told. But in the words of a famous program note writer, sometimes that's a truth of its own sort.

So I leave you for now, and begin anew, with an offering from childhood:


To me, Catholicism, the Magic River, and the family of my father are one, and they live in St. Louis.

Half of my family was raised Catholic, and in the days before my Dad stopped taking us to Missouri I saw them on a fairly regular bi yearly basis. While Chicago and its suburbs were home, Saint Louis was and remains in my mind a shadowy place, a world full of symbolic image and mythic size. Chicago was realism, devoided of its iconography, St. Louis held mystery intrigue, voo-doo hoo-doo magic.

My sister and I were the first grandchildren of a 9 child clan from my grandmother Ursie and faintly remembered grandfather. My earliest memories of St. Louis come in a bundle of 3: being thrown in the air by my grandpa G while searching out the evil snake/dog cloth log that blocked heat from getting in from the porch through the crack at the bottom of the door, the church across the street that my grandmother attended daily yet never brought me to and the frame of Jesus in the living room that faced it, and lastly, the River, the big one, barges and mud. These blend together in my brain into a single vision of the warmth and pain of that second home away from home.

My dad's family were always the bustling ones, unlike my Scandinavian relatives on my mom's side, the Germanic G's were loud, used to arguing for their needs and values (9 children the rule went, meant you accepted what there was and got as much of it as you could). Being the first heiresses to the kingdom, my sister and I were doted upon, told we were being doted upon, and told how lucky we were to be so doted upon. The center of attention at any family gathering, city-wide scavenger hunts were set up in out honor, all the relatives moving through parks, writing "clues" leading us back to a "stolen" doll in a spontaneous and collective interactive adventure. And because we were the first, we were, at least at the beginning, told the most careful version of the family history. The telling of it intended to be passed on, cleansed usually of its more dour parts. The stories of the larger than life joy of my grandfather's "good" times did not include the words "manic" and nowhere were they tempered with the flip side of the depression that he eventually succumbed to. The vague sadness of my grandmother in rare quiet moments together was fleeting, an aunt or uncle always quickly swooping in with a story or joke to cover the silences. Grandpa G became a single image, a painted portrait from his army days I'd seen once, a symbol and a vague memory of a literally grand father I had known but did not know anymore, though I was told he adored me with the ardor only a first grandchild can elicit.

Images and sensory memory of Creve Coeur, the area my grandmother lived in, are fluid and consistently do not reflect the actual geography I've noted in the few times I've returned. The church across the street, Sacred Heart or something to that general effect, I remember as huge, hulking, a giant block of religious iconography. Mysterious to me and thus tantalizing. At Christmas everyone would go to midnight mass and every year I begged, pleaded, cried to be allowed with the adults when they attended. The one year some poor aunt relented I feel asleep and was in tears for hours the next day, feeling as if I'd missed some bizarre and luscious magic show only playing across the street from my grandmother's home. My aunt O tried to make up from the loss by showing me an illustrated book of Saints (or perhaps simply describing it? the memory is never solid enough to be sure). We sat in the hall, with the Jesus portrait palpable in the next room, and she described Catholic school and the book and her desire as a girl to be daring like the female saints depicted within. Her descriptions of the pictures were vivid, lurid even, and as intended, they inspired me, made me surer than ever that St. Louis held a kind of spell and power I could only dream of in parts farther north. Missouri's heat and magic were entwined, one seeming to fuel the other so that even in the cold of winter, one had only to stand at the old steam furnaces to know there was a deep source of energy and warmth welling up from somewhere down below.

The last of the great St. Louis fantasies lay in the river, giant and rolling, brown and dingy, a secret keeping river. One of the more adventurous uncles, always a camera in hand to snap the opportune poetic image, would walk my sister and I down the "Secret Steps," really more an overgrown path, but it felt like trekking down a cliff. We would come to the bank and wave and dance for the barges, put our hands in the muddy water until someone couldn't take the thought of dirty children a moment longer. We took turns inventing stories about the river, sailors lost to opaque depths, or boats that slowly floated their way to its distant mouth. We treated the river as our own private place. I felt with a kind of knowing I've rarely found again, that whenever I saw a public lookout onto that rolling mass of murk, I was lucky to know the real river, the truest place to meet it, the only real point to connect with it's banks. The river was my right and responsibility as a descendent of the family line, I tried to impress this upon my sibling with my tree years worth of advanced study on the subject.

And seemingly suddenly, though really it must have been over years and months, months and years at a time, this cord was broken. New children were born, my father stopped going down south for Christmas, my grandmother seemed older than I remembered, tired in a way that frightened me. I became busy with my "real" life and though there was no particular or neat end to St. Louis as a child, when I go back now it all looks small by comparison, the city, the house in Creve Coeur, the church, even my mythic aunts and uncles. The picture over the wall and my grandmother seem fragile and a bit unknown now, faded and shrunken from their former childhood brilliances. I've still never been to midnight mass, though it's long since passed from my desires. Because I can't do it anymore, because it would expose what isn't and really never was and because only the not doing leaves at least some of the magic possible, somewhere. In the story of bones uncovered from under the alter across the street during a renovation, in the nostalgic stories told to me about my younger self, and in that river, still big and obscuring enough not to give away all the mystic secrets it once held.

XXX-tremism

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

Must you make me laugh so much?
It's bad enough we get along so well.
Say "Goodnight" and go...
- Imogen Heap, Goodnight and Go

I am a person who lives life as an emotional absolutist.

What, you may ask, is that? Well, I answer, it's a term I've sort of made up. But, I think that it says a lot about the way I interact with the things around me. And I'm guessing that there are at least a few other people like me out there in the world, even if they don't know that they too are emotional absolutists. We're people who don't know how to live in emotional shades of gray. We are those who need to put specific labels on specific feelings so that we can specifically deal with them in a specific way. I'm revealing to you, and this isn't easy for me dear readers, that I have a really hard time when I'm not sure how I feel about something.

As a middle schooler, I learned in my "gifted" program about the seven kinds of intelligences as posited by Howard Gardner. Mr. Gardner put forth that people can be "smart" in a variety of ways, seven to be exact. It's a theory which that splits up smarts into separate categories of aptitude and helps to elucidate why person with perfect pitch and the ability to pick up any instrument won't necessarily understand multivariable calculus right away or why a gifted punster might not be able to parallel park. Ms. Kotrba my gifted teacher told my mother in a parent-teacher school conference that I was the first student she had ever encountered who had ever exhibited excellence in all 7 intelligences.

My mother told her she was wrong.

I admit that I have always been a nerdy science geek, so poor Wendy Kotrba's assessment of above average ability in the area of logical-mathematical intelligence comes as no real surprise. I think that I have also always written reasonably well, if overly dependent on form, so we can also concede that the linguistic category wasn't a huge stretch. I sang and played an instrument decently so music was within the realm of possibility. The drive to win at Tetris or arrange my setting in the most efficient manner possible bespeaks my spatial understanding. Ms. Kotrba never saw me dance so I suppose she couldn't have known my body/kinestethic sense was a little off and while everyone deludes themselves to some extent about their own personal strengths and weaknesses I think I have a vaguely accurate understanding about my own personality. However, "Interpersonal Skills," the last intelligence and the one my mother pointed to as a clear indication of my teacher's clear and present delusions of favoritism, has never been a strong suit. Not by any stretch. Some might go so far as to say that I have always "struggled" with this particular hurdle.

I have, in short, never been very good at expressing my emotions or picking up on the meanings of those in others. I was notorious for acting in a manner that bespoke the very opposite of what I was trying to convey. If I felt sorry for doing something wrong I expressed that emotion in anger and frustration at the other person. A real sense of guilt or sadness came out as stony and silent. My warmer moments were at times unexpected or in response to frustration on the part of the intended recipient. Child of an adolescent therapist, I was forced to learn how to substitute actual interpersonal skills for a logical reading system. In place of actual understanding in a direct way why people act the way they do, I have learned to process cues through a semi-logical system that I have been given, something akin to a computer logarithm that inputs signals people are giving me with their body language and outputs emotive expression and meaning. But people aren't all the same or always all that logical, much as I want them to be. Thus, it might be an understatement to say that between the lines communication has never been my strong suit.

Because of this, I often don't trust my interpretations of personal interactions. I tend not to trust my reading of a situation, especially when it falls outside of my direct personal experience. I've had one too many cases in which a person seems to me to be acting in a very specific way only to in fact feel quite the opposite. It's made such an impression that I've defensively developed a habit of adopting rather rigid emotional climates within myself, almost as if I'm doing the world a favor by making my emotional terrain simpler, in the hopes that the people around me will do so in return.

As a teenager early stages of boy-girl interactions made me vaguely green and weak in the knees for the very reason that my social life depended on my ability to play games of interpersonal subtlety. Not to mention that whenever I liked someone I was tortured with the knowledge that I had nil aptitude for figuring out whether they felt the same feelings in kind. Regular people are hard enough to figure out and teenage boys?!? Forget it. Often I would find myself doubting up to and sometimes far after admission of feeling from a suitor. The boy could have positive body signals charged with a car battery, be bent nearly backwards in order to put his hand closer to mine on the arm rest of my chair, they could back-rub, "accidentally" touch my should/arm/knee/thigh a hundred times, make excuses to call and still I couldn't or wouldn't trust myself to read the signs as what I hoped they were.

So while for some the strange and new feeling of kiss-chase would send them soaring, giving them a new found power in the exhilarating limbo, the ecstatic state was for me instead a veritable purgatory. While my peers raced into the trascendant penumbra of courtship addicted to the adrenaline-driven thrill like a first hit of heroin, I found myself stuck in the back seat of the hated vehicle suffering from motion sickness. My sister and I often argued this point, taking opposing viewpoints on matters of the burgeoning heart. I staunchly maintained that the beginnings of an amour simply caused undue and unwanted anxiety. For me the hulking uncertainty of end result was too much stress to bear. I simply wanted to fast forward to a state of stability in which I'd no longer have to worry. If I just knew the person felt the same I could start acting normally again. Dale on the other hand, would often find that once she'd actually caught the prey she'd been stalking that she no longer had much interest in it. "Why do I want something that's now rolled over and died?" she'd counter to my protests.

Thus I have never really believed in the thrill of flirtation, generally amping myself up into such a fit of nerves that I tend to rush past warning signs others might see flashing in bright red and dive right into things head first if only to get them over and done with. I hate so much having to begin something new that I sometimes sabotage myself. Because when I try so hard to force my eggs to hatch before they're ready I end up covered in yolk. The worst part being of course that I am totally cognizant of what I'm doing. I still have a decent sense of intra-personal intelligence after all.

When I first began my foray into online dating I quickly realized that my inclination was simply to meet someone immediately if they passed the basic set of criteria: a Republican-free voting record, an above average respect for higher education and a lack of significant others in the state of Ohio. I didn't want to drag out the get to know you process if it wasn't going to work out. And while on some level I recognized that until you actually get to know someone it's sort of arbitrary to decide whether or not things will work out, I also have a great propensity towards making large sweeping judgments about people on very little info.

"Ok", I hear you saying in reference to the quotes above. "So that explains the Rilke... What about the pop-culture insert?"

Well, here's the deal: I'm getting to the point now where I'm beginning to not only see that my patterns might be the teeny tiniest bit destructive, but that maybe, just maybe, everyone feels a little bit of those queezies when they might have to put themselves out on the line. I'm starting to wonder if maybe my discomfort is just one of those things I have to learn to live with. And while I can't promise I'll ever fully appreciate a leisurely journey to certainty, maybe I can at least learn to tolerate it, if only because it makes the destination a little fuller when you get there and that forcing situations before they're ready means I'm recieving them in an immature state. So I've made a resolution to figure out how to train myself out of the instant gratification I've gotten used to and try and keep my categories a little less absolutely. Blur the labels for my own good.

Because perhaps, just perhaps, there's validity in being one of those who's waiting for all those good things they have coming to them.

Diffused Indirections or "I'll Die Trying"

When I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clues and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

- Walt Whitman

To go forward is to die. To stand still is also to die.
Better to go forward and die.

- West African Proverb

I was looking back at some of my very first posts here, back when I was committed to writing far more often than I seem to marshal myself to doing lately. It’s funny, as I find satisfying creative theatrical outlets, I am less unsettled, and thus need less the writing outlet that I used to. Anyway, I came across this and laughed. I laughed because for all the growth that I know has taken place within the hallowed halls of my head this past year, no matter how much I feel a million miles away, I always seem to be saying the same old thing. Even I start to recognize the same old story after telling it enough.

What is it about the quarter life mark that instigates crisis? I think there's a confluence of events in the mid twenty range that starts a ball rolling. Add up the end of the idealistic college era along with the beginning of "real" adulthood with a dash of regret about choices (not) made and one produces a strange unsettledness. Unless that's just me.Oh twenty something ennui. You remind the best of us of all we're capable of and then sometimes strand us on the shores of desire with no ability to get to the other side.

I find that at this juncture I've got just enough know-it-ness to grasp a sense of everything I want/need to do to get where I think I need to go. But, that middle road is misty and unclear. Generals stand out in sharp definition while details remain murky. I know what I want but how do I get it? I can recognize it when I see it, but how do I make it come into view? For career, the straight shot of schooling is no longer the immediate answer, though it is often the default, and even there, one no longer finds the simple immediate give and take of previous eras of ones life. In love our combined sets of luggage have only just begun to weigh enough that they periodically have to be set down. Friendships are no longer a given of one's environment, new people do not necessarily waft in and out and those that do may not have that first day of kindergarden need to glom onto others. It's a weird dance of needing to plant but not wanting to settle.

It's that part of existence that calls one to think of their life as a plate of food. A plate that while still more than half full has been eaten at a blinding speed. It's when you start to think about trying to slow down and paying attention to what you're eating. "Crap!" you think, "I've already taken in some of the best part and I didn't even realize it. Do I try and save the best for later, or do I acknowledge that some things in life might start to grow cold and that it will never taste as good as it does now, so better to strike while the proverbial iron is proverbially heated?" And perhaps it also challenges one to acknowledge that the half empty plate is closer than we might wish it to be. So many mixed metaphors pile one top of each other, miles high. We're collapsing under the sheer weight of it all...

But, the secret I'm slowly discovering, is that it's really in the minutae that this life begins to shape. Life these days has become a series of moments, of details and arbitrary choices. What I think about at the end of the day, week, year are the unexpected hug from a person I hardly knew, the feeling of exhilaration in leading a rehearsal, and the baked brie ooze in the shape of Italy. A huge part of me is afraid to imagine that the ooze is all that I'm taking away from life. "I need to stop!" This voice in me says, "I need to change the world! I need to drop everything and go somewhere else and... LIVE! " But the other part says, "Look man, Italian ooze is better than no ooze at all. Maybe the living is in the ooze as much as some foreign clime or epic trek. " And if I really enjoyed the ooze, if it made enough of a mark for me to spend a paragraph on it, then ok. I came, I oozed, I left, and maybe that's enough.

The point is that I don't know what my life is. I definitely don't know what all I'm going to do with it. But I can't get caught up in the "not"ness of whatever I happen to be doing. No one can "not do." And when I get too caught up in what I'm not accomplishing, I only end up standing still accomplishing even less. I can only continue to move forward, getting closer to the dying, eating the food in whatever order makes sense at the time. Which is exactly what I said months and months ago. I'm a veritable time machine. Tell me I'm Einsteinian: theoretically relative, relatively theoried,always simultaneously moving forward while maintaining a constant state of uncertainty.

So in honor of that old post, I put up some judiciously contrasting quotes and followed with my standard introspective and slightly self-indulgent musing that, as per usual, says I really have no idea what I'm running towards, but at least I'll move forward in my way, if I can figure that out, and die in lieu of standing still.

Stinky Cheese

I am out of a job.

Yes, despite my double bachelors from a relatively prestigious college, one in a hard science no less, I was released from the employ of a peddler of cheese. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

The funny thing is, while I put up a stink and demanded my rights, protested my downsizing to the high heavens and made the fat cat boss feel pretty bad about his squashing of the workingman, I probably should have been released long ago. If the cheese masters had even the remotest idea about the things that went on while I was under their umbrella and brought it to my attention, I couldn't really have fought. But they didn't know that, and the reason I got laid off wasn't a very good one.

I love to feed people. It's an offshoot of my general love of food as a concept. But somehow sharing that love with others makes things feel extra special. So while I reigned the steeds of the Italian Market, I invited those relatively near and dear to come and sit and have a sandwich or a slice of pizza, at little or no cost to themselves. It felt a mere extension of the policy in which employees were allowed to eat and drink whatever they might lay their hands to while working. A policy that was stretched to include non-working hours as well. In short, let us guess that I have not really bought groceries in a little over a year.

So it seemed only the logical next step that I ought to spread the bounty to the little folk, the starving artists of the city of Philadelphia. Joe Hill, a famous labor martyr, said to strike at the boss man every chance you got. One coke, one baguette, one hot roast pork with broccoli rabe at a time, I was doing my part for the united workers of the world. And I can only guess that the higher ups couldn't have been hurting that badly as things went on as long as they did.

But to the present. As they say, all good things must come to an end. The very day of my unceremonious release, done with no notice immediately after the holiday season, a friend and I remarked on how very much I should cherish the extremely cushy nature of my service industry career. My own personal form of Robin Hooding now over, I am surprised at the lack of emotion I feel towards this loss. But thinking it over, I suppose I've expected this to come for some time now, even if not for this reason.

Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of the Cheese Shop.
I will fear no hunger; For I will find other delicacies;
My pan and my stove, they comfort me.
Unused by my hand in the presence of my now enemies;
Thou will now be anointed with oil; My pot will again runneth over.

It's the end of an era friends. Let us bow our heads in a moment of silence.

The opposite of me, or A Winter's Tale

Things I am not: High flying and fancy free.



See.

That was most certainly not me earlier today.

Sugar Glider related antitheses aside, I am seriously addicted to the winter weather. Rather, I am reveling in the sheer winter-inspired life style the current weather is affording me. Hermetic by nature, I love excuses to stay indoors and snuggle up to my laptop or a book, or even the hanging of my new curtains with social justification on my side. I love wintery foods: pumpkin, gingerbread, nutmeg and all those intense carb and meat centered creations that one craves as a hibernation catalyst. Soup looms large with me this time of year: steamy, full of little chunks of tasty, even the bowl it comes in warms me to the core.

In the winter I listen to books on tape. I stay home and work on craft projects. I play solitaire. I do a million things that all let me sit alone in the quiet of my house and free the mind to wander through the halls of introspection. It’s this time of year that I get the most ideas for new shows, the seeds of things that the productive spring months will foster, nurture and grow beyond shadows and flickers. It’s also the time that I reconnect with what I’m doing now, checking in with life as it stands and sort of just noting what’s there.

Winter is never really a time of action-packedness for me. It’s about stillness and preservation of one’s energies, be they mental or physical, because there’s less to go around. I try not to start big new endeavors in winter, in part I guess because of the hassle that goes along with winter schlepping, but more so because the short days and chilled air encourages a kind of minimalism. And yet, because I know I tap out around 11pm and can’t run around the clock like the long summer nights seem to always find me doing, I’m more careful with the way I use those hours. When I read, I don’t feel the need to slam through my book to get it done, I can savor the words.

I sometimes get upset with the slow paced-ness of life in the winter months, but lots of experience trying to change the inevitable says the effort is futile. So instead I trust that I will again rev up in the coming months and bask in the semi-lethargy for now.

i want to shine on in the hearts of men!!!!!!

Another head aches,
another heart breaks,

I'm so much older than I can take...

And my affection,
well it comes and goes,
I need direction to perfection
No no no no no no: Help me out.
Yeah-e-ah.
You know you got to help me out.

- Some alterna-pop band with a name that was "The Fill-In-The-Ironic-Blank" from a recent trendy movie I can't remember

So freaking true man.

Do you know the days when bad pop music just hurts so good? Those days when you know it's trashy and that everyone is singing it but you seriously can't believe that another person can be comprehending this music on the deep philosophical level that you have spontaneously achieved? And even as you karmically connect you know the music isn't actually all that meaningful, but perhaps you've found depth were there was none. In fact, tomorrow it may not strike any sort of chord with you at all, but this particular afternoon when this song randomly came up on your play list you stopped and actually listened to (a selective some of) the lyrics for the first time and felt like Jimmy Cool was talking right to you.

This is the stuff that walking down a city sidewalk hero/heroine slow-smile-spreading across the face "everything is going to be ok" end of movie credit roll scenes are made of. And I've determined that, for me at least, this is one of the few simple pleasures that keep the young creative minds of this X-Y-what comes after Z generation going. We need to make the things that surround us important or we'll simply go bonkers.

We're po-mo and majored in anthro, orgo, or socio. Or perhaps gender/woman/sexuality/race studies with a dash of urban planning. Skilled in the language of "ology"s notwithstanding we seek jobs that pay us a fractional amount per year of the cost of our higher educations. We house low rent but live high maintenance. We have above-par intelligence and sub-standard housing. Every person I know is a super genius physicist who ballroom dances professionally in their spare time. They're the closet opera singers who pay the rent peddling medical insurance to drug companies and work 50-plus hours a week besides their 9-5 because their "career" does not make them a living.

And most of the time it means that we're doing things that challenge us every day of our lives. It's tough work, draining work, and 99% percent of the time it's severely unrewarding. All that work towards a vague artistic ideal can taint you on the way. By the time you get to the point where you can do the thing you want to do, it's the last thing you feel like doing. So life becomes this idea of infinite potential, a world in which you knew if you just had "the time, the funds, the resources" to do your thing, you'd be brilliant. But all those literal other-worldly things start to seem so far away, and more "needs" start to pile up. So before you have gotten to anything at all, it starts to seem easier to detour off into something else. There is a reason for artist "burn out" and it's a prevalent creative phenomenon, especially within the American artistic landscape, that the best artists are not always the ones who can survive.

And at the end of the day after toiling in some silly job that a monkey could perform or spending 7 years behind a book getting a PhD so that you can teach somewhere, simply so that one has the flexibility to be around in case what they want to do has a chance of happening, there is a need for those underextended brains to find meaning in the silly and sometimes overly shallow world around them. So we find that meaning in the middle of Hot Fuss.

Because sometimes, you just want to yell, kick and scream your head off about something, even if you don't yet know what it is. When I've finished yelling, life usually seems a little clearer, more focused, which is nice. And sometimes I hit the replay button and listen again, headphones on, and actually feel like that person in the movie, walking down the street, with a slow smile crossing my face, knowing everything will turn out alright.