"All I Want"

1 July 2026: I've always really liked this one and get swept away by that last reprise of the chorus, wrapped around new lines:

"And it feels so close (All I want is to feel this way)

Let it take me in (Be this close, feel the same)

Let it hold me so (All I want is to feel this way)

I can feel it say (Evening speaks, feel it say)"

90s nostalgia, for better or worse, hitting me really hard these days.

"Secret of Life"

16 June 2026: Listening to Faith Hill's 1998 album Faith while I get some work done this afternoon. This was a major soundtrack of my summer of '98, when I was doing Summer Scholars research at Roanoke. Anyway, there's a lot of gems on this one, including "Secret of Life," which always struck me as wise in its simplicity. 

Maybe my favorite lines?

"The secret of life is to try not to hurry,

But don't wait, don't wait..."

Love that tension in the ideas and the way she repeats that second "don't wait."

I find myself navigating that tension (internally) a lot. 

Anyway, kind of cool to return to this album 18 years later. And Faith is so cute in this era! (She's always beautiful, but this late 90's cute is really something.)

Big Sister Energy

20 May 2026: 

Today while the group chat with my siblings was a bit lively, the song “I Melt with You” was playing on Pandora. 

I realized the first time I really heard that song, I was in the back of my mom’s minivan and we were driving Tara back home from a semester at college in the spring of 1990. I was always so excited to have her back home.

Anyway, I had my little Walkman and played a song for her that I was just swoony over: “Paintings in My Mind” by Tommy Page.** (Ha! It's not a great song, but I was young...) 

I can picture her*: putting on the headphones, listening, and telling me it was a great song. Immaculate “Big Sister Energy,” tolerating and even humoring my enthusiasm for the New Kids on the Block-adjacent pop star.  

Then she was like, “Let me play one for you…” 

Because she was the coolest person I knew, I agreed that it was a great song. (And come on—it is!)

Sometimes I think too much, maybe, about the hard parts of growing up. When I think of my siblings, though, so much is good and filled with love.

*A “painting in my mind,” if you will.

**RIP, Tommy Page. I still think you were swoon-worthy.

Shiny Happy Dreams

11 September 2025: I am so grateful that the hope and energy of my early-ish post yesterday carried me through the rest of the day as things grew much darker in the wake of more gun violence.

Woke up with that darkness weighing on me. Then I heard two songs on my brief run to and from Sheetz this morning: "Shiny Happy People" and "Dreams." Sunny, optimistic songs from 1991 and 1993, when I was so young and the world at least pretended to make more sense. 

On the two minute drive to Sheetz, the juxtaposition of "Shiny Happy People" to my emotions almost made me laugh. 

When I got back in the car and "Dreams" was playing? I just cried. 

I can't really say what all of this means--why it stands out to me. But I want to mark it and remember it. 

Nostalgia machine...

1 August 2025: Amy and I saw the new Naked Gun movie tonight. I laughed a lot--so many dumb jokes!* An added bonus: the movie worked like a nostalgia machine for me, bringing me back to watching these movies with my siblings when we were kids. 

*One joke landed with a real thud for me, though; we do not to be dropping the r-word back into things.

"Sometime in the Morning"

24 May 2025: Felt the urge to listen to The Monkees on my evening walk. I remembered how much I really liked this one when I was little.

30 years ago...

1 November 2024: Social media tells me that this album--Nirvana's MTV Unplugged in New York--was released thirty years ago today. (The show was recorded the previous November.) Thirty years...my goodness. 

An email that changed my life...

27 June 2024: Was doing some cleaning/filing today and found a print-out of an email that changed my life. Wonderful to have a reminder of that day and everything that followed it. Also always nice to remember Charles, who was so kind and nurturing to me as a department chair.

"As Cool As I Am..."

25 July 2022: After a full day on campus, I came home (already hitting my 10K steps) and realized that the rain that was supposed to come this afternoon and evening wasn't coming. And that, even though it was still gross out, the heat had broken a bit. And that it was maybe the only chance I'd have to mow the lawn (which was long) for several days. So I did it reluctantly, even though I knew I would be glad when I was done. 

Another incentive? I knew I had the first episode of Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs' new season on the "Lilith Fairest of Them All" waiting for me to listen to while I mowed. What a fun episode of a season I am so excited to hear! Like Mark suggested for himself, this song--which is at the top of the rankings for now--might just go all the way in my rankings.

901...

13 June 2022: Today marks 901 days in a row of at least 10,000 steps. Still incredibly lucky--for health and the ability to plan my days--to have kept this up.

It's also my dear brother's birthday, so I am thinking about him. Lately when I do, this song is the soundtrack, bringing back thoughts of summer night dips in the pool. 

Flashback: 1998

 14 February 2021: Just got done offering some feedback to a recent graduate who is working on a statement of purpose for a graduate program. Every time I get asked to do one of these, I say, "You know I haven't done one of these since 1998..." And because of how time works, every year 1998 is further away.

Yet I always end up recycling some of the advice my advisor gave me back in 1998: give us your voice, find the little stories you can tell in a phrase or an example, make us see you. It's not easy to do--to blend the academic and the personal, argue a thesis that is about you. But when you can do it, it works really well. 

Anyway, no doubt because I am currently reading Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch, my thoughts went back to my "hook" for my own statement--the story of finding myself going down an internet rabbit hole to learn everything I could about Christina Rossetti. It's kind of funny now. In 1998, after all, the internet was still a bit "new" for many of us. Clear as day, I can see my advisor telling me he liked it a lot, but I wanted to be careful not to come off as some "cyber-punk." He had even written "cyber-punk?" in the margin. You know, I didn't want to scare off professors by seeming too obsessed with this internet thing. Ha. Very 1998. 

"You Got It All"

25 October 2020: Saw this song, "You Got It All" by The Jets, get mentioned in a tweet yesterday morning and it has been playing in my head non-stop since then. The opening bars are a like a time machine. The tune is simple and sweet. The lyrics are kind of lovely, too. Wistful and nostalgia-inducing with a touch of melancholy. In other words, a perfect "rainy Sunday in autumn" soundtrack. 

(By the way, the tweet was pointing out that the lead singer was about 13 (!) when she sang this.)

Nostalgia

4 October 2020: On a day where I once again find myself seeking escape in very old game show re-runs and dreaming of the "before times," this episode of Sawbones on nostalgia hits differently. I always remember a professor telling me that the word combines "'pain" and "home" and I've been acutely aware of its inherent bittersweet-ness ever since. 

"Dreamsicle"

17 May 2020: Treated myself to Jason Isbell's new album the other day and I'm really digging it so far. "Dreamsicle" seems to fit in kind of well with what I've blogged about the last two days: crystal clear images of youthful times; moments loaded with more meaning, even if the kid could only sense it and not fully understand them.

"the space-annihilating power of thought"

16 May 2020: “It is curious—the space-annihilating power of thought. For just one second, all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missourian village, on the other side of the globe, vividly seeing again these forgotten pictures of fifty years ago, and wholly unconscious of all things but just those; and in the next second I was back in Bombay, and that kneeling native’s smitten cheek was not done tingling yet! Back to boyhood—fifty years; back to age again, another fifty; and a flight equal to the circumference of the globe-all in two seconds by the watch!” --Mark Twain, Following the Equator

I'm working on a review of a new book about Twain and came across this passage in which he writes about being in Bombay and seeing an Indian boy struck by a white man. He is instantly transported in his mind back to his boyhood in Missouri and the memory of a slave suffering similar violence. It reminded me of yesterday's post and all of the thoughts I've been having since then.

"Your Wildest Dreams"

15 Mary 2020: Heard this song today on my very quick drive to pick up dinner from my favorite local Thai restaurant.

Found myself instantly transported back to 1986, riding in the minivan with my parents on a trip to Hartwick to see Tara. My dad had bought the tape for my mom, something he didn't do often because my mom didn't like a lot of new music. But she loved this song. They told us about how this was a comeback for The Moody Blues, a band from when they "were young," and a group I knew nothing about. I remember myself imagining them as "young" and settling into that thing you did when you were little--just listening to adults talking about old times from the front of the car.

The song itself is about nostalgia. And the lead singer was about my age (a bit younger, actually) when they had this big comeback. So lots to think about there...

Not all of my memories from back then are good, but this one is. And on the first day this season that felt like summer, when I pushed back the [moody--can't help myself] blues for a bit, this memory was a welcome one.

Box of memories...

18 March 2020: Spring Break cleaning unearthed a box of treasures. First, with my childhood best friend, Marie. Second, on an overnight train to Paris in 1992 with junior high friends. Finally, the most "I was a kid in the 80s" collection of random objects.

Expired...

20 June 2019: This fell out of one of my books today. The real tragedy is not the expired coupon, but that my first reaction was, “Oh boy—this expired over ten years ago!” Then I remembered how math works…

Posting it on Facebook reminded me an expired gift certificate I posted about last summer. Weirdly, that was exactly one year ago!

20 years ago?

25 April 2018:

"So today I finally find the courage deep inside
Just to walk right up to your door
But my body can't move when I finally get to it
Like a thousand times before
Then without a word you handed me this letter
Read I hope this finds the way into your heart, it said

I love you
Please say you love me too
'Til the end of time" --Faith Hill, "I Love You"

I have always really liked this song--its retro-sound, its big old vocal delivered by Faith, and most of all, the very sweet story it tells. It's been in my head today.

Just now, I realized I first heard it in the spring of 1998. (In fact, Wikipedia tells me the album--entitled Faith--was released on April 21, 1998.) That's twenty years ago. Wow. I remember so much of that spring and summer and so many of those memories are set to that album. It was, among other things, the summer before my senior year of college (terrifying and thrilling), when I did independent "grad-school level" research for the first time as a "Summer Scholar," when I lived on the Elizabeth Campus with my best friends and we felt like we had the whole campus to ourselves and kind of practiced for our first apartments, when I turned 21, when my sister got married... Lots of change and big thinking and the feeling of being on the cusp of new things. Again: scary and exciting.

Twenty years later. How much has changed? What remains the same? Hmmm...

"When You're Gone"

15 January 2018: Really sad to hear the news about Dolores O'Riordan today. The Cranberries were an important part of the soundtrack of some foundational years in my life. I could link to so many songs, but this afternoon/evening, this is the one that's been on my mind. I can remember playing it (on repeat, sometimes!) through some angsty moments, but the lyrics take on a new resonance today.