Nine millions bicycles

Every time I see Sevada, no matter how long it’s been and how much catching up it involves, our conversations always end up with discussion of music - about how we can no longer bring ourselves to listen to Zeppelin; about the immortality of the Stones and the fact that Mick Jagger might just as well be the sexiest man alive; about the merits and demerits of the new U2 album; about our lack of interest in “sad bastard” music and how instead of falling for the next generic alternative band number one hundred and eleventy six, we are now slowly switching towards the mellow, more ear pleasing tunes of the newly found and (relatively) less famous and nonetheless favorite artists of ours… These type of discussions inevitably lead to grand music swaps of sorts, although long gone are the days when we’d trade Sonic Youth for Pearl Jam (! Sonic Youth, by the way, sucks. I don’t know what business I had listening to it in the first place).

Sevada seems to be into chick music these days. I am not a particularly big fan of chick music – too loaded, too emotionally charged for me. But then, sometimes there is just that one song that is so perfect in its simplicity and so harmoniously melodic that I can’t stop listening to it over and over and over again…

More on Katie Melua here.

Oh the wonderful world of possibilities

Sometimes I wish I could get a contractor job with the State Department and move to Armenia on some kind of a foreign policy “mission”, taking the boy along with me, and he would teach history to the embassy brats and do whatever else historians do when they are in a country full of history, and we would live the good life of pretentious expats and scout out neighboring Georgia, Turkey and Russia on long weekends…


At other times I want to just say “Fuck it” and apply to the Math PhD program here at VCU and stay in Richmond forever (or at least for the foreseeable future) without having to move or think about anything else but being happy and content… But then they tell me stuff like “You could do better than VCU. You should try to do better than VCU,” and that makes me want to smack people in the head because the fact that a VCU professor would tell me to go to a “better” school appears to me somewhat disturbing…


I know that between these two options there is a world of other, infinitely many possibilities. I also seem to have a much better idea than I did before about where I’d like to be in the next five/ten years. And yet, even though the shortest distance between point A and point B is always a straight line, that’s not how things usually work out for me, as far as choices are concerned… And this is just a tiny glimpse of the kind of an ongoing debate I have been having with myself that I am sure will be reappearing here on a more or less regular basis.


I do find it rather ironic that of all subjects in the world I chose the one that deals with decisions and choices while being the worst type of person whenever decision making is concerned. I wonder whether I need to really see someone about this…