brave new world

I feel like I’ve been easing into 2009 the way one wanders into OZ or Narnia or something, looking around at the world in a sort of befuddled wonderment and not particularly knowing what to do with myself. That the world outside my windows is a snow-icing landscape of white with creeping black-fingered trees likely only adds to the otherworldliness of it all.

I spent today alternately watching inauguration coverage on CNN and attempting to figure out what was wrong with my printer. It made for an interesting juxtaposition of historically significant and everyday mundane, but didn’t make the world feel any less strange. Maybe it feels even more strange now, strange and new, in a good way. I fixed the printer, so that bodes well.

My Moby-based Pandora station keeps pulling out this track by Jakatta that samples the score of American Beauty, a movie I was somewhat obsessed with nearly ten years ago. It is mixed and layered and might not even be identifiable had you not seen the movie multiple times in the theatre and owned the soundtrack. Listening to it is like having a piece of my past reworked and remixed and made into something new that retains the idea of the original if not the form. It’s disturbing and comforting all at once.

I think I’m still standing in the snow looking at 2009 spread out in front of me all full of possibility and promise and hope, and not sure where it is going to take me. Perhaps I just need to trust in my boots to take one step and then another. Destination unknown.