First some miscellany. I've joined the ranks of my sister by having hit a pigeon with my car yesterday. While I'm no big fan of pigeons (rats with wings, I think is the best description), I'm saddened by death, especially death that comes as a result of my actions. It kinda left me in a funk all day.

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And with that I move on to a whenever-I-feel-like-it feature of some of my favorite music. Someone used to complain frequently that I had too many favorite songs and albums and bands and the like. So I thought I'd start running down the (very detailed) list. Maybe you'll find something you might want to try. Anyway ...

• Favorite rock song: Molodiye L'vi (Young Lions)- Boris Grebenshikov. Literally the only song I've ever heard that I absolutely cannot listen to only once at a time. Coming from someone who thinks he's overplaying something if he listens to a CD more than twice in a month, that's saying something.
  
• Favorite rock album: Radio Silence- Boris Grebenshikov. Piss-poor sales. Awful reviews. His fans in Russia revile it. I absolutely love it. Straight-ahead rock and roll produced by Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, with BG's scotch-soaked voice and impressionist poetry for lyrics.
  
• Favorite English traditional song: Matty Groves as performed by Fairport Convention
  
• Favorite Scottish traditional song: Cruel Sister as performed by Old Blind Dogs
  
• Favorite Irish traditional song: tie: Arthur MacBride and Lord Franklin
  
• Favorite Canadian Celtic rock album: Weights and Measures- Spirit of the West
  
• Favorite U.S. Celtic rock album: Nothing good enough, although Black Stone Tramp by Brother fills this niche. They're an Australian band that lives, records and performs mostly in the US, so they almost count.
  
• Favorite Scottish folk rock album: The Half Tail- Wolfstone
  
• Favorite progressive rock song: The Brave album in its entirety by Marillion, except "Paper Lies". Masquerade/Lift Me Up by Yes gets an honorable mention (two separate songs, but they run into each other and I always listen to them as a unit)
  
• Favorite concert ever: Silly Wizard Tucson, Arizona, 1988
  
• Favorite new wave song: Major Tom- Peter Schilling
  
• Favorite new wave album: Systems of Romance- Ultravox
  
• Favorite New Romantic album: Journeys to Glory or Diamond- Spandau Ballet
  
• Favorite Afropop album: tie: Joko- Youssou N'Dour and Wakafrika- Manu Dibango
  

Okay, that's enough for now. More later when I feel like it.

Now that the recent mid-term is election behind us, I feel it incumbent upon myself (oh, groan, I just realized the pun) to mention a thought I had about voting, which I mentioned in the company of my mom and sister this evening.

You hear often about how everyone should vote because they can, because this is a free country and we should celebrate our freedom. Blah blah the power of one vote blah blah this blah blah that.

Screw it all.

As a citizen of what purports to be a democracy, it is your, my, and everyone else's who meets legal requirements, responsibility to inform ourselves about the issues at stake and vote in every election. It is something we owe ourselves, our communities and our nation.

Our democracy doesn't work because it takes voting to make it work. If you want to complain about this or the other sorry state of affairs, you must understand that the systems are in place to fix it if only people vote regularly, conscientiously in sufficient numbers. Voter apathy is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think your vote will count for nothing so you don't vote, then it really does count for nothing.

If you think politics doesn't matter, then you take too much for granted. It is only through political change that social change is recognized. In a different political climate, such as exists in other nations and could exist in ours if we don't take seriously our responsibility to put in place wise leaders and good laws, things would be different. Races would still be segregated, or even worse, subjugated. Slavery and/or neo-serfdom would arise. There would be no freedom of speech or thought. Gay rights? Ha! You have the right to burn at the stake or get locked up in an asylum.

Or even better, run for office yourself. Michael Moore's Stupid White Men has a great section on that whole deal. It's not just for stupid rich straight white men with no vision.

Enough. You get the picture. Do something.

What strikes me most these days in the various livejournal entries I write or try to write is my overwhelming sense of contentment these days. It seems odd to me, since my life is so full of stress from work, school, business, etc., that it should be so.

But it strikes me even so, at odd moments of contemplation like the other day when I walked outside with Monty, only to be stopped in my tracks by the sunset -- dramatic tongues of yellow flame bouncing off the clouds above, followed a few minutes later by every vivid shade of red, blue and purple in a painter's arsenal. I love where I live, I love what I'm doing with my life and who I'm doing it with and I love myself.

I say this last because it also occurs to me a major reason why my last relationship didn't go so well, at least in terms of things we can pin on Joseph (I'm well aware that there's plenty of blame to pin on me, but this isn't a blame thing so much as an observation). It's often been said that you can't truly love someone else till you can love yourself. While I can certainly say that until relatively recently I had little clue how to love myself, I can say with equal confidence that Joseph hadn't a clue how to love himself either. Oh, certainly, he has a very high opinion of himself, but that seems in my opinion to be a substitute for, rather than an indication of, his love for himself. Not sure where I'm going with this; it's just a thought I had.

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It's been a long time since I've written, and mostly it's because I've been so busy. My classes are going incredibly well (midterm past in one class, major project half-over in another, and stunning group presentation to be made in another this week). This group presentation is a particular point of pride for me. We have to present the results of our group work to the class, but our instructor exhorted us to do it in a hopefully less-than-boring way. Flippantly, during our group meeting I joked that we could just do it all in haiku. Obviously, since I've mentioned it, you can probably surmise that that's just what we're doing. It's a little freakish to write haiku on collection development policies for a library, but it does force some discipline of thought and succinctness of presentation. If nothing else, our classmates will appreciate our brevity. A sample:

Books on dusty shelf --
No body ever reads them .
Out to the dumpster.

In addition to my classes, I've finally been getting the hang of my job and I'm starting to catch up on all of the Web design and database update projects I've fallen so far behind on for DCS. Still a lot of work to do (not the least of which is that the identifiers on the Web site for the items are incorrect so you can't add any of the items I've listed directly to the shopping cart ... very frustrating), but there's been progress.

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My birthday was good fun. It was the first time I've actually had a birthday celebration with more than immediate family around me, since I and Mason and my sister and brother-in-law were accompanied by Mike, Mark, Doug, Tim and Scott (don't worry about the specifics -- they're good people) at Hamburger Mary 's for much merriment, drinking and gift-deliverance. This was followed by homemade birthday cake (Mason is SUCH a Betty Crocker when he sets his mind to it -- devil's food with raspberry filling and a chessboard motif in the icing on top), coffee and wine. For the record, some of my gifts :

• Brazil, the Criterion Collection DVD set
  
• Dune: The Butlerian Jihad
  
• A Williams-Sonoma crepe pan and crepe mix
  
• A book of Celtic mythology and spirituality with absolutely gorgeous illustrations from my mom
  

Better than any material gift, though, was being surrounded by people who genuinely care about me and wanted to celebrate. This is going to sound ultra-sappy, but celebrating a birthday with these people makes me glad for the time that's passed and for the time yet to come, rather than self-piteously sad that I'm getting so damned old. I want these people near me when I really am old.

Well, that's all from me for now, but that's probably enough. If you live near me, plan to join me to see Solaris the weekend of its release Nov. 27. If you don't live near me, please go see it on your own! Not only is it a remake of a film by my favorite film director of all time, Andrei Tarkovsky, but it looks to be a visually stunning and appropriately affecting film in its own right.