Songs of Travel and Searching

To tease next week's post about the psychology of wanderlust, here's some songs about travel... Enjoy.

I think I might make these teaser posts a thing

I'm making a habit of writing blog posts a bit earlier than I my own self-imposed deadline, which is a good thing. But the down side is that I get really excited afterward and want to post them right away instead of spreading them out a bit. Last week I posted a teaser post, and that satiated my desire to post the real post right away, so I'm doing it again this week. Hell, I might even make it a regular thing. We'll see. This teaser post includes songs (all in different languages! yay!) to get you curious about next week's post. I'm keeping it mysterious this time. I want to watch shiver with antici............

Excited about my next entry....

So, I think I'm starting to get the hang of this blog thing more and more, and I'm pretty excited about my next entry because it actually has a paragraph or two of interest beyond people who know me personally. Since it contains an obscure Dune reference, written by the one and only and dead Frank Herbert, I decided to include some songs inspired by Dune in this teaser post. Enjoy! (And thanks to Frank Magnasco for introducing me to Grimes so, so long ago...)

This one actually only references Dune in one line. Can you guess it?

(Videos = hard)(Restarting blog = good)

So, welcome back for some of you, and welcome for the first time to others. As you may or may not remember, this blog used to be a chronicle of my six months studying abroad in Spain. It consisted mostly of videos I would make talking about my experiences and recording some things I would see around Madrid. I abandoned the blog before leaving Madrid because, well, as it turns out videos are really, really hard. Not just for me to conceptualize and execute but apparently also on my computer, which started emitting a sound that could be called nothing other than a death rattle and was destined to survive only about four more months.

Photo of me at work editing a video

Videos are also time consuming. It started to become obvious to me that all the time I spent compiling shots, editing them together, and rendering the video into formats that could be used by your average internet voyager, I could really be out making the most of the time abroad. I actually hated taking as many pictures and videos as I did back in Europe because I think they destroy the beauty of—hold on a second while a take a picture—What was I saying? Oh right, the beauty of the moment. But I desperately wanted to share everything with friends and family back home who I knew would never get the time or opportunity to leave the country. I think one of the biggest problems with the culture of the United States today is that no one is leaving it. I don't mean permanently, but the globalization of our planet is inescapable and it's much better having at least a vague idea of what's out there than growing to fear it as the unknown, a fear which others will often use to manipulate to their own ends. But I digress.

You, or we, should probably get used to that though. The whole digression thing. This unfortunately won't be the last time.

I'm writing this on a train. It's a pretty magical thing. Not only do all the workers seem like happy and pleasant people, you can look out the windows to see something interesting at any point, and I can only feel like this is a wonderful cosmic moment: to be writing about traveling while traveling, to be in motion while writing about being in motion.

See I did it again.

 In any case, I'm reviving this blog again because I found out (after a long and tortuous wait that I'll talk about next post) that I was selected for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship grant to Colombia. I've been toying with the idea of starting a blog about linguistics and multi-multiculturalism for some time, and this seemed like a good excuse to do it. I plan to be a bit nomadic for the next couple years (with any luck I'll be able to write some interesting stories about being in France, Japan, and hopefully back in Spain over the next couple years), so you can expect all sorts of global tidbits and misadventures. And though I may not be doing too much in the way of videos anymore, I do plan to write and add a few pictures to make up for whatever boring moments come along in a post because everyone likes pictures. 

Beautiful