It is so pleasing when my mom is happy. She has problems being happy because she never actually does any of the things that she knows make her happy. For instance, she is a huge music fan, but because she spends so much time writing music, she never listens to any of her 300-odd CD’s because she’ll get distracted… or something. Today, for the first time I can remember in, oh, fifteen years, she turned on a CD that was neither one of her own nor someone else singing her music (it was Phil Colins, actually). She was singing along and everything, and it just made me so happy… then she came to my door and said, “Hey, do you have any David Bowie CD’s?” She’s always been a huge Bowie fan, but by the time his stuff was available on CD, she’d stopped buying CD’s (she stopped buying ’em… well, about fifteen years ago). “Well, I have all his songs archived on MP3,” I replied. “Can I borrow them?” she asked. “Sure,” I said, gleeing, and gave her the two discs. And she’s been listening to Bowie all day. I just can’t express how nice it is.

The thing is, I remember when I was young hearing all the music she liked, ’cause she used to listen to it all the time. Then as I got older and she listened to less and less, I kinda lost touch with music in general (except for what she wrote, of course), until one day when I was sixteen or seventeen I realized that I had not even the faintest idea what kind of music I liked, because I never listened to anything and had no CD’s of my own. Which is part of the reason that I make CD’s for my brother all the time, because I think that was a really sad condition to be in in my mid-teens; once I discovered music and that I loved it, I was like, “How much I have been missing for so many years!!!!!!!” So I’m piling up every kind of musical genre that there is on my brother (and he’s liking ’em all so far, good boy) so that he can like something by the time he’s old enough to choose CD’s. OK, I’ll admit that I’m leaning a little heavily on the J-Pop and hard rock, but that’s only because it’s what I have most of. I haven’t been able to get him to like anything classical yet, but I believe that’s fairly normal for a 12-year-old boy. We’ll see.

Anyway, I’m happy today.