essential

My friends and I at work exchange essential mixes. well, they exchanged them once in the past, in season one, before I came along. I'm part of season two. Like the white ranger.

Anyway, it was an incredibly daunting project for me. Someone's musical choices say a lot about their state of mind, heart and soul at any particular time, and I was afraid of what mine would say. I've been feeling recently like a broken gumball machine. My giant, glass bowl of individual parts, thoughts, memories, choices, experiences - it was dispensing fine. Put a quarter in, out rolls a piece of me. Measured, consistent, mechanical, predictable. Imagine that glass bowl shattering, and all of your bits and pieces rolling about on a checkered floor, some going under the fridge, some falling through the cracks, all moving (and eventually stopping) at different speeds and at different rates. That's how I feel.

I'm OCD about the kitchen. I really, really like a clean kitchen. I clean the dishes immediately (most of the time) after I use them. My gumballs are rolling around the kitchen floor, and instead of picking them up, I think I just sat down and am watching the colors for a while.

You miss the individual parts when everything is collected and contained. I'm discovering incredibly shaped and colored gumballs, that I didn't know I had. I'm also throwing away some of the moldy ones. Can gumballs mold?

It's super. I'm doing super. Everyone should break their gumball machine sometime.