Nafisto the Great

(thanks to Sum for sending this to me)

Shirin and Me at Deihim and Julie’s Wedding

Shirin trying to kill me on the National Mall

Mandatory self-portrait with Washington Monument

In the doorway of our (unbuilt) home in Atlanta

Trance favorites playing on my iTunes today (some new and some old):

• Plumb - Cut
• Kaskade - Be Still
• Gabriel & Dresden - Tracking Treasure Down
• Andain - Beautiful Things
• 4 Strings - All Around the World
• Sylver - Lay All Your Love on Me
• Ian Vah Dahl - Just a Girl
• Late Night Alumni - Empty Streets
• iio - Runaway

I’m having one of those nights. You know the kind I’m talking about. The ones you don’t admit to having–going about your normal business–while inside you’re bursting. All those emotions tucked away–years of memories, delimited only by the artifice of time, tagged with words that fail to capture the real feeling inside.

Tonight, like every night this happens, the catalyst is music. And once again, the digital age is fighting my sense of inner entropy as it seeks to find stability. Life was simple before CDs and MP3s and iPods–you picked the mood you thought you wanted to be in, popped in a cassette and wallowed in [insert emotion here]. With the shuffle feature has come the rise of the song-driven emotional roller-coaster. Now every launch of iTunes has the potential for the extremest of highs and lows.

I have felt those extremes all night. The Counting Crows took me back to late night billiards after a concert and IHOP; David Gray reminded me of Amica, the Counsellors’ Conference and the fifth epoch message. The Gipsy Kings reminded me of moving from Minnesota to Virginia. Coldplay: Flying to Haifa. Travis: lonely Friday afternoons on Ibn-al-Muqaffah street. Justin Timberlake: seeing him in concert at the 9:30 Club. U2: sitting on the roof at Hakeramim and celebrating Sahba’s birthday. John Mayer: my brother. No Doubt: the dot-com bust.

The memories are rich and they’re alive. They take me to moments as exciting as they are filled with fear, riddled with sorrow and drowning in joy. And those moments are all uniquely and inexplicably mine.

The ride continues so long as the songs keep playing (iTunes tells me they will for 15.4 days before repeating), or until my mind returns to the station and I take a short pause to make more memories. Until then, I plan to enjoy every bar and note of my life’s soundtrack. It’s just that kind of night.