I'm currently listening to Vienna Teng, who is brilliant and I highly recommend, and not just because she's a talented musician and a computer engineer (and pretty cute, too). NPR had an excellent feature on her; the music is often a bit quiet for me, but it's great for those moods, or mixed in with other stuff.

Some friends of mine just bought a house a month or two ago, about 1000 yards north of Pacifica, about 3 blocks inland from the Pacific Ocean. It's a sweet spot: toward the end of the evening I drove down to the shore access and watched the sun go down. The Pacific always seems incredibly stark to me, maybe because you can usually see so far up and down the coast. Standing there squinting into the sun, I remembered losing my sunglasses in Mexico, and living on a sailboat for two months with just a baseball hat, and how I adjusted. I remembered sundown when out at sea, the sudden blackness that signalled bedtime until my watch; the unthinkable clarity of the stars and the moon, reflecting the water uninterrupted in all directions. Part of me belongs on a boat.

I used to ask myself why I left Mexico, the same way I used to think about running away to the circus. Now, though, it's an answerable question: it was time to leave. That was the time to live on a boat and travel, and now it's time to do something else (if it were still time to be adventuring, I'd be doing it). But what? I hear a call I don't understand...my life could never be this steady-state, it's not my way, or my desire. The tension makes me twitch sometimes, staying focused while waiting for the change. I don't know if the call comes from inside our outside myself--to me they're the same. I am an integrated part of all the threads criss-crossing the universe.