Startlingly small world

Wednesday, wet, and... something. I'm not quite sure what, though. I have referred to Wednesday as Mr Malleable before, a lump of mid-week clay waiting to be shaped into either a half full or half empty whatever. Today feels that way. Still early in the day and it feels like it could go either way.

That being the case, and in the hopes that I can give the day a tip into the half-full side of being, I'm starting the day with comfort food for the ear, mind, and body: Sigur Rós and a gourd of mate.

To be honest, the iPod got dialed into my Sigur Rós playlist yesterday afternoon and I forgot to flip back to shuffle for the drive in. Had I thought about it, though, I probably would have left it on Sigur Rós anyway.

Funny how, through the magic of the shrunken world, Icelandic ambient rock and a South American beverage have, over time, become comfort food to someone living in the US. From geographic near-polar opposites, no less. Small world.

This morning, as I was pouring hot water into my gourd, a colleague popped into my office bright and early for a quick good morning chat. Us early birds are like that. For the first time he really noticed a painting I have hanging in my office, and it really pulled him up short. Art can do that, of course, but this was clearly a very deep reaction to the painting.

I have two paintings hanging side by side, intentionally grouped because, like South America and Iceland, they are such a compelling contrast:



The small image size here may not do either justice, but hopefully gives the flavor of them, at least. For my colleague, the one on the left took him back to a very different time and place, a housing project in Chicago. The image evoked by this painting was so similar to a building he had lived in growing up that he could even see which of the windows was his unit; he pointed it out on the painting. He then showed me the real place on the Web, now closed up and ready for demolition. The similarity was startling.

Both paintings are from my daughter, each painted a number of years ago. The one on the left was based on a smaller version she did about the time she was serving in City Year (Americorps), where she did a stint in.... wait for it... Chicago. Small world.

Today's full playlist:

- Gobbledigook
- Starálfur
- Go Do - Live
- Straumnes

- Posted via Hermes.

PS: I love how the iPad's adaptive on-screen keyboard makes typing a wide variety of accented characters so much easier than a traditional fixed keyboard. Just press and hold a vowel, for example, to get a whole pallet of accented versions of same to select from. Brilliant!