Northern Soul

Winter sucks.  In the summer, you don't need to put so much effort into basic happiness.  If I'm feeling a little down in August, I just look outside at the sunshine and that usually does the trick.  In the winter, I find that a normal level of mental stability requires constant maintenance.  It's just so...gray.  And Long Island winters can be quite bitter.  Your skin gets scaly and your lips are so dry that they crack with each attempt to smile, so then you don't want to smile because you'll start bleeding from the face, and then your mood grows dour, and unless you moisturize the cracks out of your lips every twenty minutes you become depressed.

Listening to good music is always wonderful, but in the winter it is essential.  It's like moisturizer for my soul.  Maybe not the best metaphor, but the point is: I just found some new music that I really love, and here it is.

Northern Soul is actually not new at all, but it is new to me.  It's music that became popular in Northern England in the late 1960s -- Motown-kinda records that never made it big in the U.S.  It's a little bit soul, a little bit R&B, and a little bit hipster.  NPR recently did a program about it, and the music still has a following.  As far as I can tell, most of these records were made in the 1960s but didn't get a wide release, so the music can be hard to come by.  Fans search through the annals and still discover new tracks, apparently.  And there are dance moves (they look totally doable, yes?) that goes along with it:

I get a groove going every time I listen to this music.  I can't help it.  I grew up on Marvin Gaye and The Four Tops and The Temptations, and it's delightful to discover that I've hardly tapped into how much of this genre is out there.  I blasted Frankie Beverly & The Butlers today at the gym while I was on the elliptical, and I grooved so hard I nearly broke the machine.  Who are Frankie Beverly & The Butlers?  I have no idea, but they're friggen awesome.

Disclaimer

I've always been against writing a blog.  They've always seemed rather self-indulgent to me, and I like to indulge myself in other, less time-consuming ways (drinking coffee on the front porch, watching The Office for the forty seventh time, eating anything truffle related).  I lived in Killarney, Ireland for the past two years and although I suspect I developed my character and underwent several life-changing experiences, I can't remember what they were.  I have undergone sporadic and intense episodes of journaling, they usually end up tear-sodden pages of ranting about my love life, which is useful to no one.  In a symbolic effort, I recently burned one of them in the backyard and created a small patch of infertile dirt in which even worms no longer crawl.

So, this blog.

I'm currently unemployed and looking for a teaching job in Korea this spring.  Although I've written a bunch of travel articles for various Internet websites (all of which are totally legitimate), those articles were boring to write, boring to read, and didn't make me very much money.  I may as well not make money writing things I find interesting instead.  And hopefully this will be a record for myself, my family, and my friends of what I've been up to.  Mostly I do things like these:

Hiking the Kenmare Way in County Kerry, Ireland

Experiencing Irish Culture

Eating pizza for one in Bologna, Italy

But for now I'm at home on Long Island doing things like this:

Taking pictures of The Sound through a bunch of rocks

Anyway, hope to write to you again soon.  Cheers!