I will likely get back to posting about the State of the World tomorrow or on the weekend.*

Tonight, in an effort to bring myself back from several days’ worth of wailing and gnashing of teeth, I’m going to be a bit more whimsical.

Let me introduce you to part of my media collection:

I’m showing off not to make the point that I am well-prepared to keep myself entertained in case of potential quarantine**, but simply to make it clear exactly how much of a music hound I happen to be. Which is useful context for the rest of today’s whimsical story.

A couple days ago, I decided I was tired of how all my Facebook time had become yet another exercise of wailing and the gnashing of teeth. So I decided to mix it up by doing at least one heart-warming and not at all sociopolitical post each day: sharing whatever track from that morning’s commuting playlist that I wanted to share.

If I keep this up, it could be an interesting forum to show the diversity of music I’ve got. Because here’s a quirky way that I enjoy my music collection: I keep cycling through it, intentionally listening to every last CD in alphabetical order.*** You see that open gap in the CD shelves in that picture up there? Those are the G’s, which I am working my way through right now, and the I’s, which are on deck.

I mean, if I’m craving something specific, I’ll pull it out and listen to it, for sure. But there’s a LOT of the time when I just want to have music playing, and I am frequently delighted at the juxtapositions and rediscoveries that happen from my ongoing “alphabetic crawl” through my CD collection.

So far, I’ve been linking to videos on YouTube—Facebook being a visual medium and all. Tuesday when I started this was a track from Josh Groban, and I linked to Groban’s video for the song. Yesterday was a cut from Groove Armada, and I linked to a live performance of my favorite song from that album.

Today was the first challenge: Dave Grusin’s soundtrack for the film Havana. Honestly, I didn’t even look to see if there were any film or soundtrack clips on YouTube. It was just embarrassing enough to dime myself out for having this soundtrack: I was not to compound things by such a literal YouTube clip.

But then I remembered that at some point some years ago I saw a figure skater using this soundtrack as the music for his competition program. I was wrong in my recollection of the skater’s gender, but yes, indeed, German skater Nathalie Weinzierl used this soundtrack as the music for her long program back in the 2012-2013 season.****

Here’s proof:

You’re welcome. 🙂

Hmmmm, maybe I’ll start putting my daily commuting music on the JALC Facebook page instead of my personal page.

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* Seriously, y’all. I have so much to say about COVID-19.

** Although that is surely true.

*** Admittedly, there is as much art as there is science to how this music collection is alphabetized. (A long story not worth the telling….)

**** My google-fu is strong, young padawan.

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Image credit: Photo taken by the author, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.