One Thing

Reviewed in this post: Nothing Yet . . .

Temperature in Dushanbe: 100 Fahrenheit / 38 Celcius

When I was leaving for Turkmenistan in 2003, it was advised that I take along one thing that would help me when I became homesick. Something to see me through the lean times as a Peace Corps volunteer, out in the Kara Kum desert far from home. The examples given in the brochure included family photographs and stuffed animals. Instead, I chose a pair of Pioneer SE-20A Headphones -- huge white-cupped dinosaurs with a coiled cord and their own carrying case -- and my music collection. I burned every CD I owned onto a laptop. In fact, the laptop that I traveled to Turkmenistan with contained almost nothing but music. I used it for two purposes only: to listen to my music collection, and to compose my long emails to my family and friends back home.

The headphones (which I still have with me here in Tajikistan, almost 6 years later) make it feel like you are swimming through music. They cut the world off and let you close your eyes and drop into the album. They make everything else go away. More than anything else, they are a window back into my own culture -- a window that is sorely needed, now that I have been overseas continuously for almost six years. I have used music in the last six years as an antidote to culture shock, as a teaching tool, as a security blanket, and as a way to share my own background with others. I have used music as a bridge to my own past and my own culture, as a field against which I can contrast the culture I live in, and as a filter through which I can sift my emotions.

I'm not sure, looking back, why I chose the headphones. I had lots of friends back home in SF who were audiophiles and hipsters, but I never put myself into those categories. I was the one usually guilty of discovering an album only years after it came out, or listening to an album obsessively that everyone else in the "scene" was over. I have been a musician, in a number of different forms, but none of them dedicated. I have been a fan, but not to the depth of the fans I saw around me. I never felt committed to music: only lately have I come to realize that it is a clearly visible thread winding through my life, both back home and overseas, connecting disparate events and serving as a foil for my many metamorphoses over the years.

Music, in short, is often where I turn to when I want to feel "at home." And that shifting meaning is what this blog hopes to be about: music viewed from over here, as a transmission from home and from my past.