Somewhere I lost connections; ran out of songs to play

...well, maybe I haven't run out of songs to play. According to my weekend of mp3 player cleanup, I have well over 3400 songs ready and available--I even found some CDs I didn't realize I had. Oops.

Even worse, I rediscovered a used CD store a block away from my apartment that seems to have a very nice selection of techno/electronica. I found an obscure album by a Russian guy recording in France in English that I had been looking for since the middle of last year...and it was only $1.99. Sooo...my collection is definitely going to grow some more if there are more finds like that one.

I recently found myself getting in touch with a woman I haven't seen since my family moved out of a small town in northern Wisconsin when she and I were 12. She had found my email address in a guest-book for what would have been my graduating class had I stayed there. It is amazing to see how people change or don't after almost 20 years. She stayed in that small town (8000 people), got married, pushed out a few pups and works in the local Wal-Mart. She brought up a few of our old classmates from elementary school who stayed in town. They all seem to have intermarried and followed similar paths. She asked me what I had been up to. And, I told her...keeping things as simple as possible; where my family moved to, living in NL, college, grad school, present job and location. She was in awe of how much of an adventurous life I had.

Adventurous? Wow. That's really quite sad that my life is seen as being that.

It also makes me sad to think about how small-town America is vanishing. It makes me feel worse to know that I wouldn't go back...at least not seriously. There are times that I find myself daydreaming about winning the lottery and heading back, but joining up with a remote artists' colony outside of town. There is one that I have seen information about and, my last jr. high school crush from that town works there, making furniture and giving wilderness tours to school groups. Yeah, Roger (the crush) was a nature-boy I adored because of him being such a nature-boy. I also like to think that he liked me a little because of my own interest in those topics (he told me once that he was impressed by my plant identification skills and loaned me a book on tracking animals for silent-reading).

This started making me think again at how radically life can change from one path to the next with a simple decision. If I had stayed in the Netherlands instead of returning to the US to go to college, I know I would have continued in my IB program and then probably on to university in Scotland (the college counselor at my school in NL was a huge fan of St. Andrews and seemed to push students that way)...probably studying history...then maybe on to Glascow for graduate school where I would have met Neil Oliver and...

DAMN! That path could have led me to being the mother of Neil Oliver's children and I didn't take it. Oh well. Maybe next life.