i may be late to the game, but a friend of mine introduced me to a group called "slum village."  and while i’ve spent the last couple of years getting exposed to my fellow south asian musicians and the varying types of music we’re putting out into the world, let me tell you…i’m so loving this new exposure. 

i get the same feeling listening to them as i do when i listen to kruder and dorfmeister, although they’re two totally different types of artists.  but they are both sexy as all hell and raw at the same time.

i’ve been thinking about the next album a lot.  i want it to have a much sexier feel the next time around.  sexy in a sly, seductive way.  different type of songwriting.  a new artistic challenge.  not sure i could rap though.  might be an odd proposition to hear me rapping!

as for an explanation about me moving to london (a request from a comment)…well, my astrologer said i was going to marry a man and that we’d live abroad.  the only city i could see myself in abroad is london so i’ve just decided that’s where he must be and where i’ll end up.  astrological foolery perhaps, but i’m preparing just in case…

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perhaps it has something to do with the end of the year.  the quiet.  watching friends and family travel all over the world for the holidays.  watching your own city get very very still, especially when you don’t venture much into malls anymore, what with on-line shopping and all.  but with all this time to sit with my thoughts, i begin to meet my obsessions all over again.  generally i can keep them squashed down under work, fun time with friends.  yoga class surely helps defuse the bomb about to explode in my head.

obsession.  in its worst form, it comes as "spinning."  running in a wheel like a hamster with stress being the only product.  this is the most frustrating form of obsession for me.  it’s neither productive nor fruitful and i usually ask myself if i am really that bored that i have all this time on my hands to spin.  the answer usually gets me off my ass and redirects my attention to the myriad of things i want to accomplish in this lifetime.

obsession.  in its most entertaining form, it comes as "fantacizing."  entering an altered reality in your mind where all your dreams exist as true.  you have the life you want, with the person(s) you want.  i can take it in the form of hope and idealism.  it can also burn me from the agony of knowing that such fantasies have not yet made their way to my physical world.  i am forced to exercise patience or go insane.  i have seen glimpses of both. 

obsession.  a miracle really.  it can make us creepy and excited, inspiring and strange all at the same time.  it’s the stuff of a good song.

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i’ve been following this story of the air marshall and the passenger he shot.  i’m completely saddened by the events.  we are living in a culture of fear fueled by thoughts of brown ghosts hiding in corners and ethnic boogeymen under our beds. 

i understand he may have been doing his job.  my question is why do we have a job whose purpose is to suspect that everyone and anyone could be a potential threat to society.  seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

call me naive.  i think we should expect to receive what we give out.  if we stand on our pulpits ranting about the insanity in the world, we sure will spend a lot of energy looking for it in the most obscure places, and no doubt find it or even create it.  an air marshall kills a bipolar man because he said the word bomb. 

seems to me our time would be better spent finding all the good and love and flaming those fires instead.

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so on wednesday night (two days ago), i went to visit my eye fairy.  that’s what I’m going to call her from now on.  it was the first session I had with her during the night.  i definitely notice that my vision is considerably less sharp as soon as hits around 4pm and the natural light begins to fade.  a very frustrating fact i am learning to live with.  when i worked with my Fairy, we worked in extremely dim light.  if you can relax the muscles around the eye and have clear vision in dim light, then you can definitely have clear vision in day light.  it took me much longer to get to the same level of clarity I normally would have gotten if i was reading in bright sunlight.  we worked for about half an hour and then i was back to my own devices.  i’ve been a lot less faithful about not wearing my glasses as much - even if they are not 20/20 glasses.  i have noticed a difference that these 20/40 glasses offer me considerably clearer site now that my eyes have started to get better.  it’s been not even a month.  wow!

i did visit my eye doctor brother in cleveland over thanksgiving.  and instead of it my vision experiment being a surprise to him, he asked me about it the minute i got in the car.  i suppose blogging about the journey didn’t really keep it top secret, but i specifically said that it was meant to be a surprise to him.  some unnamed member of our family spilled the beans!  since the eye exam would not have been a controlled experiment, i decided to forego getting my eyes checked by him.  will just wait til my vision is 20/20 before i have him check me.

enough about the eyes…i’ve been enjoying these colder months a lot.  partly due to my increasing fascination with moving to london.  i’m getting very open to walking around in cold rainy weather more often than not.  london is such a fantastic city - a cross between bombay and new york city, with a little bit of eurpean charm and tradition thrown in.  fantastic!!! 

i’ve been using this time especially to get quiet with myself and think about what i want to do in 2006.  it’s a thing i do once a year or so.  take inventory of my life and reassess its direction.  do you do that?  i find it very inspiring to give myself the permission and time to reinvent my life if i want.  most of the time, the shifts are very subtle, but every once in a while, i set myself up for the next roller coaster ride.

one of my goals for next year is to travel a lot more.  2005 has kept me pretty tied to los angeles, which has had a lot of great moments - including a lot of time with my family.  but next year, i aim to go to london, india, morocco and bali.  on my trip to cleveland, i made a friend on the plane who is a jewelry designer.  much of her work is inspired by her many trips to bali.  after hearing her talk about it…i just have to get there.  as for heather’s work…you should take a look.  it’s beautiful.

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