a night so cold in december, an old post from december 13th 2024

I remember when December meant Christmas time, and no school, and seeing how long I could keep my hand on a frozen bus window. The feeling of a cold December night meant watching ‘White Christmas’ on the couch with my mom for the 50th time, and looking out at the deer in my backyard. I loathed December and the bundling up and the waiting for the bus stop. The bus that was always late and smelled like salt. December to me, was like the snow-ball full of rocks the boy down the street would throw at me, that would convince my sister that he must have a crush on me, but that would only make me hate him more. It meant wet boots and slippery tiled hallways, and coming back from recess sweating with a red nose. It meant cold, wet, and tired.

Now I think December means something else. It means hot cups of coffee sipped between blue lips. It means walking as fast as I can in between classes, and having to take off and put on and take off my jacket, scarf, and hat every hour and a half. It means studying for finals, and pulling all nighters in the library, just to walk back to my apartment in the -15 windchill. It’s biking to the student union Tuesday morning with Lucy to jump into the lake, just to get knee deep and turn around. It’s college-adulthood, a chocolate croissant, half-baked and sweeter than anything I ever would’ve ordered for myself. It's making sourdough all-day and fogging up the windows in my apartment. It’s draining my bank account for a ridiculous amount of chai-lattes and red-eyes, and asking every coffee shop I go to if they are hiring. It’s plugging in the Christmas lights in my apartment, glowing in the third floor windows, and lighting candles in the living room. Tall candle sticks, the tapered one’s that drip all over the sides of the candle holders how Mina likes. Playing guitar until our nail beds bleed and calluses form so thick we can pick up pans right off the stove. Calling my mom for the first time in a while, telling her I’m busy and doing well. An overflowing email inbox. A notebook filled with poetry. A purse with 3 empty pens and 4 books, all half read. My diary with 5 journal entries from today, all with varying moods and way too many exclamation points. Striped socks over white lace tights, all under jeans, all under my thick winter coat, all on top of goosebumped red skin.

We listen to Joni Mitchell and Mina plays along, but when we pause the music we realize how horrible we are. We plan parties we’ll never throw, make setlists for a band that doesn’t exist, and talk incessantly about boy’s we’ve never spoken to. We stay up late in the kitchen making jokes that go a little too far and sharing a few too many details. I laugh harder than I ever have, I feel more sure of myself than I ever will. I cut my hair and dye it red, I pierce my nose and do it all again. I look in the mirror and know exactly who I am. We collapse into bed after a long night out, after walking back in the snow, we’re cold, wet, and tired.

I’m not sure how this happened, how I became so in love with a city, with a community, that even my least favorite month has become something so beautiful and so poetic. It’s akin to the people walking down the street, all bundled, holding hands, to the spectator in the warm coffee shop. Their voices always booming, cheeks rosy, scarves tucked under their chins. Some days we are in the coffee shop, glued to our computers or our math textbooks, and other days we get to skip down the street. We get to be the laughter that cuts through the huge windows, and pulls the stranger in the cafe away from the last page in their book, because how can someone really be smiling so big on a night so cold in December. How can I really be smiling so big on a night so cold in December?

live on fm: wrapped up in the streaming of it all, december 5th 2025

this week is a big week for spotify users and music-streamers a like. on wednesday spotify wrapped was released on the platform for its 713 million streamers worldwide. Wrapped gives users a look at their top songs, albums, artists, and the number of minutes they streamed music on the platform. It has become a quasi-competition for music streamers: who's top 5 artists are the most underground- god forbid taylor swift makes it on there, and of course who has streamed the most music?

spotify wrapped, at this point, is a capital-m Moment. It is the encapsulation of everything which has changed from physical media and mp3 days, to our current culture of music streaming where music-listeners have turned music listening into a competition, into something mindless, into a way to block out the noise around them. Music has become unintentional.

in the beginning of last year i made the switch from spotify to a music streaming platform called Tidal. Tidal pays their artists more per stream, has a cheaper student subscription, claims better music quality, and also does not donate to the Trump Administration or military campaigns. Whats that? Spotify does that? ...yes! spotify's CEO and cofounder donated around $600 million to an AI Military Defence company! and they are relying on your attachment to horrible playlists from eigth grade to keep you paying $11/month for a platform explicitly being taken over by AI.

however, switching music platforms wasn't the solution for me, I still needed to be more intentional. i needed a reason, a personal purpose, to remind myself why I was dusting off cds and opening casettes that had seen better days. ultimately, i am sick of music feeling unintentional. i want to have to think about art, i want to make concious decisions about what i am listening to and dive deep into the liner notes of my favorite lps. i want to wear out a copy of a cd so much that it's engrained into my cd-player. i want to have to replace the needle on my turntable because i've used it too much!!

the age of the internet is now. it's everywhere. i can feel it breathing down my neck, standing way too close. the key to existence in the age of the internet is not turning away from it, but finding a corner that you enjoy and find meaning in. this is why i have created this website and why i am using Bandcamp to stream music directly from artists, and why i am no longer so enraged by the internet!

many have said that convience is the cost of creativity, or vise-versa, whichever way you know what i mean and i agree! an ai-playlist, god forbid an ai-artist, lacks the soul and the record-scratch of a 20-something dj in her college studio. this week i'm spinning 15 of my favorite records from my collection for 2-hours of spotify-free bliss.

the next time you click play on that spotify generated playlist, or dodge the cover for a local show, or stream instead of download, maybe take a second and think about what you are doing! they hate to see us self-aware and uninfluenced by greedy companies telling us what to care about! support local artists, make bad art publically, and dance to your favorite record and i promise you'll feel at least a bit better about the state of the world!

live on fm: howling at my horoscope, november 25th 2025

there comes a time in a young womans life where she looks to her right and then looks behind her and realizes that she is alone. even when arm in arm with someone, maybe even hand in hand, there is a deep and personal intimacy within oneself waiting to be recognized. i believe this time hits when we least expect it. like on a cold park bench during a full moon in november, or maybe when kicking ones leg over the back of a bicycle to get home, or on the first morning bus to the chicago airport.

there comes a time in a young womens life where she needs guidance, and often we look for something outside of us before looking within. partnership and community, while important, are pitched as a reason to exist. do this thing or that to look better, or feel better, or be better for your future partner. its draining, unrealistic, and based on everything i disagree with.

there comes a time in a young womens life where she must read her horoscope, and feel seen in a way which she never has. there is no person who can read such a broad statement and apply it so perfectly to ones life, except oneself. horoscopes are powerful because they let us breath out, exhale the worries that no one will ever understand what we are going through. because maybe the stars, in their battle between gravity and fusion, the turbulant existence and choas of a triple-alpha process; feels like it might just describe the heavy weight of existence. horoscopes, while some call them hand-wavey and others simply dismiss them, are not there to tell you how you are feeling or how you are doing. they are a medium to reflect and present oneself, to meet you where you are. its like pearing into a dark window and seeing your reflection look back at you: you are allowing yourself to be seen.

there comes a time in a young womens life where she must decide to put herself first, to read her birthchart and book mark her star-sign description, and finally reliquish ones right to control to the cosmos. maybe its wrong or cosmologically incomprehensible, but it feels equally impossible to claim that everything in life has always has a sensible explanation, especially from where i am sitting.

its been a long time coming, tarot cards sitting on the bookshelf since we moved in, and they finally get their tabletop time. in candlelight ill put my head in my hands and reliquish control, ill scribble out one last goodbye, and make that turn off the interstate ive missed over and over. ill write my own name in the backs of my notebooks and crawl out of bed wide-eyed and ready to make something for myself. life is sprawling and open, mouths are gaping, teeth broken, ill say whats on my mind and scream whats rolling around in the back. for too long its been keep quite, look perfect, do no wrong, but there comes a time in a young womans life where she must let out an ugly laugh, put on her worst outfit, and read her horoscope over a lukewarm cup of coffee that tastes like dirt.

live on fm: heartbreak of homogeneity, october 24th 2025

On an airplane I prefer the window seat. I like to watch the tarmac fall away as people shrink to ants and buildings press-down flat. At a certain point everything looks the same. The Earth is the Earth, and whatever is below me could be Milan or Kenosha and I wouldn’t know the difference, I simply wouldn’t be able to distinguish them.

This is sort of what the cosmological principle tells us. If we were in an omnipotent airplane traveling through the Universe, we could fly ‘high’ enough to a certain point where our perspective would be so zoomed out that everything would begin to look the same. This implies that there is no special corner of space, and furthermore, that we are not special.

This keeps me up at night. With a hot cup of peppermint tea and cold feet shoved into mismatched socks or faded-wool slippers. With knees pressed to my chest, eyes out the window, elbows on the table. The heartbreak of homogeneity was my first great perspective change, one that is on-going and (at times) excruciating. Like lying on a cold tile floor at the end of a long day, there’s only so much you can do to make yourself feel better about something so out of your hands.

The Universe is homogenous and isotropic, this is the cosmological principle. It’s homogenous, meaning no preferred observing position or center, and it’s isotropic, meaning the same in all directions. So no matter where we are, or where we look, at some scale everything will look the same. From this foundational idea we can break into more cosmology, something about dark matter and black holes and a time-traveling twin, but it’s more fun to do what cosmologists known to do best- to look backwards!

In 1543, Copernicus realized that the Earth was not the center of the solar system, and that actually the Earth orbits the sun (not the other way around). The Copernican principle is the notion that the Earth is not the fixed center of creation. While the copernican principle may not bear the same teeth as the cosmological principle, it’s got the same clenching jaws. In 1543, humankind began to face an ugly truth: WE ARE NOT SPECIAL.

live on fm: locke’s licking my floorboards clean, september 12th 2025

It’s a windy day out on the coast, and a big wooden pirate ship is sailing across the ocean. As it sails it’s boards need replacing from scratches and cannonballs and all of the natural and normal pirate occurrences. When it finally arrives to it’s destination, somehow every single board on the ship has been replaced. Is it possible for this to still be the same ship upon return as departure? If not, when should we say the critical point was, fifty-percent replacement, seventy-five-percent replacement? The ship of theseus is a philosophical puzzle that philosophers have pondered for ages, and one that probably sends the annoying kid in your philosophy class on a rampage because ‘it’s too subjective.’

With the beginning of a new school year, a university student is not unlike the ship of theseus. Never mind that one’s biological cells are completely replaced every few years, but with the constant resolutions to be better, the constant attempt at self-betterment and inevitable change to conform, we replace our boards over the years. This semester I had a great long list of changes I’d love to make before the new school year, I cut and dyed my hair, fixed the zipper on my backpack, started going to the gym, bought new notebooks and pens, and made a promise to myself not to skip class this time around. Through these changes it does not feel radical to call myself the same person, or at least the same name, today as I was a few weeks ago. A few weeks ago I had blonder and longer hair, a better tan, and a lot more free time, but I was still (am still) me. Something must connect current me to the old me, the same thing that connects current me to high-school me.

I see myself, this changing of the boards, in the flowing identity of a standard jazz tune. Jazz standards, similar to standards in other traditional forms of music like bluegrass and folk, are at the foundation of the genre’s culture. Musicians and audiences know the names and melodies of these tunes, something like ‘Funny Valentine’ comes to mind here, and play them live together. The shape of the song changes in the hands of each musician, depending on the mood, the skill, and the vibe of the players. This unofficial set of standard music lays the ground for jam’s and collaboration, a secret language spoken among those in the know.

Before I dyed my hair, when it was still blonde, I went to a jazz performance. It was quite the windy day and was the beginning of my thinking of the ship of theseus, and as I was sitting there ‘Old Devil Moon’ began to play. The cadence of the piece rendered it almost entirely unrecognizable, at least to my uneducated ears, until it rolled back around to the main theme. There is something which connects this performance of ‘Old Devil Moon’ with that of Chet Baker, with that of a different version of Chet Baker, with that of Dodie from a few years back. Although notes and accents and keys may change, words exchanged for humming, then exchanged for something else, and then finally left out all together. Something must connect the new, hip version to the old version, and maybe that is the same thing that connects current me to high-school me.

Let’s break it down even further. What connects me right now, to me in (hopefully) six hours when I am asleep?

‘If the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same Person. And to punish Socrates waking, for what sleeping Socrates thought, and waking Socrates was never conscious of, would be no more of Right, than to punish one Twin for what his Brother-Twin did, whereof he knew nothing, because their outsides were so like, that they could not be distinguished; for such Twins have been seen.’ – John Locke

I have gathered a playlist of my favorite covers and traditional standards for my broadcast on the FM radio this week, because everything old becomes new again!

live on fm: the diderot (hyper)problem, august 14th 2025

Cardboard boxes are stacked tall and wide on my tired futon and are somewhat blocking the flow of the small window-ac unit. Currently, I share a room with a hometown friend, but she is moving out this week and is to be replaced at the end of the month. So as she takes her half of the apartments clutter and decorations, I am left to stare at semi-blank walls and empty hardwood-floor for two and a half weeks.

I stroll to work in the blazing sunlight pondering the layout of a new bedroom– maybe I’ll take my bed out of it’s little cutout in the wall, however, a very diogenes sleeping arrangement. Scattered on the streets the second weekend of August are the rain-soaked and sunbathed discarded dressers, sofas, lamps, shelving and rugs from apartments cleaned, scrubbed, painted, and turned over. In the midst of this hippy christmas street gathering, a desk with a missing drawer and no corresponding chair is displayed haphazardly. Of course, this is what the space just to the left of my bedroom doorway is craving. My roommate and her boyfriend drag it up six-half flights of switchbacked stairs.

Now my room isn’t empty… but worse… half empty. My head spins with ideas of what else to put next to my desk, or where to put an imaginary rug, maybe even a tapestry in the blank space of the wall… A voice overhead condemns me-

“My friends, keep your old friends. My friends, fear the touch of wealth. Let my example teach you a lesson. Poverty has its freedoms; opulence has its obstacles.

O Diogenes! How you would laugh if you saw your disciple beneath Aristipius’ luxurious mantle! O Aristipius, this luxurious mantle was paid for by many low acts. What a difference between your soft, crawling, effeminate life and the free and firm life of the rag-wearing cynic. I left behind the barrel in which I ruled in order to serve a tyrant.”

Diderot warned me of this very effect: to buy one thing is just a catalyst to crave the next. In 1769, ‘Regrets for my Old Dressing Gown, or A warning to those who have more taste than fortune’ was published by Denis Diderot, and today is quoted and considered and held in the (unopened) wallets of many marxists and philosophers. The only way one can really escape this incessant burning in the chest for a new thing– we’ve seen so many popular renditions of water bottles, amazons basic sets, shoes, bows, rings, denim-jeans, and regretfully mentioned weird stuffed animal keychains that I still don’t understand– is to stop the cycle all together.

Replacing something before it’s truly needed makes us crave replacing everything in our lives. It starts with replacing one’s dressing gown, until one’s entire wardrobe and the wardrobe itself is luxurious and tasteful.

“When in the morning, covered in my sumptuous scarlet, I enter my office I lower my gaze and I see my old rug of selvage. It reminds me of my beginnings and pride is stopped at the entryway to my heart.“

A trend similar to this can be observed in widespread phenomena like pop culture, music, and politics. The swing from minimalism to maximalism, from one extreme to the other. We can look to pop music for a great example. Throughout the 2010’s pop music was in an iconic era of radio ear worms, like 2011’s ‘Somebody that I used to Know’. In 2014 something started brewing, a culmination of early y2k digital nastolgia and catchy over the top pop music.

Around this time A.G. Cook was steadily putting out ‘PC Music’, including ‘Beautiful’ which made Rolling Stone’s list of top 100 songs from 2014. This music, fit with digital and electronic sounds, catchy lyrics, and an over the top pop-y sound made waves in the music scene. Scottish Producer SOPHIE clung on to this wave of music and in 2019 released ‘The Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides’, which received a lot of mainstream praise and built upon the foundation of the genre now called ‘hyper-pop’.

Charli XCX, a longstanding pop artist at the time, iconic in today’s zeitgeist, settled into a hyper-pop sound around the same time with the release of ‘how i am feeling now’ in 2020. In this same year multiple legendary hyper-pop albums came out, including ‘1000 gecs and the Tree of Clues’ by 100 gecs.

Hyper-pop artists clung onto the nostalgic electronic sound, whil incorporating the catchiness of pop-music at the time. A genre, which I sort of see as a parody of it’s parent genre, was born.

Now I can listen to Kero Kero Bonito and Rico Nasty in the comfort of my neon pink zip up, low-waisted jeans, 4 belts, and blue hair. Maximalism as a form of expression, it’s a big thing. I’d love to ask the three girls that order fruit-flavored matcha-lemonades at my barista job about this concept. They have multi-colored mullets, pastel baby-doll dresses layered over skirts and pants, tens of key-chains and accessories and eyeshadow and gems corresponding to that day’s color scheme. I wonder if they’ll ever swing the other way, throw out everything and sit cross-legged on the ground in the middle of an empty apartment in a linen button down dress.

This is what I see more and more musicians doing. Breaking it down to the basics, ditching heavy production and software. MJ Lenderman plays stripped back, with minimal vocals, and has exploded in the indie music scene. Think Nirvana making waves in the 90s.

Maybe it’s time to ditch my blue hair…