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Just now, watching a small dust bunny float around a circular path on my freshly cleaned kitchen floor, I suddenly felt the need to write something. Preferably something fictional, involving a character who gets out of her chair to pick up and throw away tiny dust bunnies. Bad news for that urge: it's writing about acupuncture (this week) that gets me paid. And anyway, that character is really just me. But I think the desire to be creative comes in part from the music I'm listening to tonight, by a local guy who is about to top the masculine companion to my list of wonderful female musicians:

1. Jeremy Messersmith
2. The Fratellis
3. Jeff Buckley
4. Damien Rice
5. The Raconteurs
6. Jack Johnson
7. Mason Jennings
8. Modest Mouse
9. Eels
10. Tom Waits
11. The Shins

The Blogging Paradox

Sometimes this happens. I have things going on, things that beg to be blogged about. I think about blogging every day, but my brain is clogged by all these blogworthy things I'm doing, and I'm too busy to sit down and relax enough to let the clog flow free into this space. So even though I would like to feel able to write (vaguely and confidentially) about the class I started teaching this week, and even though you may be interested in hearing about that, I have a test to write and a couple of classes to plan, so we'll all have to be satisfied for the moment with a list, in no particular order and with mainstream choices unashamedly mingled with the heroically underplayed, of eleven women whose music you should probably be listening to, if you aren't already:

1. Keren Ann
2. Feist
3. Kate Nash
4. Regina Spektor
5. Madeleine Peyroux
6. Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton
7. The Pierces
8. Rachael Yamagata
9. Goldfrapp
10. KT Tunstall
11. Vyvienne Long

Musical Crack

While fighting hard against the wedding planning infection in my brain in the interest of actually getting three seconds worth of work done today, I pulled up some vintage Madonna on iTunes. (Nothing after 1989. That's the rule.) And suddenly I'm relaxed and happy and writing almost fluently. Embarrassing but true.

Ye Olde Stone Temple Pilots

They give you your money's worth. The show tonight was theatrical and sexy and totally rocktastic.

An Evening With Eels

That's what it said on the marquee, and on the tickets our friend Nils was good enough to get for us. If you don't know this band, try a little listen. They aren't for everyone, but if you think you might like introverted, quirky, substantial rock music, Eels are your guys.

Actually, it's mostly one guy: Mark Oliver Everett. His dad was Hugh Everett, the quantum physicist who devised the theory of parallel universes. Tonight's "opening act" was a documentary film about the son traveling the country to learn more about the father and his theory. See? I told you: quirky but substantial.

Birthday Self-Indulgence

Today's my birthday. And I'm milking it. Last night, Eric and I initiated the festivities by going out for a semi-romantic dinner (We're really a very grounded couple, and don't spend much time gazing into each other's eyes. I'm pretty sure eye-gazing is a requirement of a fully romantic dinner.) at the Loring Pasta Bar, where they make incredible food and lay the atmosphere on as thick as possible, and where there was a live jazz quartet. This morning I was up before nine, and I've spent the hours since doing yoga and drinking almond-infused black tea and finishing The Golden Compass in my pajamas. Next up is a long hot shower, and baking myself a birthday cake from scratch (which I haven't done before, but seems easy enough), and playing The Sims ad nauseum, and eating leftover chicken marsala, and listening to the Tori Amos CD my mom gave me for my birthday. Later tonight, I'm going to Natasha's solstice party, where I will make people eat my homemade cake, whether it's any good or not.

Birthdays are awesome.

The Pierces

I don't usually do this, but for the past couple nights I've been full of the urge to spread the word. And that's why I insist that you go here and turn your sound on. The MySpace page seems to play the whole album if you just leave it up. This is very different from all the music I've listened to for, oh, about five years. And that might be why I'm so excited by it. That, and it's really freaking good.

Bring on the Happy Music

I have a lot to get done today: cleaning, class planning, yoga to ease my spasming back, work at the bookstore late this evening. And all this while groggy from too much sleep (got up at 8:30, not bad for a Saturday morning, except that Crime and Punishment and I were asleep on the couch by 11:00 last night) and unwashed because of a continuing lack of hot water in my building. I'll be boiling bathwater on the stove again today, which should make me feel better (and less itchy), but not until after I'm finished with the sweaty vacuuming. In the meantime, I'll have to draw my energy from artificial sources. Like Beck and Modest Mouse and this otherwise pointless blog post.

Refresher Course

While boiling some noodles to eat with leftover stroganoff, washing the dishes and writing a web page, I'm listening to Ani Difranco. Because we're seeing her tonight and I've barely listened to her CDs for the past five years, most of which I spent in a sort of Ani Difranco hangover resulting from the years after high school when I considered her indispensable to my political and feminine coming-of-age and listened to little else. It's too bad, really, that I went off my Ani when I did, because I was just beginning to think I liked her newer stuff better than the older stuff. Mellower, more complex, less political. So I'm looking forward to tonight, both for the nostalgic fun of the earlier songs, and for an introduction to the recent ones.

Mold and Mail

In the words of our (Polish, I think) maintenance guy, "Toilet leaking. I fixed it. I come back next week, fix ceiling. After dries."

The process of fixing the toilet earned our upstairs neighbor a thank you card taped to his/her/their door, and made the ceiling leak so steadily--until it stopped--that a large chunk of plaster is now dangling from it. That chunk of plaster, and the ceiling it used to be attached to, is partially covered with dark green moss-like mold, and my asthma and I aren't thrilled about letting it be there for four or five more days.

But--but! Thanks to the package that finally arrived this morning, I can Zen my cares away with my replacement yoga DVDs. And the new KT Tunstall CD makes me happy too.

Thoughts in a Very Loud, Very Dark Room With Hundreds of Strangers

That was to be the title of a stream-of-consciousness blog post that I wrote in bits and pieces in my head last night during the Modest Mouse concert. But now it's just a persuasive argument for keeping a notebook in my pocket at all times and writing things down as I think of them. Because when we got home last night, I didn't have the energy to actually write it out. So I sat down to recreate it just now, and discovered that all the magic had gone out of it. It would be hard at this point to remember everything I had wanted to say, and hard to achieve the effect I wanted, and I'm not interested enough anymore to put the effort in.

So instead I'll just say, in conventional blog fashion, that the concert--which we owe our friend Katie for, since she let us have the tickets she won--was awesome. We were in the front row in the orchestra pit, directly in front of the guitarist and his guitar-only speakers, which convinced me that it is possible to be too close to the stage during a concert. The singer's vocals were often drowned out by the guitar, and the unique vocals and lyrics are one of my favorite things about Modest Mouse. But that's just an observation. I wouldn't complain. The music was great, the venue was gorgeous, the gin and tonic was tasty, the people-watching was interesting, and the vibe was extremely positive. People love that band. It makes them smile. And for good reason.