i know my answers often left you feeling like you're hanging out to dry. (mix tape edition)

[cayley_jane]

1. Blind Pilot - Oveido (Three Rooms and a Sound)
2. Rocky Votolato - White Daisy Passing (Makers)
3. Sea Wolf - Leaves in the River (Leaves in the River)
4. Cloud Cult - Pretty Voice (The Meaning of 8)
5. Red Cedar - There's a Storm Overhead (self-titled EP, unsigned, local)
6. Alexi Murdoch - Blue Mind (Time Without Consequence)
7. Peter Broderick - Refining (HUSH)
8. The National - Slow Show (The White Sessions)
9. Rocky Votolato - Streetlights (Makers)
10. The Mountain Goats - In the Hidden Places (Get Lonely)
11. Dead Man's Bones - In the Room Where You Sleep (Wrap Party Live Version)
12. The National - About Today (The Virginia EP)
13. Cloud Cult - Everybody Here is a Cloud (Feel Good Ghosts [Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes])
14. The Mountain Goats - Grendel's Mother (Zopilote Machine)
15. Sufjan Stevens - To Be Alone With You (Seven Swans)
16. Great Lake Swimmers - I Could Be Nothing (Bodies and Minds)
17. Xavier Rudd - Come Back (White Moth)

i almost never have two artists in the same mix; this one is all doubles. i really love singing along to track 1, and it really grew on me. tracks 2 and 9 are exceptional standouts on an exceptional album by an exceptional artist i only just discovered, who has a lovely, melancholy sound, if not a particularly original one. track 3 is a quiet story of a rainy night - one of those epic, wandery ones. track 4 makes me hope. track 5 is one of my bosses (!) and a friend, and amazing; the first time i heard him sing i said (a little breathlessly and without irony) that he sounded like a lonesome wolf baying high upon a mountain. maybe a little irony. track 6 makes me want to be in a car heading nowhere in particular at night. track 7 is a short strings intermission. tracks 8 and 12 make me long to be in love for the heartbreak, and that is saying something. track 10 is about being punched in the gut by an encounter and i think we all know that feeling (i found a short story of mine about it last week). track 11 makes me excited about this band and kind of want to do a tom waits-ian dance in a graveyard and features a children's choir that is more yelling than singing. track 13 makes me smile and love other people. track 14 is amazing, amazing, and gives me a literary boner. i've loved track 15 for forever, and even though i know it's not romantic, it feels it. track 16 is lonely in that precise, exquisite way tony dekker makes me feel: lonely, but not alone. and track 17 makes me think of someone in particular, and it's loving, and it's sorry, and it's hopeful. trying to describe these songs makes me realize how much i use the words: love(ly), hope(ful), amazing, and lonely to describe the music i like, and i don't think that the repetitiveness upsets me at all.

today lolo told me the reef never hires anyone without six years of serving experience and that i would do well there because i was a really hard worker. and everyone at salt spring has said the same. and. i just. feel good about myself. and pretty and useful and not an asshole. and i've applied for my program, and the only boss i can expect to like me likes me, and maybe a boy likes me too? and i love my friends and oh it's AUTUMN and i can talk about how long i've been single without feeling bad about it and smile in the rain. today i have amethyst emblazoned on my breast and bare shoulders and a quirk in my eyebrow and am more than a little in love with the world. today i came home to a house i cleaned and a beautiful tree and a serratonin on my couch and am cleaning my room and missing my cat and feeling pretty great.

you should probably come to my house on saturday.