February Made Me Shiver

February is, generally speaking, a rough month for me. I mean, it's a rough month for most people, especially those living in a northern climate where it's a time associated with frozen snot, fasting and those particularly blightful chunks of snow turned to ice turned to mud repository that cling stubbornly to life far longer than anyone wants them to. It's a time of introspection and self-assessment that goes part-in-parcel with the long nights, broken resolutions and guilty Lenten vows, which is rough enough. On top of that, February is, personally-speaking, a lull in my work year that makes liquid assets depressingly scarce.

And here I am again, another year, still chugging away, in a place not to dissimilar to where I was twelve months ago - is it unfair to feel a bit depressed?

Happy National Radio Day, Here's A Mix!

Poles who speak English have an oddly charming way of turning phrases. I think it's the combination of the nation's famed "poetic soul" and the almost-familiarity of a second tongue. One of the things I enjoyed most when I lived in Poland was people's habit of describing things as "something terrible, but also something wonderful".


I couldn't think of a better description of radio than "something terrible, but also something wonderful" for music. The radio has exposed millions to mind-altering music and turned many a group of hopeful teens into prophets with an audience of millions. At the same time, radio has also always been a great homogenizer, sanitizer and censor of music, a trend that grows ever worse with Clear Channel playlists increasingly dominating the commercial dial.