scent

organizing the songs for my "new" iPod feels like reorganizing my head.

I found heaps of old old songs that I've compressed into little folders, hidden away in another folder which consists of pre-formatted junk (remember, my head). Heaped into a pile, 'just in case'.

adding them to Itunes one by one, and listening to the little snippets of each song instantly transports me back to the initial moment I first heard them. It sounds horribly cliche I know, but each song just triggers something in my head, a weird reconciliation of how I felt when I first heard each song, and the objectivity that comes to hear it now.

Needless to say, most of these songs were gathered when I was still in high school, when I managed to, like the little leech I am, persuade my friends who had limewire or bitorrent to download and send songs to me because I did not want to risk getting a virus from either programs. And some of them were sent to me out of the goodness of their hearts in an exhaustive effort to get me to listen to chinese songs. Being the illiterate ass in wolf's skin, coming home to an English-speaking environment.

But it worked. Somehow, like many expressions in Chinese that cannot be explained in English (be it in the midst of differance), listening to these old songs in particular, gives me that little, comfortable yet unexplainable feeling. Maybe the word emo just covers it all and I'm being in over my head.

and reminds me of places and times I can never go back to again.