Music Monday - Woo-Sah

I'm a big fan of the Kingdom Hearts series, so featuring this song is inevitable. The soundtracks to the various games are superb, and all crafted by a woman by the name of Yoko Shimomura, lending a certain constant quality to each game. Of all the songs, though, my favourite has to be "Dearly Beloved," the home screen background music of each game.

Why do I love it so much? With the very first chord I am instantly relaxed. My shoulders drop, my lungs heave a soft sigh, I close my eyes and let all the tension leave me.

It's something I need every now and again, as I'm a rather emotionally closed person (comes with being a Green!). I bottle emotions up, and music is my most favoured form of relaxation. That's the reason I have a 'down tempo' playlist on my iPod, with five different versions of this particular song. I admit, I'm a little obsessed, but you will be to after giving it a listen!

Below are the two versions from Kingdom Hearts II, probably my favourites, but I love all the versions for different reasons. Enjoy!

a First Time for Everything

This may come as a surprise, but before today I had never had a library card. I had never borrowed a book from a library that wasn't on campus, and never a non-academic book at that. I never counted down the days I had left to finish a novel, never owed late fees on a book lost in a messy room. Nope, that was never me.

That's right: me, the Advanced Placement Literature student, Cultural Studies major, Star Wars book nerd, and longtime Protagonizer, has never had a library card. Until now!

Today I picked up my first ever library card for the Banff Public Library, with which I promptly borrowed Edgar Rice Burroughs' first volume of "The Collected John Carter of Mars." I now have a growing list of films to borrow from the library, and have yet to even look at the CD collection. If there's anything in the jazz family, you can be sure I'll borrow that, too. Hopefully this won't turn me into some sort of book hermit, the literary equivalent of a crazy cat lady.

That's all I have to say. It's reading time!

photo (cc) Ozyman

One of these Things is Not Like the Others

Click photos to enlarge

Originally I was planning on writing a post about how different my present location is from my location one year ago, but then I started thinking about all the other places I've lived. The photos above are arranged in the order of date lived in: Victoria, BC; Kelowna, BC; Singapore; Banff, AB. I'm not gonna say anything more, let's let the pictures do the talking this time around, eh?

photos (cc) me

a Photoblog - Views of Mount Rundle

click photos to enlarge

photos (cc) me

Music Monday - Hare Ram in the Rockies

Well, I've made it safely to my new home in Banff. It's still a little surreal, walking to work and seeing the giant Rocky Mountains all around and the most emerald water in the Bow River running under the bridge. I'm not sure whether I'll ever be fully accustomed to it, really.

So I wrote something. Those of you on Protagonize might have caught a little something called Rocky Mountain Sūrya Namaskāra the other night. It's not as exotic as it sounds, but it's full of foreign words that even I have trouble reading. If you practice Hatha yoga, you might recognize some of the phrases. And if you do, then you'll actually know exactly what's going on!

The soundtrack and inspiration for this particular piece is Krisha Das' "Hare Rame (God is Real)." I was introduced to the song by an instructor at the Hot Box yoga studio back in Kelowna, where I quickly fell in love with both the practice of hot yoga and the diverse soundtracks selected by the various instructors. Some stuck to more "traditional" yogi music: forest sounds, Hindu chants, wind chimes. Sometimes I heard Florence + the Machine, or Sia, or Passion Pit. I loved the variety, but this one song stands out.

Take a listen below, or pop over to Protagonize to listen to it while reading my short scene.
 

photo (cc) Claude Robillard