I know you've supported me for a long time; somehow, I'm not impressed

I have a strange affinity for windmills. Not the old-fashioned, characteristically Dutch type with the grinder in the cabin, though those are nice. Rather, I’m absolutely obsessed with the sleek, power-generating type that crop up in unexpected places. This, in fact, has a lot to do with why I love these generators: their unexpectedness. They appear sporadically on a flat plain in Illinois, in the foothills of Spain, in mountains of California. And the fact that their layout never seems to have a plan—there are no rows and columns of windmills, they face different directions, their propellers never spin quite in sync—seems to indicate that they’re these natural outcroppings of sleek, beautiful trees, incomprehensibly tall, honed by evolution, taking root wherever the soil can support them. But regardless of their erraticism and the sleek naturalness of their form, they are manmade. And this is the Objectivist in me speaking, but every time I see a field of them emerging from the horizon, I want to put my hand on its base and feel the power churning through it, knowing that someone constructed, designed, planned this machine, a part of the landscape but nevertheless asserting its dominance over it, at the mercy of the wind but harnessing it.

I swear, someone should burn my copy of The Fountainhead, because this is just ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as my love for that damn Masterson building.

Calm down, temper temper; you shouldn't get so annoyed.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Damien Rice lately. By which I mean that I’ve been playing it at the Exposé frequently because he’s one of the few artists on the store iPod I can stand at this point. The Rice songs on the iPod, actually, are a convenient de facto greatest hits album; it weeds out all the songs I consider especially mawkish to present only those songs that I enjoy. Among these songs is “The Blower’s Daughter,” which, despite being wonderfully tragic, is also incredibly interesting to me, solely because Rice takes a lyric—“I can’t take my eyes off of you”—and changes it from something cheerful into this utterly heartbreaking ballad. In the case of Rice, it is not the joyous passion Frankie Valli describes when he can’t take his eyes off the woman he believes is too good to be true; rather, Rice cannot take his eyes off of the blower’s daughter and IT IS A PROBLEM. In fact, it causes him so much pain that it will probably kill him unless he beats it to the punch and takes care of things himself.

On a similar though slightly unrelated vein, I also recently listened to “How To Be Dead” by Snow Patrol. My interest in Snow Patrol was pretty much extinguished with the advent of “Eyes Open” (who could really be excited by lyrics so awkwardly formed around bizarre rhymes like, “And when the worrying starts to hurt/and the world feels like graves of dirt”?), but I’ve always held a soft spot in my heart for the songs of “Final Straw.” In any case, I felt a renewed surge of affection upon hearing this song; not only was it a wonderful source of nostalgia, but I was also reminded of its captivating lyrics. I’m really into songs that tell stories (“Ixcatan”), and this song does, but what’s most remarkable is that it tells the story of an argument only through one side of the dialogue. And when Gary Lightbody sings, “You’ve not heard a single word I have said/Oh my God,” I can just feel the frustration in not being understood and can comprehend just how desperately he wants these words to actually be contemplated, digested, taken in. Homeboy just wants to be heard.