This is the song that has me dancing around my kitchen this morning.

I'm almost always listening to music at home. I have mix CDs for housework, exercising, various writing projects. Life should have a soundtrack.

Music isn't just about a good beat or a skilled guitar player for me. It's an emotional experience. I like music that makes me feel something or that paints pictures in my head.

And it's transformative. I listen to The Ramones when I want an energy boost, Sarah McLachlan's Surfacing when I want a good melancholy. With more than 400 CDs in my collection, there's something for just about every mood I'm on, or want to be in.

But I do like a good beat, a bit of ethereal electronica, and something I can sing in my kitchen or my car at the top of my lungs. For reference, I think Seal's "Crazy" is just about a perfect song. We'll never survive unless we get a little bit crazy. Oh, yeah.

Maybe that's why I don't particularly enjoy going to concerts -- because my experience of music is about what's going on in my own head. That, and I can't seem to bring myself to dance in public, so any time I go to a concert I end up sitting there stiffly while everyone around me is tapping their toes and letting their arms fly from the joy of seeing their favorite band live.

I added a widget at the bottom of this blog with a few of my favorite songs for anyone who wants a (very shallow) glimpse into my music tastes. I'll definitely have to add more songs to the list.

Dreams: The Baby

I'm dreaming that I'm imagining having a baby.

I know the baby is imaginary, but I can see it, hold it, smell its comforting baby scent. Not it. Her. The baby is a girl, although I don't know her name. She is, however, my imaginary baby.

I'm cradling the baby in my arms or bouncing her on my hip and it feels good, even though I tell the baby she should not be here. I do not want a baby. My biological clock is on permanent snooze. My life will be completed on my own terms, without marriage or children, I say.

The baby just smiles.

I put the baby down on a waterbed. Something tells me that's irresponsible, but the baby is only imaginary so what difference does it make. The baby cries. I pick her back up, cradle her against my breast, and she snuggles there in blessed silence.

I have an imaginary conversation with the baby's imaginary father. I tell him he is only imaginary, and so is the baby. He just shrugs. For a moment, we make a lovely imaginary family.

Dreams: The Village

The dream is hazy, already receding from memory.

I'm in a village. It's muddy, wooden, pre-industrial. A post-apocalyptic relic or people who have chosen to abandon modern society and create their own? It's unclear.

I'm traveling with people — people from my workplace. I don't know how we got here. We're just here. We're outsiders. We don't belong.

I find a library. It's clean, warm, bright. A man cares for the books. He's my age, wears glasses, disheveled hair. Harry Potter grown up, without the trademark scar.

I like this man, though I do not know his name. I like him because he cares for the books, cares for knowledge. We talk. It's good.

Someone comes? I don't know how, but I'm in a hut with plank walls and a dirt floor. I'm lying on a metal table. Three women are in the room with me, preparing rudimentary surgical instruments on a dirty cart. I see a bone saw. They think I'm wrong. They want to cut into my brain to make me right, make me like them. They want to take my knowledge, my independence, my soul.

I leap off the table, flip it, pin them against the wall. I run. I look for the people I was traveling with.

I find my boss in another hut tinkering on a rusty vehicle. Post-apocalyptic relic. He's wearing overalls and a simplistic smile. I shake him, tell him about the women who wanted to cut into my brain. Nothing registers. It's too late for him.

I run.

Every day is a commencement

Every year in late May and early June, the reporters at my newspaper are tasked with covering every high school and college graduation in our region. It amounts to dozens of ceremonies, hundreds of graduates and thousands of proud friends and family members each year. I just returned from my assigned graduation, quite possibly thankful for the first time to have reached my mid-30s.

I often lament the days when it seemed the entire world was at my fingertips, when I felt invincible in mind and body. I was the girl who could do anything she set her mind to. I haven't felt that way in awhile.

I've been struggling this week -- for the past several weeks really -- with a good deal of pain in my lower back and hip. I went to see a chiropractor and was told I'm "wearing out" my spine. The x-ray showed my spine zig-zagging at unnatural angles where it should be neatly curved, and I discovered I'm putting twice as much weight on my left leg as my right, which is probably what's causing the excruciating pain in my hip. I walked out of the chiropractor's office on Monday feeling glum and fatalistic, like I could see the remaining span of my life in front of me and that it's all downhill from here. I could see a future of arthritis, hip replacements, a walker, maybe a wheelchair. I felt old.

I felt old again today, but in a different sort of way. I listened to these young men and women give their commencement speeches -- filled with cliched metaphors about baby birds and fledgling graduates -- and I felt grateful that I'm no longer one of them. I was grateful to have acquired what wisdom and knowledge I have at what I'm sure these bright-eyed teenagers would view as my ripe old age, to have traded my wide-eyed innocence and complete self-assurance for a more nuanced, complex worldview.

I see things now in a way I couldn't at 18, and realizing that has re-opened the door to the future I thought had closed this past week. I remembered that I will continue to learn and evolve and see the world in new and different ways each day that I draw breath.