Listening to music from high school is grand tonic for my tired heart. I spent a morning last week listening to “When I Woke” and set myself to the past.

Deer Valley, a YMCA family camp, and hearing the album for the first time. It was exotic and clearly something all the college-kid counselors had. I had to have it, too.

Rusted Root playing to a packed audience of Johnny Hop students: knowing I had been in on the secret for a good seven years before my peers clued in. Also, Ben desperately wanting to hook up with Liz Berlin, who, I assured him, was married, and her thanking him for his phone number by calling him “so sweet.”

Carpooling to the PMEA honors band practices with four boys from my band: Nate, Zach, Joe and Joe. Zach and I were in the front seat, after rehearsal, singing along to every song. With abandon. Halfway through the CD, he turned to me and asked, “Do you actually know any of these words?” I assured him I did not either, and we continued to sing.

Watching Wilco at the Pittsburgh Arts Festival for free, standing but feet away from Michael Glabicki.

Always the girl who danced with her arms in a time when no one else did: Evan Mayo-Wilson watching me dance to “Ecstasy” at Homecoming in ninth grade and saying that he could always find me in a crowd because I was the only one with my arms in the air. Oh, how I was in love with Justin then and cringed when my date asked me, “Do you think it would be a bad idea for us to go out?”

Seeing Rusted Root open for Jewel with Kelly at the Starlake amphitheater. The sound guy could have done a better job by using some good car speakers than he did with the amphitheater’s sound system.

Years and years of putting “Food and Creative Love” on every mix tape I made: for myself, for Eve, for Adam, for the man of the hour. I still believe that all I need is food and creative love.

1. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. Seeing as how it’s the school year again, my reading brain has returned to a state of near collapse. To counter this effect I am rereading The Great Gatsby, which is beautiful but does not force me inexorably toward the end, because I already know the end, and The Hunger Games. Young adult dystopias are becoming quite a favorite around the house, here. The Last Book in the Universe, How I Live Now, and now The Hunger Games. It’s a fast-paced, easy-to-read, terrifying vision of exploitation of the poor and totalitarianism. I recommend it highly.

2. Freddy the fern. Jeff and I were at an A&P buying things that Trader Joe’s doesn’t have. I saw Freddy and just had to have him. He’s happy now, sitting next to Phil (the philodendron).

3. Rusted Root, Weezer and Rufus Wainwright. It’s like I’m listening to my bear blanket from when I was a kid. Comforting. Warm. Broken in.

4. Homegrown tomatoes, which will become Sopa de Azteca tonight. Or, my own bastardized version of it based on my memory of eating it at Picante and looking at their menu on the internet. We’ve also got corn, beans, and avocado waiting. Everything is better with avocado.

5. Lady Grey tea. With sugar and milk.

Jeff and I spent last night watching My Own Private Idaho. Well, I watched and graded papers (ahh, the school year). The moment it started I knew I would want to watch again, just to take in the beauty. After finishing it, I wanted to watch it again in order to put the miscellaneous pieces together at least a little better and to take in the beauty.

For those of you who have never seen the flick, it involves Keanu Reeves speaking Shakespearean lines (apparently he’s Henry IV), River Phoenix as a narcoleptic homosexual hustler, Flea as the manservant to king of the hobos, and sequences of sexual tableaux that stand in for live-action sex. You know, your average film about hustlers, thieves and drug addicts.

Idaho is an early Gus Van Sant film, and the more I watch of Van Sant the more I think I love him. The movie was beautiful in the way of A Clockwork Orange, a movie to which it owes its aesthetic. Only, I didn’t hate it like I hate A Clockwork Orange. The perversions were charming, like the man who wanted Mike (River Phoenix) to be a little Dutch boy scrubbing his kitchen, and not deeply unsettling, like a giant phallic sculpture or cows that dispense drugged milk.

And Idaho is just a beautiful landscape, one which Van Sant uses liberally.

I actually want to go here, now. Maybe to hermit away for a year writing and reading and watching films from the Criterion Collection. Never speaking to 14-year-olds, no matter how severe their learning disability or emotional disorder. Relaxing. Drinking fine martinis and Boont Amber beer. Eating stinky cheese. An artistic good life.