The Wandering Mind of a Rolling Stone

Of course this comes out the day after Christmas but I'm just going to assume all those decorations are still up. In a lot of ways, Christmas for the Stones felt like a bigger, flashier sequel to Thanksgiving every year. Just like that November holiday, the proceedings would largely be conducted from my grandparents' family home over in Falls Church with a bigger spread for lunch though the turkey would be swapped out for a yuletide roast with my father and I competing over who got to eat the most end pieces because that was always totally the best part (not a die hard competition, mind you, there were other members of the family that deserved a piece). My grandmother's beloved Jello was there too but for Christmas she added sparkling cider that somehow gave it more of a kick; probably a placebo effect, I don't see how the carbonation would translate. The usual decorative traditions were all in place for our own family home: Christmas lights strewn across the bushes i

This month marks the anniversary of the first rock show I went to. While I had been to a whole hell of a lot of classical music concerts and stage productions (Plays, musicals, ballets, operas) as a kid, my parents never had the interest to take me to any rock shows, even the classic rock acts they grew up with (My dad went to his first while I was in college! The Steve Miller Band if memory serves). By middle school, I was finally starting to listen to contemporary music mostly through the local rock radio stations like DC101 but really from WHFS. WHFS doesn't exist anymore. It was replaced unannounced by a Latino-bossa nova station dubbed El Zol halfway through my senior year of high school. I had used WHFS as my alarm wake-up since seventh grade and one early morning in February, I woke up to Mariachi-infused reggaeton. I guess it served as a great way of getting me awake at least. Anyway, this radio station would put on two big rock shows every year: An all-day festival at

By the time this thing posts, an interview I did talking to writer Greg Pak will be out all over iTunes, Google Play, and YouTube. That particular interview was really personal (and thankfully not heavy-handed; I similarly don't plan to get heavy-handed here) for me because Greg is a half-Korean guy that grew up in the South (Dallas, to be specific) that went on to become one of the more prolific, acclaimed writers of his generation. All the Gladiator Hulk stuff in Thor: Ragnarok ? The secret origins of John Wick? That's all Greg and that's just the tip of the iceberg of his career. Growing up as a Korean-Irish kid in the DC-area wasn't a hardship; it really wasn't. I wouldn't really catch any ill-intentioned racism...until college deeper in the South...the stuff I ran into as a kid warranted more curiosity than animosity. It was just business as usual at home because I have no real basis for comparison otherwise: Starch heavy diets with potatoes and/or rice,

Through college, grad school, and working at a university, my favorite part of the school year has been the beginnings and the endings; honestly, probably more the end of every semester chasing that last little bit of college and friends around while kind of laughing in the face of exams and final papers/projects. That isn't a feeling limited to post-secondary education for me but with college there was a greater sense of momentum and finality to it all. That first semester of college, I let things get a bit more out of control than I'm comfortable with. That last sentence is one of the bigger understatements I've made in recent memory. I was running the very real risk of not passing biology, psychology, or statistics that term and needed to pull out all the stops that exam week to make it work on top of other stuff I was facing at the time. I'm prone to eidetic imagery which is a bit of both a blessing and a curse in terms of memory; I don't always get to choos