The Wandering Mind of a Rolling Stone

College is a whirlwind of education, lifelong friendships, parties, experiences both heartwarming and heartbreaking, decisions and choices both frivolous and with far-reaching consequence; like or not, college is the period that informs and shapes the adult you will become. In a lot of ways, that dynamic and intensity was really distilled into my final undergraduate study abroad trip to Spain. As I began Year Four, I kind of knew I would need one more year of college beyond that. It would allow me the chance to breathe a bit more when it came to my majors in communications and Spanish, expand my French and German aspirations into full-fledged minors, complete literally every single Italian class Christopher Newport offered at that time, and retake some classes that I had struggled at previously to improve my cumulative GPA. There were external factors involved with that decision too: The recession was entering its worst year nationally and friends that had graduated or were preparing...

Learning French and German from scratch at the same time is one of the smarter mistakes I've ever made. On some level, I wanted to learn more languages because I assumed I was good at it and because most people take college electives with little to show for it; there's a visible (audible?) result if you successfully take a foreign language class. I just didn't expect to start two different languages at the same time. That really came about from the majority of communications courses I wanted going into Year Two filling up quickly and me not knowing any better; more ignorance than confidence, if I'm to be honest. And with two years of both European languages under my belt, I decided to follow up my Costa Rican study abroad the previous summer with a similar study abroad trip to Switzerland. Now, I was starting to get cocky. By the end of Year Three, my grasp on French and German had basically stabilized. I came out the gate strong with German; the learning curve is a l...

It was always going to be Spanish. Okay, that's not entirely true: My mother pushed for me to learn Korean before I started elementary school but by then, between the memory exercises and learning to write before kindergarten (with my off-hand, might I add!), I was already starting to feel burned out. I'm not a parent but I'm willing to bet kids probably shouldn't feel burned out at the age of six. I remember standing pat that I didn't want to learn something as difficult as Korean that young with a gentle but firm resolve that caught my parents off-guard; they relented but the compromise was that I would learn Spanish instead. In a lot of ways I do have some regrets about not learning Korean at that early an age but, again, burned out. This was before I was learning Tae Kwon Do and piano too. Probably explains why I don't like an excess of free time. Anyway, in a funny twist of fate, we had just moved to Fairfax from Falls Church and the elementary school we ...

The two cities perhaps nearest and dearest to my heart, DC and Seoul, are both subject to swelteringly hot summers and unforgivingly cold winters. This largely has to do with location; both metropolises share roughly the same longitude which means there's going to be similarities in terms of placement on the planetary axis which affects air mass currents with the Korean peninsula catching cold air fronts from Siberia and DC catching the gulf stream. But I'm assuming you didn't come here for the geography lesson so let's just get down to it. Both of my hometown and mother country are places where you get to experience the magic of having all four seasons as opposed to, say, Los Angeles where you get a dry season and wet season or any of the tropical places I would visit or study in where you get a wet season and a wetter season. With DC literally built on a swamp, it gets so damn humid you can virtually cut through the air with a knife; when people joke about the out...

January "How long have you and I been doing this dance?" I ask the faint traces of that familiar smirk starting to form at the corners of my mouth. It's the first recording day of the new year and in a whirlwind turnaround we've just recorded an interview with Jason Latour , an Eisner winner I had been jonesing to get on the show for years. Despite this unshakeable feeling that 2017 will be darker and meaner than everything that came before, I'm feeling smug as I move my fingers absent-mindedly over the cup of coffee in front of me, trying to restore feeling robbed by the January cold and soothe my fingertips after about an hour of having them press firmly on the coiled metal strings of a guitar; a typical jam session to get all that musical energy out of my system and create the illusion of professionalism for an interview that at times ran both seriously personal and funny as hell. Jake leans forward over his own coffee; Chris is unable to join owing to h...

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 ...