I don’t mean to get all “Ross Ross Ross” on you this week, but I kind of have to because

a) it’s his 25th birthday tomorrow! Hooray for a quarter century of having successfully not died!

b) He got no love from the University of Washington in Seattle this afternoon, and even though neither of us minds taking it off the list of possibilities that much (9 months of grey every year? Boo!) I’m sure he’s at least a little sad about it considering that Ethan lives there and it was the closest school to my lovely parents-in-law Barb and David. Still, Ethan, Barb, and David are probably all much more cut up about it than we are, because the University of Chicago is still on the list and today when I was listening to the latest episode of This American Life I suddenly got very excited about that option because HEY! Did you know that the bridges of Chicago smell like chocolate? Well, they DO. Ira Glass told me so, and I am helpless but to believe every word that man says. (Sadly, Chicago does not smell as much like sweet nostalgia as it used to, but once again, Mr. Glass says the breezes of the Windy City still blow enough of those delicious cocoa particles through the atmosphere for you to get a good sniff of ambrosial air when you’re walking down the street, and are you really gonna be the one to tell me he’s wrong?)

c) That picture of Ross is the one I chose to kick off my 10 Things guest post—possibly the most fun writing assignment I have ever had (it’s definitely the most fun thing I did last week), so you should definitely go and read it. 10 Things is run in part by the lovely Stephanie, who is currently jaunting about the neighborhoods of Seoul evilly filling the minds of unsuspecting Korean children with lots of American propaganda (um I mean nobly teaching them very useful rules of English grammar). At any rate, she makes a mean website. Go see!

d) Ross Ross Ross!

P.S. That whole salmon thing was just a joke. . .

. . . or was it?

Ross has started taking an Indian cooking class at the BCAE, and it transpires that (as we have long suspected but been reluctant to acknowledge) all our years of attempting to combine health concerns with the lust for the perfect homemade saag have been misguided ones; truly, there is no real Indian food without The Power of The Ghee.

Now that we know this, friends, now that we have smelled the strangely sweet fragrance of spices happily popping away in clarified butter, witnessed the beautiful creamy swirl of more than a cup of cream blending into cooked tomatoes, and tasted the mouth-magic that is leftover Murgh Masala for lunch, we can never go back.

For we are, at long last, gheeful.

I grew up in a house whose rooms were filled above all with two very particular strains of music: the smooth, syncopated foot-tappings of jazz (Coltrane, Clapton, Davis; Billie, Brubeck, Ella) and the intricate architectures of classical harmonics (Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi; Mendelssohn, Mozart, Handel). Besides the records that made the speakers shiver, music also meant my father’s sharp, clear whistle angling through the space between his teeth, and my mother’s sweet voice quavering through the hymns of her heart. For many years music—though familiar and beloved, though a friend of mine, though calm and moving and inspiring and every good thing that it still is today—wasn’t really something I could choose, and therefore possess, for myself. All the paths to music I saw laid out before me were marked with the signposts of intellect (I was too childishly sensual), faith (I was too literal), or memory (my past was still the size of a pea underneath a pile of mattresses, and I was no princess).

Don’t get me wrong. I loved music, both as a listener and a producer of song. I was in organized choirs and funny little a cappella choruses with friends; I was obsessed with musicals; I hummed and warbled my way through my awkward years bolstered with the knowledge, some days, that my voice was the prettiest thing about me. But all that music was about other people, other worlds—adult worlds, usually, that were ordered and complete and beautifully, richly mature. Even the hottest jazz seemed that way to me as a kid, since I didn’t have the slightest idea what jazz was about. I didn’t get that music could be an instrument of rebellion. I didn’t get that it could be a secret you held close to your chest, or a bitter raging against the universe. That it could tell you in a single phrase who you always were, or suddenly show you the self you didn’t even know you wanted to be.

Then I became a teenager.

I now realize that I had a wholly ordinary teenage experience, as these things go—I was alternately cruel and passionately affectionate to my fellows, and they were the same to me. I shunned the idea of love and then fell in love with my best friend’s boy, and that was a whole mess. I felt the fear of embarrassment thrilling through every hair on my body during every single second. I turned my back on my parents. I suffered through painful epiphanies every other month. I had an inferiority complex; I had a superiority complex.

What can I say? It was the thing to do. :-)

But if those years held only one gift (and in truth they held many), it was music, music that opened up for me then with such emotional power that it was like a conflagration of exquisite aches. I started listening to the radio every moment I could. Soon I decided the radio was too vanilla for me. I read CD reviews in obscure British and American music magazines every week and delighted in purchasing albums without ever having heard a single track on them. As soon as I bought a new CD I locked my door and put it on, playing it over and over until the order of the songs on it had become as familiar as the thrum of my heart when I lay awake at night. I turned the volume up high. I screamed into my pillow in inchoate rages. I wept for heartbreaks I hadn’t even had properly. Music belonged to me, and I belonged to music, and thank god for all of it.

I was beautifully, irreparably, sixteen. There was no turning back.

*******

This entry brought to you by My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, whose album “Hit and Run Holiday” I listened to this afternoon while washing the dishes.

I promise I’ll stop making just-picture posts soon; it’s just that I love the way this one of Ross turned out.