Out of the Desert and Into the Sun

I'm so pleased to have discovered the Pandora application for iPhone. We're not allowed to stream any Web content at work, so it's been a long time since I utilized Pandora's Music Genome Project application. If you love all sorts of music, and you've never tried Pandora, I highly recommend it.

I have written previously about my love for the Ben Folds song "The Luckiest." This afternoon I thought I'd create a Pandora station for that song, to see what other similar songs might be played. One of the first songs that came up was "On Your Porch", from the album "Interventions & Lullabies" by The Format. One of the lines in the song is "But now it's time to get out of the desert and into the sun."

Having lived in the desert for eight years, and knowing intimately the 350 days per year of sun that's touted there, I found the concept of "out of the desert and into the sun" to be interesting.

Really, that's what I did when I moved from Tucson to Youngstown. I came out of the loneliness of my life there, with lots of friends and activities but no family, to the sun of Youngstown. There may be 350 days a year of gray and cold and snow and rain and fog, but my family is here. And there's an incredible energy around working, all the activitists together, to bring the Valley back to its former vitality—a vitality with an air of newness that will take it into the 22nd Century and beyond.