For Easter I decided to drive to Chicago and celebrate with my family.  Road trip!  And what road trip doesn’t have a soundtrack?  Actually, most of my solo ones.

As much as I adore music, I find it is too easy to tune out while I’m driving long distances.  Plus flipping through radio stations can be a pain and popping in a CD is annoying because I don’t was to hear the same thing in the same order multiple times.  So instead I listen to audiobooks.

I mean, it’s hard to ignore the person chattering at you in the front seat so if you want something to keep you awake and prevent you from getting velocitized, words are the way to do it.  It also means you don’t look like a fool to the people passing you because you’re singing along.

Typically I like to read my books, not listen to them, but when I’m driving I find that the time goes by quicker when I’m engaged in a story.  And it’s typically hands free too.

Don’t know what to read/listen too?  Here are a couple of free podcast books you can download, via iTunes of course.  If you’re on the look out for others,  search podiobook.

*Somebody Somewhere by Tom Lichtenberg A psycho stalker kidnaps his would-be girlfriend, gets chased by the cops, runs out of gas right outside your house, where you and your spouse are enjoying a quite evening and now the pair of you are hostages at gunpoint and surround by police.

*The Rookie by Scott Sigler (the King of podcast novels) This is set amongst a lethal pro football league 700 years in the future. Aliens play positions based on physiology, creating receivers that jump 25 feet into the air, linemen that bench-press 1,200 pounds, and linebackers that literally want to eat you. Organized crime runs every franchise, games are fixed, and rival players are assassinated.

*A Man and his Unicorn by Anthony Matthews Vern was an ordinary college instructor and looking forward to spring break. But on the last day of classes and dreaming about a gorgeous gal, he woke up in a white washed world with nothing there! … That included his clothes (oops).  After meeting a few individuals who wanted to slice, dice, or otherwise harm him, Vern got into a quest. Then he met a beautiful Red unicorn stallion with magical powers. The unicorn took immediately to Vern. He was thrilled – then he remembered why unicorns took to certain people … Vern didn’t have too much success in dating (he swore he was a good kisser). Hopefully, he’ll have more success in staying alive.

Life is ever changing.  For a college student this can range from studying for an exam, taking an exam later, drinking wine with friends, and going to an arts event all in the same day.  We are supreme, multitasking beings.  Extremely impressive, if I do say so myself.

Tonight I was accompanied by one of my finest, most admired friends to the one-year celebration of the opening of the new wing in UMMA.

The night was filled with the two food groups of sweets and fruit, through decadent cupcakes and bananas.  While my friend and I shared cupcakes, we spoke with other museum connoisseurs about art and life.  We got away from our technological devices for a few hours and enjoyed the company of each other.

Art has that effect on people.  It removes them from their daily, sometimes ordinary lives and takes them into a new world filled with culture, conversation and yummy treats.

The basis for museums is education, but also entertainment.  Your eyes are opened to not only art, but also society.  Museums are vital to our sociological continuum.  They are the thread that pulls history to the present day and the future.

Their importance is humble.  It fosters relationships between community members, while asking little in return.  They are an ever changing valuable resource that should be appreciated.

Tonight I will leave you with this message.  Immerse yourself in the museum.

Close your eyes and clear your mind of any rambling thoughts. Now, imagine yourself walking around the campus of your dream college- what do you see?

Hopefully, for many of you images of State Street and the Diag occupy your mind. However, I think most of us can agree that the ideal campus contains classically constructed buildings scattered among an abundance of greenery. And maybe, for the fun of it, we could throw in a lake and a couple of squirrels.

Recently though, certain schools have decided to infuse modern works of art into their collegiate landscapes. For example, sculptural pieces made out of wire and metal have begun to populate Cornell University’s picturesque campus. Cluttered around the school’s stone bridges, these new artistic additions are known as the “Suicide Fences.”

Okay, so they aren’t actually called “Suicide Fences,” but in the wake of recent alleged student suicides, Cornell University has erected fences (and increased security) along bridges that overlook the beautiful gorges that surround campus. Similar actions have been taken by schools like New York University who instead of building fences put screen floors on every level of dormitory stairwells.

As I read about this new development in the Cornell Daily Sun, I was extremely disheartened. Instead of spending time and money on these temporary fences, shouldn’t the university (and other schools) be trying to figure out why these students are committing suicide? Or maybe they should put in the time and effort to find new ways of reaching out to desperate students. No, instead schools like Cornell and NYU have taken to physical construction as an answer to mental and emotional strife. What they don’t realize however is that no amount of metal or security guards can stop someone from committing the act of suicide. If someone wants to jump, believe me, they will jump.

I’m a sucker for music or rather background noise and music is my favorite thing to listen too.  Doing homework, folding laundry, walking to class, and occasionally even getting to sleep I have something sounding in my ear.

Once in awhile I like to listen to something other that Celtic reels or Daft Punk beats.  I go outside  and just listen.  I was thrilled last Monday when I actually woke up to birdsong!  Nature has it’s own melody going on, one that I usually drown out or simply ignore.  Taking the time to listen to it forces me to slow down and essentially recharge.  Who has just sat on the beach and listened to waves roll in?  It’s the same thing, I just sit under a tree near the CCRB and listen to waves of students instead of water.

I’ve heard lots of nature sounds, but the night sky has always been silent.  Sure, you can hear crickets in the night or a breeze through the trees but the stars themselves are silent.  I know satellites make noise, who hasn’t heard Sputnik’s electronic beeps?  But other sounds I’ve always loved to imagine.  Do stars crackle and pop like bonfires or do they produce a roar?  Yes yes, I know technically they can’t produce sound because space is a vacuum, but it’s fun to imagine.  Do you think the sound of methane rain on Titian is the same as water rain here on Earth?  Does the storm that is Jupiter’s Red Spot sound like ten thousand thunderstorms with crashing booms or more like ten thousand tornadoes with a whining wind?  Or perhaps it sound more like the upper registers of a canary.  Don’t you wonder at all what space sounds like?

Apparently yes, some one does have the same weird taste as I do. WhiteVinyl designs aka Luke Twyman has created SolarBeat, an ambient music box based on the motions of the planets (and one asteroid) around the Sun.

The planets move at the correct speed relevant to each other and every time they cross the line a chime sounds, a different pitch for each orbital body. You can speed up the tempo or slow it down and even pause it to compare the location to the planets to each other.  At the bottom of the page is the number of times each planet (well, Ceres is an asteroid in the Kuiper Belt) has crossed the line of music and produced a note.  Mercury is a speed demon, it went around 1031 times before Pluto even sounded once.

While the default speed of SolarBeat is in the middle of the tempo range, I wouldn’t recommend you adjust it too much to either side.  Too slow, there is a lot of empty sound space and it’s hard to discern a melody other than Mercury’s waily chime.  Too fast, and a lot of the notes sound together and the pattern of the piece is lost.  Either way, I can finally listen to space without needing a really big hearing aide or having to bundle up from cold weather. I wonder how long it’ll take for Pluto to cross chime 10 times…

Your planet-listening blogger,

Jenny

That’s what one of my housemates said about Easter eggs painted by little children.  Hahaha.  I mean… it’s probably going to be true for a lot of eggs decorated by kids, but in their case, they think it’s beautiful so it’s the thought and effort on their part that counts,  I guess.

We were just joking around but it made me think– what is the story behind the Easter egg?  Why do we do it at all?  For the Russians, the Easter egg was a huge deal and the Tsars were known for commissioning elaborate eggs created of precious metals and expensive jewels to give as presents to their family members during this Christian holiday (see picture below).

Given Russia’s predominantly orthodox Christian tradition, I should have presumed that there was a historical, religious reasoning behind the existence of Easter eggs, but I never actually processed this line of thought to go that far.  It was only when I looked it up on Wikipedia that I learned of the religious background to this timeless tradition.

In short, the egg itself was always seen as a symbol of life (given that chicks hatch from them).  Zoroastrians used to paint eggs for one of their gods, and the egg was used in several other religions ceremonies as well, in Judaim, Paganism, etc.  When Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe, many of the cultural traditions of different people groups were combined, and hence forth existed the Easter egg.

In Christianity, the Easter egg represents the rebirth of Christ and the shape of the egg itself resembles a grave.  Especially in Eastern European and Russian customs, the Easter egg was always a constant symbol for new life and was widely decorated and given out as gestures of love and friendship.

Now, the act has become, especially in America, a popular fun-time activity for children during this spring season, so that children can enjoy not only painting the eggs in beautiful (or hideous) manners, but also finding them in egg hunts.

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Gabby Park is a triple concentrator in Communication Studies, French, and History of Art, who particularly relishes reading up on the history of mundane practices in daily social life.

Scent may have the closest tie to memory because of the logistics – the olfactory bulb is a part of the brain’s limbic system; they have the advantage of proximity – but speaking from personal experience, I have found my memories bound more faithfully to sound than any other sensory modality.

At times while chipping away at my daily assignments, my iTunes player shuffles and slyly pulls out a song that has been buried under gigabyte after gigabyte of music collected over the years. A distinct trail of melody, a certain maneuvering of fingers across the strings of guitar to produce a particularly telling riff, might draw forth memories of my freshman year in high school at precisely 6:45 am when my bus would pull up to the corner, and like an ominous yellow portal, beckon me within. Upon hearing this song five years later, I still recall looking out the window at the array of houses, twins, triplets, and quadruplets, all virtually the same, and the feel of the crackly brown upholstery of the seats beneath me. All the while, my playlist circled through and I’d rest my eyes for moments and look at the back of the bus driver and anticipate the sun the break the chilly sky and the rest of the day to fall into place. Although I sit in my dormitory at a utterly different segment of my life staring at abstract concepts lectured to me hours before, songs on that playlist still are able to awaken dusty pathways where impulses once traversed habitually. In turn, they roused visual memories to awaken, fibers containing tactile information that they had secretly stored without my conscious permission reignite and I feel the tips of my fingers remembering.

Other playlists jog other memories – songs that I associate with writing my term paper senior year, songs that relate to driving around, cradled in the warmth of the sun in the summer of 2007, songs connected with my trip to Costa Rica, songs attributed to my first boyfriend – and the list grows.

Sometimes I organize my iTunes library by ‘Date Added’ and steadily scroll through its entirety, amusing myself with some of the older songs that I would be embarrassed to have others see. But I find fine lines that divide my life into chapters, the music I listen to now is even different from the music I had indulged in my previous year in college. My current playlist consists of a lot of Yeasayer, Ratatat, and Beach House, their patterns of air compressions and decompressions causing movements in my brain to thread them to the image of this room, this blue plastic chair that it came furnished with, the brisk and bold coldness of our Michigan weather. The beat, the bass, all intermingled, consolidated in the hippocampus (which, incidentally has the shape in cross section of a sea horse) and dispersed to the various cortexes of the brain to one day, perhaps be fished out by the whimsical shuffle feature on my music player.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.