I spent about two and a half hours in the car today for no reason. I was supposed to tutor, but my student forgot and didn't show, and I was stuck driving all the way to the South Bay and back for nothing.

But I did have a lot of time to think, and I've decided that it's time to get cheery, dammit. The last half of this year has been pretty hard for lots of my friends, myself included. Somehow, we seem to have landed under a black cloud that's causing breakups, breakdowns, breakouts, and just general suffering. I personally have been stupefyingly bored and pretty much sick of everything lately. Which is sad, because the last few weeks of the year are quite possibly my favorite time of any given year, and it seems I'm doing my damndest to miss them.

So...we leave for Miami on Friday, and it's time to get excited. Usually I try to delay the anticipation because I get all worked up and freaked out. Last year I couldn't sleep for the whole week before New Year's Eve, and for good reason: Phish hadn't played together in over 2 years, we were skin-of-our-teeth lucky to get tickets, my brother was going to come with us, and I was still in the first blush of purposeful joblessness. This year, December's been slipping by and outside of putting ourself on a self-imposed Phish Listening Hiatus for the past few weeks, I haven't thought much about the shows.

So this week, each day, I'll be uploading a song that makes me happy, gets me excited, and puts me in the mood for New Year's Eve. Because bad luck's gotta end sometime, and I've decided that time is now.

On a related note, I just discovered that come January 1st, Phish is going to donate all the net proceeds of their Live Phish downloads to The Mockingbird Foundation, which is a volunteer organization staffed by Phish fans that donates money to music education-related charities. It's a great group, and they're going to get a major, major influx from the wildly-successful LivePhish site. It also makes me so proud of the band, and helps me remember why I have so much genuine affection for the four of them and why I care enough to be as crazy about all of this as I am.

Another reason I love the boys? Silly-ass covers like this one: Roses are Free (originally by the inimitable Ween, this version is from Hampton Comes Alive). It's also appropriate to be a song that spreads cheer, as the first line is "Take a piece of tinsel and put it on the tree...."

Cheers, all. Time to get happy.