Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about home.

I’ll start by saying this: I’m not sure I’ve ever really had one. My (divorced) parents changed residences a few times between them; plus, I spent my pre-college years bouncing between their respective places. I still do, whenever I’m back in Illinois. Maybe as a result, I started to feel twitchy about this lack of stability—I was always anticipating the next upheaval.

College didn’t help much in the way of stability, since students are generally condemned to spending each year in a new, cramped dorm room. And, as I’ve mentioned here, I’ve spent the the past two post-grad years floundering around in some pretty bleak parts of the D.C. metro area. I looked at this experience with rose-colored glasses for a long time, until the situation deteriorated (hi, bedbugs!) and it just became clear that I needed more for myself. Until recently, I’d been filling my weekends with travel plans and cooking sprees, but I came to realize that even a full refrigerator wasn’t getting me any closer to the safe haven I craved. My constant desire to leave town didn’t help, either.

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In a recent act of reverence, I visited a synagogue. It was still Hanukkah, and I’d definitely say it was a spiritual event: Andrew Bird was playing at the 6th and I downtown. I’ve always loved the lush, layered qualities of his songs (and, of course, that whistling!) but wasn’t quite sure how he’d be able to recreate them live.

He was completely sans backing band, looking lonely up on stage amidst a sea of instruments and blue light. But apparently that didn’t matter, because he became his own band in a feat of musical and technological wizardry: by recording himself onstage, then looping the track as he layered piece upon piece of percussion, melody and harmony. He only started singing after a few minutes of this strategic work, once he’d created a backing track from his own musical building blocks (see the method for yourself here).

It was humbling, to say the least.

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When you start a lifelong hobby at the tender age of sixteen, it’s virtually guaranteed to see you through a lot: various stages of awkwardness, confusion, frustration, epiphany, and change, for starters. It’s called growing up, and I toured those stages of adolescence and young adulthood quite literally on foot. For the past eight years, I’ve been a runner, each footstep carrying me though life as I know it. As you can imagine, I’ve worn through many pairs of Asics in the process.

As a sophomore in high school, I picked up the jogging habit that was already a constant in my dad’s life. Up until that point, my music knowledge had been gleaned from the same parental sources: I’d listened to a strange combination of Motown and classical symphonies forever, never really extending my own musical tastes past the edges of theirs. And while oldies and opera sufficed as the soundtrack for family car trips, my new running habit allowed for freedom of musical choice. Armed with headphones and a Discman, I added artists to my repertoire, slowly becoming enamored with the songs that propelled me on increasingly lengthy jogs. I discovered Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Bob Dylan a few years into my running career, at eighteen or nineteen, swam to the bottom of their discographies and drowned myself in sound. All the while, I was pounding pavement or snaking through wooded trails, running away from a few heart-ripping breakups and familial dysfunction, and towards new friends, new love, and eventual peace within my home.

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Am I the only one who imagines her life set to a soundtrack? Sometimes, I catch myself pressing the “play” button in my head as I walk down the street. If my steps are determined and purposeful, I choose a track with a driving beat. When I’m overcome with some sort of angsty emotion (heartache comes to mind), something soulful rings through my ears. I’d be far too bashful to be the object of so many moviegoers’ gazes, but I’ll admit this: I love imagining that my feelings are so epic as to deserve their own 3-minute, cinematic scenes (set to to my favorite songs, of course).

Earbuds and my trusty little iPod make those daydreams portable, but my nostalgic side prefers the old-school romance of vinyl records. As I mentioned last week, Saturday was Record Store Day, when music nerds like me came out of the woodwork to celebrate with special vinyl-only releases and nifty deals at our favorite record shops. That day, Ted and I added six albums to our collection; his contributions were a Brazilian samba album by Jorge Ben, Loudon Wainwright’s Album III, and something by his favorite mandolinist David Grisman.

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