The soundtrack in my head

I am woman of my time (more or less), so I don't have a diary, I make mix tapes. I recently moved up to iTunes, so now I can make mix CDs to reflect the current state of my world. My first mix CD will get burned sometime in the next couple of weeks. Probably.

The playlist has been percolating in my head for the past few months. I mentally add and subtract, I ponder, I add and subtract some more, I collect the needed music in various formats. All that is the easy part, really. The hard part is setting the order for the songs. Some songs lend themselves to a particular spot. For instance, for this CD, I know that "Belleville Rendez-vous" will be the opener and "Beyond the Sea" the closer.

Every tape (CD now!) that I've made has had a general theme and captured a particular time in my life and the theme for this one is loss. So the playlist is much more melancholy and high romance than usual, but them's the breaks. It just seems that the last year has been full of loses of one kind or another: my sister died unexpectedly (she was only 38) on Christmas Day, three friends lost their Dads, Ira lost one of his best friends, and Gordon - a good theater friend and all-around good guy - died unexpectedly on Thanksgiving Day at age 55. A friend is going through a separation that will probably end up as a divorce. Another friend who is particularly important to me is apparently checking out of our relationship. So there's the loss and heartache part.

Another part of the playlist came from some conversations I've had with a new friend. Some of what I call "dumb ass flirting" conversations and some "I'm there if you need a friend" conversations.

And then there are the "I just love this song" additions.

These mix things are like a snapshot of a chunk of my life. Many of them came about when I was trying to puzzle out relationships. Some grew out of crushes. One is built around my love of percussion.

I'll post the playlist as it stands later. Suggested running orders cheerfully accepted.