I have been wait­ing for a long, long time for a new album to come rolling out from this man. The album was sup­posed to come out a while ago, but when your house burns down due to some forest fires that are ruin­ing the local forestry… well I can under­stand a delay.

Thank­fully after my faith­ful wait, I have been rewarded with his new release: Sycamore Mead­ows. After giving this album a couple of lis­tens, it has quickly become one of my favorites for all time. It’s both amaz­ingly happy and star­tlingly deep, many times simultaneously.

Who knew that read­ing about a gay man who dresses in drag and his call-​boy lover would be all that inter­est­ing? I sure didn’t! To be honest had some­one sug­gested it to me, I prob­a­bly would have sprained my eye­brow from the speed in which it would’ve raised. All that aside, I Am Not Myself These Days is a great first book to the year. Start­ing off with your good foot and all that.

Over the Christ­mas hol­i­days, Theresa and I went to our local inde­pen­dent movie the­ater, and watched Juno. I have to say that it’s easily one of the best films I watched in 2007. It was sweet, funny, and potent in all the right spots.

The movie Juno is about one Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) and Paulie Bleeker (the ever master of awk­ward pauses, Michael Cera) and their joint child-​making. The movie takes place during the nine months of Juno’s won­der­ful adven­ture through preg­nancy, and her inter­ac­tion with the adop­tive couple Vanessa and Mark Loring (Jen­nifer Garner and Jason Bate­man).

If you’ve ever watched Clone High, you’ve heard Aban­doned Pools. I’m fairly cer­tain that all of their songs from their first album are used through­out the show, includ­ing the intro video which is not actu­ally on any of their Albums. In any case, Human­is­tic is one of the longest run­ning albums exis­tent in my library and easily on my top ten, if not my top five. Flat out I’m going to say that it’s simply a won­der­ful album and worth lis­ten­ing to. It has a subtle dark­ness to it, and man­ages to convey a stun­ning amount of emo­tion con­sid­er­ing how “happy” some of the songs happen to be.