You Might Be an Ethnomusicologist…

…if you notice a guy on the subway platform rocking back and forth from foot to foot and tooting into a recorder and you actually stop to wonder what unknown (to you anyway) folk tradition his music comes from.

Eventually you realize that it comes from an unknown crazy tradition.

When the Wild Things Are

6:07 a.m.

That’s when I left my house this morning. (The precise details of why I was leaving before dawn are not important, but I will admit that I got up early to do work that I should have been doing last night when I was watching the latest episode of Bones with my housemate.)

Anyhow, I came downstairs, and the front hallway wreaked. For a few seconds, I thought the neurotic chihuahua (is that redundant?) upstairs had skunked himself, but I quickly realized that the smell was coming from outside. I walked up the hill looking all around so I wouldn’t end up accidentally tripping over one of the neighborhood skunks.

Then, as I was standing at the bus-stop, I noticed a raccoon sneaking out from between the laundromat and the neighboring house. It snuffled around the sidewalk for a few minutes. Every time a car went by it jumped on to the closest tree trunk and clung for dear life.

Finally it started waddling across the road with me stage whispering “hurry up, hurry up!” as truck headlights bore down on it. It made it to the other side unscathed and went straight up onto the front porch of a house, presumably to root through their recycling bins.

BTW, I don’t think I’ve mentioned here that my favoritemost word in Swedish is tvättbjörn, raccoon. It literally means “wash bear.” The Norwegian version, which has the same literal meaning, might be even better: vaskebjørn. Try saying it to yourself to see what I mean.

Vas’-kuh-byern. Vas’-kuh-byern. Vas’-kuh-byern.