At Home in my Head

I was traveling abroad this week. I was at a conference in Jerusalem, which is a place that I’ve spent some significant time earlier in my life, but I had not been there for about 10 years. I know my way around that city as well as any other city in which I’ve ever lived and I speak Hebrew well enough to get around. and while now there are roads and tunnels and buildings that weren’t there when I was last there, and there’s a cement wall snaking it’s way across the eastern horizon, the basic landmarks of the city that I know remain, mostly, in place.

But I don’t really feel “at home” here, and I found myself pawing through my bag at various points, in search of my iPod. I wasnt trying to block out the Language or the ubiquitous sounds of construction that comprise the crowded city’s soundtrack. I was trying to find my own aural bearings, and they – for better and for worse – live in the little iPod that lives in my iphone. And this week, “home” came in the sounds of the Modern Lovers, Aimee Mann, and the Clash, whose songs helped me hear my way through this city.

I realize that I’m not the first to comment on the confluence of travel and mobile music, but for the first time, I think, the precise irony of this situation weighed upon me: I am more at home i my ears, and in songs that I have not known for all that long, than I am in a city in which I’ve lived.

I can’t tell if this is a sign of the apocalypse, or if I should just settle in to the unsettling intersection of technology, place, and identity. But while it’s not quite dancing about architecture, wandering around jerusalem this time is closest I’ve ever come to doing so.