Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack for Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫): spring and summer of 2001; warm days of my freshman year at MSOE spent waking up at 10 or 11, driving down to Milwaukee for a couple compressed hours of classes, driving back home and staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning (definitely, those were the days before week-long labs and projects).

I include the Japanese name for the film as this period was the height of my independent study of the language, and I remember teaching myself as best I knew how, learning hiragana and katakana, picking up what I could… listening to audio, letting the madness of watching Neon Genesis Evangelion at 3 AM take me. These events were the catalyst for becoming alienated from a group, which I reeled from for a bit, but in another sense, it was a self-defining moment, and worth the bizarre overimportance of how I’d been shunned.

Regardless, the songs from the album (and what I’m actually listening to now, Symphonic Suite Princess Mononoke) bring about memories of what I’m experiencing this very moment — dark nights alone in my bedroom, technology my implement of interest and my own curiosity my guide. The motif in song and memory is a kind of reserved contemplation; surely, I was at my most isolated and aloof then, but I believe it was therapeutic, and in the end it played no small part in crafting my personality as an aspiring intellectual (and maybe a bit of a misanthrope as well :).

At the end of the summer, I would dislocate my knee for a third time, and then things soon took an odd turn.