Michael Limiero

This song has been a long time in the making. I wrote it over a year ago, in October and November 2014, but the core idea goes back years beyond that (and in fact I’ve talked about the theme on this very blog). I could say a lot of things about this song, and probably will at some point, but I don’t have the time right now. So without further ado:

Stream for free on Soundcloud
Download for $1 on Bandcamp

This song was written, performed, recorded, and produced by me in my bedroom studio. Lyrics, music, and recording are © 2015-2016 Michael Limiero, All Rights Reserved. In other words, please share the link but don’t share the download.

Special thanks to my friends at GTCCF for encouraging me to record this song. And a shout-out to Judah and the Lion, whose song Mason-Dixon Line was a huge source of inspiration for this one. Give them a listen if you enjoyed it.

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Update: version 2 of my user style. Scroll down to the bottom for more info.

Some of you might have noticed that I haven’t been very active on social media lately. More likely you haven’t, because I haven’t completely disconnected either. But I am in fact doing a deliberate experiment where I’m reevaluating my Internet usage. This is not a “social media is evil” discussion. This is an attempt to do more of what matters, and cut back on everything else.

I’ve toyed with these ideas for a long time, but until this month I couldn’t figure out a good way to do anything about it. Like it or not, Facebook is important. There is no better tool right now for messaging, event planning, and group project management. The real problem is the news feed. There is no way to filter out the useful stuff from an infinite stream of memes, party pictures, and links to interesting but useless articles. So I thought, what if I just cut that out and keep everything else? I have done exactly that using a custom user style and the Stylish extension for Firefox. My Facebook now looks like this:

Endless desert. Crumbling cinderblock buildings, some abandoned, some still clinging to life. Wild dogs roaming the streets. Discarded tires, soda bottles, and newspapers covering the red sands as far as the eye can see. A few miles away, across an imaginary line, an entirely different world - one lit by neon signs, where men and women sleep peacefully in hotels and apartments and spacious houses, unaware or perhaps just unwilling to see the plight of those on the other side of the line.

This is the city of Juarez, Mexico and however I try to describe it, I fall flat.

I almost forgot to mention this to everyone, but I’m going to be spending my spring break on a mission trip to Juarez. At 3:30AM, myself and 20ish other CCF people will be hopping in vans and driving to El Paso, TX. On Monday, we’ll cross the border and get started building two houses with Casas por Cristo to give to two families that need them. By the end of the day Thursday we’ll be done, and head back to the US. I am super excited! I get to spend time with some of my favorite people, visit a new country, do some physical work and rest my brain a bit, hopefully practice some Spanish, eat delicious Mexican food, spend some time in New Orleans on the way back, and of course bless some people with a new house!

I didn’t send out a support letter for this trip because I knew I could come up with the money on my own. God has provided for me in a huge way this year, and I have been able to save up enough over the past couple months to cover the whole cost. That said, I can definitely use your support in prayer. You can pray for:

• Safety on the road and on the work site
• Friendships to form and to deepen among the team members
• God’s blessing for the families that are receiving these houses

And I’m sure you can think of more. I will be pretty busy the week after I get back but I hope to put up some pictures and a post-trip blog post the weekend after that. Thanks for your support!

It’s the end of my fourth day here in Barcelona and I think I’m starting to settle in. The weirdest thing about this experience is how non-weird everything seems to me. Of course there are plenty of small differences from the US - things like the shape of soda cans, using a button instead of a lever to flush the toilet, and the apparent lack of street names (they are named but the signs are quite difficult to find). I think I got all the being amazed by such things out of my system on my trip to Italy last year. These things are strange for a minute but hardly affect everyday life. I still go to class, ride the subway, buy groceries, cook dinner, check Twitter, and occasionally do some productive work. In that respect, my life in Barcelona vs. Atlanta is more similar than high school vs. college.

There remains one glaring difference, however: the language barrier. In my head I’m positive I know enough Spanish to get by, but in real life it’s not so easy. The first time I went into a cafe to get some lunch and the waiter asked me something my mind went completely blank. I must have had the worst deer-in-the-headlights look as I tried to point to something on the menu while saying “um” a whole lot. He probably knew enough English to make the transaction but I’m not even sure I could have done that myself with how badly I panicked, let alone recall enough castellano to ask ¿habla Usted inglés? or even request un momento to collect my thoughts.

I’ve never really thought of home as a place. Despite living in the same house for eight years, I never felt like the house itself was all that important. Home was a feeling, not a building. Sitting on my window seat, playing guitar late into the night - that was home. Eating cereal in the kitchen after everyone else had gone to bed, and pondering the mysteries of the universe - that was home. I’ll admit I’m rather fond of those particular spots, but the home-ness of those things doesn’t belong to a specific point in space. Playing guitar at church, in my mind, is more ‘home’ than say, studying for a test in my own room.

After two years of college, I’m starting to think a bit differently. Home isn’t so much a feeling - home is people. My house was (and still is) home because my family lives there. Bakersfield was home because my closest friends lived there. I think about when I was younger and my friend Bobby moved out of the neighborhood. That street never felt the same - it used to be my own, but without the person who made it that way, it was just a street on which my house happened to be located.

As I write this, I’m preparing to leave for a summer study-abroad program in Barcelona. I am pretty excited, naturally - I’ve been out of the country a few times but certainly never for almost three months.

I sometimes think about culture - mainstream culture, subculture, Christian culture, corporate culture. It’s a tricky thing to define, and even trickier to understand. Georgia Tech has a culture. Bakersfield has a culture. White middle-class Americans have a culture that differs in many ways from that of Latino or Chinese immigrants, and even from the culture of whites in poor neighborhoods. Our cultures influence how we see the world, who we feel comfortable with, and what skills and knowledge we view as important.

Note: this article is highly technical.

My dad recently got a MacBook Air, so tonight I decided to test my current website project to make sure the fonts looked okay. All my Calibri replacements looked great (Helvetica is a nice font), but I discovered a much nastier problem. For some reason, instead of an image blending into the background like I had designed it, the colors didn’t match.

This is such a beautiful song, but I never liked the ending, so I rewrote it. My lyrics, this recording, and my arrangement are available under a Creative Commons BY-NC license, meaning you are free to download and distribute them as long as you give me credit and don’t make any money.

Update: I should probably credit Leonard Cohen’s original version). I should also mention that the feel and message of the song varies a lot between its 200 covers. Cohen himself released two versions of this song on two different albums - one biblical and more hopeful, the other secular and more depressing. He wrote around 80 verses, but only selected a few for these final arrangements. The version you probably know is a cover by John Cale and was used in the movie Shrek. My version is most closely based on Jeff Buckley’s cover.

I now have a Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheDeltaWhy.

I uploaded some videos from the Marymount Open 2010, a cubing competition I went to in October, and the world’s first video tutorial for 3x3x5BLD. I made the tutorial a few weeks ago but was waiting until I had a solve video before posting it. I still haven’t made the solve video but I decided to post the tutorial anyway. A text tutorial is currently in the works.