Music on Og Maciel's Journal

Why Christmas Music Gets Me Every Time

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I know it may sound weird to start talking about Christmas when Halloween hasn’t even come up yet. But last night, while my oldest daughter was making dinner, she put on a Christmas station on Pandora—and just like that, I was transported straight into my first Christmas memory.

I must have been maybe five or six. And when I say I “remember” it, I’m not 100% sure if it’s a real memory or something I pieced together from old photos—but it feels real. Someone dressed as Santa Claus came to our house. To this day I don’t know if it was my dad, a friend of his, or someone my parents hired—but “Santa” showed up. And to my absolute shock, I got a G.I. Joe dressed in full camouflage, plus a yellow helicopter and a Jeep with some kind of weapon mounted in the back. This was the early 80s, so getting war-themed toys was totally normal. That’s the first Christmas I can truly recall.

The Night I Became a Man (Musically Speaking)

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I first became aware of music when I was around eleven or twelve years old. I remember a party being held at a sports arena in the small town where I lived, and at some point, they started playing an upbeat rock ’n’ roll song. Up until then, I don’t recall ever being interested in music—or even dancing or knowing any dance moves—but that night, something happened. I found myself incapable of not moving and shaking my body, which to everyone else probably looked like I was having an epileptic seizure (not that those are fun or funny). Eventually, I started observing the people around me and copying their moves, and I’m glad to say that night I became a man—musically speaking, at least.

Rainy Day

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It was 66°F this morning when I woke up, and by the time I finished breakfast with my wife and started making my way to the gym, I realized that it was going to be a cloudy, gloomy, rainy day.

Finding Beauty in Gray Skies

Now, I know that some people don’t appreciate these cloudy, gloomy days of the Fall, which I admit can get you feeling down, especially when you’re not having a good time at work, school, or whatever it is that you need to push yourself to do in the mornings.

Adventures in the Music Streaming World

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

These last couple of years have brought (along with some new wrinkles and occasional grey hairs) some interesting changes on how I manage and maintain my “digital belongings”. For a long while I used to worry about backing up and storing in a safe place all the files, photos, books, movies and music I’ve collected through the years. I have also managed to collect a variety of different external USB hard drives to keep up with this digital sprawl, where for each iteration the next device would increase in size and sometimes in speed compared to the current one. It got to a point where I got tired of the backup/restore game and found myself paying less and less attention to the things I had spent so much time maintaining.