Live 365, the site that hosts the Evening Melancholy radio station (basically pays all royalties for a fee), provides a Shout-Out link for all listeners of the station. That link allows the listener to contact the owner of the station and give kudos, criticisms, requests, etc.

Today I received a Shout-Out from someone in Japan. The email was written entirely in Japanese. Of course, I do not read Japanese, but when someone from Japan sends the owner of an internet radio station a note AND it is entirely in Japanese, the curiosity factor goes way up. So, I took the Japanese email and used one of the Japanese to English translators on the web in an attempt to decipher what the sender of the note was trying to convey. In short, the note said the following:

A friend of 30 years worries for renal cancer very much.
But a heart is healed very much when I listen to music of here.
Thank you

Nothing I do on a day to day basis at my regular job could ever crumble and thrill me like these few words have done. Repeatedly, I am able to connect with people all over the world simply because of this wonderful thing called music. We have these quiet moments during our life when it seems like all we have are the thoughts that haunt us and the music that soothes us. During those times, everything else disappears. What an elixir music can be.

40+ hours a week I spend just “living the dream”. I need the job. I need the paycheck. But I’m not kidding myself. This is not the dream. This is the crutch I must use until, hopefully, the real dream comes along.