How do we identify who we are as people? Where we come from? What we mean?

I've been working, for almost a year now, on how music defines people and the place that they come from. Specifically, I've been working to understand why musicians responded so strongly to Hurricane Katrina. Sooner rather than later, I'll post my findings, especially pertaining to a group of techno musicians from an internet forum, but in the meantime...
how does music define where you are from?
Does it/doesn't it?
Why?
What are the ways that communities identify with themselves and with the world around them?
How important are these connections?
What role do the arts play in defining these connections and identities?
In a global community, do these identifications make sense?
Should we be working to come together as a "global community"?
Is there such a thing as a global community?
Should individual communities differentiate themselves from one another?
How should these communities come together to help one another?
Can the outward identity of a community allow someone outside of the community to participate and support the community?

These are just things I'm wondering about. My thoughts, of course, forthcoming.

the world sometimes seems so big, and sometimes so small.

how many people do we walk by, ignore, think are judging us, are even thinking about us?

i don't think about most people beyond a split second. think about their shoes or their coat or their hair or their glasses. that's probably all anyone thinks about me, right?


i haven't posted here in a long, long time. funny how we sit facing screens, thinking about ourselves, how we fit into worlds that we don't even go out to experience. or, if we do, we then have to sit down and write about it, think about it, disseminate meanings. are there always meanings?

I'm guilty.
I'm guilty for living the life I live, for having the things I have.
I'm as scared of global warming as most people, more than most people, probably.
But almost every day, you know, I get in a car, and I drive somewhere.
Somewhere that often is only a mile away from where I live.
I could get on my bike, put on my helmet, ride down there. Get a little sweaty. Would the world end?
Probably not.
But there's so much, I don't know, power in getting in a car and driving.
Sometimes I feel bad. Actually, most of the time.
At school...I don't drive at all. But I get in other people's cars and ride I guess. Which is better than me driving in circles by myself blasting music into oblivion I guess.
I guess. I guess.
I guess it's going to take the world starting to fall apart before I'll think that maybe I shouldn't waste things.

What I'm most guilty about though is how much pleasure I take out of sitting in the back seat of someone else's car with the music so loud you can't hear the people in the front seat and just looking out the window at the world. I love neon lights, streetlights, run-down buildings and trucks. I love seeing the world with that little edge of blur on it, where everything is moving, where everything has so much potential. When you get out of the car and go somewhere, some of the potential is realized and some of it isn't, it becomes limited. But in the car, it all can be anything I want it to be, or think it should be or could be or would be.

I think our world is ridiculously beautiful, even as parts of it are so, so ugly.
it's still beautiful.

I keep driving around and looking at all the advertisements everywhere. And they are everywhere. Billboards, signs, bumper stickers, benches, bus shelters, buildings, cars, trucks, people. Driving through any neighborhood I'm instantly immersed in whatever is popular or should be popular there—maybe twenty years ago. That's perhaps the most disturbing part to me, how old signs are just built over, the ink fading into the side of a building with a half-dressed woman proferring a beer plastered on top. I know the world isn't permanent, especially in the city, but it seems ridiculous that everything everywhere has to not only be impermanent but also meaningless. Does a candy bar really need to be everywhere, a beer, a gentleman's club, a law firm? In a life where everything that's beautiful is equally represented by something else that's expressly there to make me buy something, where is the meaning of anything? I feel like i'm living in a scary sci-fi movie set about fifty years from now.

i've got more on this but my brain is numb.