One of the ways my angsty teenage years manifested was that I got really into metal. I was never into the aesthetics of the genre, but I really liked the sound of it. Today I couldn't name half the bands I used to love, but I do still enjoy listening to Dance Gavin Dance, particularly Happiness.

I remember in college, I was pulling an all nighter with a project team getting all our documents ready to submit to NASA for our novel satellite idea (long story, maybe I'll write a blog post about that competition someday...), and we were hella loopy at like 3 or 4 in the morning. I was listening to Happiness because I needed something high energy to keep me going. One of our avionics guys, this like cool, aloof type, noticed the album art on my laptop screen and gave me this impressed nod like "Oh, you know DGD? Nice." Y'all. You know those compliments that stick with you the rest of your life? This guy thinking I had good taste in music was one of those moments for me, and I still think about it and feel cool every time I listen to them.