Tuesday was my birthday. It was a pretty good one. I did a lot of my favorite things: took a half day from work, threw frisbee in the park, ate chinese with friends, watched anime, and played ultimate frisbee pickup. It was good.

My sister gave me some iTunes credit, and I spent it this morning. I got some Autechre, which was way overdue. Also, iTunes finally got Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, which I pretty much had to get, since I lost my CD long ago (if I ever had one, I can’t remember). To balance all the techno, I tried something new and got Sylvie Lewis’s latest album, Translations. It’s good so far. She’s a bit Ditty Bops-ish, which is of course how I found out about her. More jazzy, though.

I also discovered that iTunes started adding tax to album sales. That made me a bit sad.

I finally caught up on a bit of queued work yesterday. It’s good to not have a bunch of things begging for my attention for a change.

I was about to write a moody post about how hard it is to be me sometimes, but that’s kind of impossible right now. Thanks to The Ditty Bops.

I gave a presentation to most of the department today, and afterwards I was pretty much spent. I left work early and came home to veg out. After a couple of hours I went outside to have a smoke, and then I went back in for my laptop and came back outside. I decided to check out the Ditty Bops website to see if there was any news about their next album, and lo and behold, they came out with a new one last month!

I bought it on iTunes immediately, and now I’m listening to it. It’s just about impossible to be angsty when listening to them.

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Played ultimate frisbee pick-up with the Belmont folks tonight for the first time in a couple of months. It was pretty awesome. On one play though, my foot nailed the back of someone’s heel. A couple of my toes are still swollen. The guy I was guarding said he thought I almost broke the skin on his heel.

I feel out of place sometimes hanging out with those guys. They’re all great, but they’re in college. They’re at a place in life that I was in over two years ago, and that’s not my place anymore. Part of me really wants to try to fit in their group, but I know I could only fit in so much. It wouldn’t be the same.

And I don’t need it to be. College was awesome, but it’s over.

I did some things today that I’m kind of embarrassed about.

On another note, I got the Radiohead In Rainbows box set in the mail today! I had forgotten that it was coming soon. It’s pretty cool.

During a toast at the rehearsal dinner for Ginger’s wedding, Ginger said that a relationship is like an organism on its own. It grows and changes. That is truth. My friendships have changed a good deal since I graduated. It’s been extremely taxing at times.

I think that my reliance on my friendships might be unhealthy.

Cowboy got a new job at Belmont. It pays great, but his hours are at night, which means when he starts working I won’t see him very much anymore. That means that I’ll be at home by myself a lot more often. I’ve been thinking about moving out on my own for a little while, and this sort of gives me a lot bigger reason. If I’m going to be by myself at home a lot anyway, I might as well start thinking about getting my own place.

Part of me is terrified to get my own place, but I think it might be good for me. Maybe it’s time for me to start leaning on my own self-esteem again a bit instead of relying on my friends so much. It’s been nearly 5 years since I started healing from depression. Maybe the next step in my personal growth can’t happen until I start trusting myself a bit more.

God worked a miracle in my dad. We found out about it last Friday. Pretty amazing. My sister wrote about it here.

I went to the percussions ensemble concert at Belmont last night. It was pretty good. The last song pretty much blew me away. There were drum set solos by Zoro and Derico Watson. Awesome.

I took a day off for the first time in a while and drove to NC for my Dad’s birthday. We played golf and DDR and smoked hookah. It was fun.

Before the trip I spent more credit card reward points to get 100 songs. I got some Eames Era, which is cool except that all their songs sound pretty similar. I got the first Jamiroquai album, which pretty much kicks ass. I also got some Thievery Corporation, Air, Paul van Dyk, and Opeth.

On the way home I listened to The Infinite Mind, a program on NPR. Tonight’s episode was about money, how we think about it and whether or not it makes people happy. It was pretty interesting. Jim Cramer was a guest on the show. He talked about how his obsession with money used to consume him. There was also a economical psychologist who had some interesting things to say, like how people don’t think about the actual empirical value of money, but just of how much of it they have. For example, he said that people don’t get upset when they only get a 3% annual salary raise and that year’s inflation goes up by 5%, but if you cut their salary by 2% when there is no inflation, they get upset.

I still think of embarrassing shit I did years ago. I laugh at it to make myself feel better.