• Prefuse 73 – One Word Extinguisher
• Dolores O’Riordan – Are You Listening?
• Girl Talk – Feed The Animals

Feed the Animals makes me happy. It’s fun trying to pick out all of the songs he mixes, although the vulgarity actually gets to me after a while. I picked O’Riordan’s album because I had a hankering for her voice. Instead of getting an album by The Cranberries, I noticed her solo album and went for that instead. It’s pretty good. I think the lyrics are a little weak in the first few songs, but I love her voice.

One Word Extinguisher is pretty good, too. I was looking at his page on Last.fm, and someone posted something about the album being #2 on the top 100 albums of this decade. I mean, it’s a good album, but not THAT good. And definitely not ahead of Kid A. The list also has an LCD Soundsystem album as number one, which I definitely don’t agree with. So I’m not sure how much stock to put in that list.

This weekend I spent some time alone on purpose for a change. I realized for the past couple of weeks I had been frantically trying to spend time with people. I stopped and took a breath and told myself I don’t have to hang out with people all the time to feel good about myself. It helped. I felt good about just saying no to a couple of social gatherings. My anxiety level from last week went down.

I treated myself to the Prince of Persia pack from Steam and started playing the first game. It’s fun. It’s been a while since I’ve really played a video game that wasn’t online.

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 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.

But I’ll do my best, heh. At the risk of sounding emo.

I think the best way to describe how I feel at times is hopelessness. I lose hope in myself and my situation.

I’ve been struggling to understand myself and to ween myself off too much dependence on people. It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes it gets to the point where I wonder if I’m better off just not having friends at all. It just seems easier to give it all up and hide. It’s way harder trying to reconcile my feelings with some semblance of logic that explains them.

I have never been able to clearly define my need for social interaction. Instead, I follow my feelings. I feel the need to be with my friends, so I seek them out. Maybe it’s the basic human need to improve oneself. Maybe it’s curiosity. Maybe it’s because God just designed us to be this way, to work together to make life worth living. Maybe I’m just over-thinking it.

I try to understand my feelings. That’s how I function. I feel, then I try to figure out why I feel that way. Sometimes I don’t do a very good job.

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.

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.

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.

Pride is my enemy. I’m prideful about my abilities. I hate attention seeking behavior. I hate it when people show off to get noticed. I want to get attention by not being an attention seeker. I want to hide.

Cowboy gave a little mini concert here for practice reasons. I wanted to support him, but I didn’t want to hang around all the people that came whom I didn’t know. I didn’t want to introduce myself, or anyone to introduce themselves to me. I want to be invisible.

Music is hard. Musicians like attention. I wish I could be a musician and not care about the attention. I don’t know if that’s even possible. I wish I loved playing music so much that I didn’t care about the other stuff.

Sometimes I’m so desperate to prove someone wrong that I make shaky claims myself. Then I look like a fool when I’m proven wrong.

Night.

Belmont’s fall graduation ceremony was last night, and a group of us went to support Nate. We were easily the most obnoxious people there. Take that, Dr. Fischer. Tonight we had a cookout with Nate’s family, and we swapped Ye Olde Pembroke stories.

We have so many stories. Every time we tell a story, the better it gets. Some of our stories are legend now, at least to me. It’s important, telling stories.

During my first year at Belmont, the year that was one of the most difficult years of my life, the year I started clawing my way out of depression, the people I latched onto were Brian and Teri. I looked up to them. I needed their approval. Then I found out that I can get that approval from myself, and that’s all I need. Sometimes, though, I still find myself latching. People that I view as strong. It sneaks up on me. Before I know it I find myself putting too much stock in their opinions of me, and I forget to be myself.

It’s a dangerous business, making yourself vulnerable. I’ve often wished I didn’t need other people. It would be so much easier to not open myself up. Or would it? In my heart I know that it’d be harder. That doesn’t make me stop occasionally wishing otherwise.

In the end, pain is what makes me remember that I’m alive. I’ve struggled to get where I am today; struggled hard. When I’m comfortable, I lose vigilance. My subconscious is like a car; I just keep truckin’ until something goes wrong. That’s when I notice it. The longer I ignore a problem, the more emotionally fucked I am when it catches up to me. Better to go ahead and deal with it sooner than later, right? I get tired of psychoanalyzing myself all the time.

I just bought Maggie Sansone’s Mist and Stone album. Cowboy let me borrow it years ago, but I lost my copy. I was listening to another one of her albums, and I decided I needed some hammer dulcimer songs that were a bit less cheerful. Yeah, I guess that makes me emo.

With Stuffy and Joey’s help, I got the beer bottled. We tasted the uncarbonated beer, and it was pretty good. I’m looking forward to drinking it 10 days from now.

My co-worker Cole offered me a free ticket to Kentucky Kingdom for next weekend. It should be fun, and hopefully I’ll come back with my feet intact. Awful story.

I think I might try to get in touch with Brian, since he lives near there, and stay an extra night to visit. I haven’t seen him in a while.

I’ve only got a couple of days left before the fifth Harry Potter movie comes out, and I’ve still got half the book to re-read before then. I might have to spend a couple of hours tomorrow reading it. I’m looking forward to the new movie all the same.

This morning I bought Thom Yorke‘s solo album from iTunes. It’s alright. The first few songs are good, but I don’t really like the later songs as much.

Nate and I pwnd Burly today. Dag.