love is stupid

bleh

pax corde in meo vivet

cheesy 2008 wrap-up time.

i spent time yesterday reflecting on the past year, and overall i am quite pleased with the way it went. i became more comfortable with being and expressing the person i want to be, and i no longer feel the pressure to bend my personality to please the people around me. i am really happy with the person i am now (and, i think, always wanted to be), and i feel more confident and self-assured than i ever have. i am still pretty awkward and self-conscious, but much less so than i ever was before now.

i traveled around the country for two months, made new friends,  became closer with the ones i love (and got rid of the ones i didn’t), and, most importantly of all, reconnected with the person i love more dearly and unconditionally than most of the people in my family. i made a lot of mistakes, i had a few successes, and i learned more about the world and myself than i ever have.

i made a more significant personal investment in music this year, and, as corny as it sounds, i feel like that has really catalyzed all the events of this year. i got my music blog up and running, i saw a bunch of great shows and went to a couple festivals. music was (and will forever be) my sword and shield, map and compass, defense and offense.

i’m not going to make resolutions for 2009, because those types of things (exercise more, drink less, eat healthier, etc) are things that i constantly strive to be better at. instead, i’m going to set a few concrete goals for myself, so rather than have something to be constantly “working on” i will have specific things to be working toward.

i will make all As and Bs in school. this is an easy one. i am going to take school seriously this time around. i know what i want to study, i’m more self-disciplined and motivated than ever, and if i make all As and Bs, my grandfather will pay for my tuition.

i will travel somewhere i’ve never been before. i would prefer to see a new country, but at the minimum i want to go to a state i’ve never visited (and there aren’t many of those left!). i want to continue my commitment to traveling and seeing new places every year. i want this to be a perennial goal until the day i die. (side note: i am looking forward to our road trip this summer, charles!)

i will hit 20,000 songs total. my current total: 16,849. i acquired around 7,000 songs this past year, so 3,151 will be no sweat.

i will blog at least once a week. this includes both this site and the music blog. as long as i compose something for either site at least once a week, i’ll be ecstatic. this is a reasonable, productive goal.

i will get at least two tattoos. hopefully more, but two is my minimum. i have a few ideas floating around in my head, but this is the year that i get serious about my body art.

i will get a dog. i love my friends, and i love spending time with them, but i have been feeling extremely lonely. i’d like to say, “i will get a girlfriend,” but that’s something that will happen if it’s right. i don’t want to date someone just to meet an arbitrary goal. i think i’m going to get a bulldog, but i’m not totally sure yet. i just want to feel loved and needed (beyond just friendship), and i want something to snuggle with at night.

i will get to know seattle better. i know this one is kinda vague, but i want to branch out from capitol hill and downtown a little bit. i know next to nothing about the other neighborhoods in this city, and i want to get more familiar with a few of them. i also want to try new places here on the hill and get to know my own neighborhood a bit better, but it’s time to explore some new nooks and crannies.

overall, this was a good year, and 2009 has the potential to be even better. it won’t happen on its own, though. my fate rests on my own shoulders.

♥ peace lives in my heart.

sweet taboo, you are in rare form

i recently read an academic paper by james grimmelmann about facebook and how people’s privacy needs – both online and off – affect (or should) the way they utilize social networks (the article was specifically focused on facebook, but its broader implications applied to other sites like myspace, orkut, friendster, etc). in addition to its analysis specifically of issues directly relating to privacy concerns, he addresses the dissonance between how we socialize offline versus online, and he shows how this new form of online interation comes back down the wire like the lawnmower man to change our offline behavior.

one of the more interesting sections specifically discussed how we compartmentalize our friend groups and tailor different versions of our selves to the dynamics of each group. for example, i have one group of friends that is not college educated (which is not to say that they aren’t still incredibly bright), and their lives are mostly focused around work and the practicalities of living. their distractions typically involve the consumption of simple media (music, movies, games, tv) or partying. when i am with this group of friends, i emphasize the social aspects of my personality over the intellectual ones, and we talk about things like music and life’s hardships, or we gossip about the people we know and share scandalous stories; those sorts of things. another group of my friends is college educated, more or less financially stable, and although they do spend a lot of time working to support themselves, their frustrations with their jobs are not always a major topic of discussion, and when we hang out we generally relax and drink beer and sing karaoke, and our conversations typically gravitate toward our artistic and philosophical interests. the vocabulary i use with them is almost wholly different, because i am able to (and often have to) exercise it fully to express and discuss complex intellectual and philosophical subjects (whether we are discussing them seriously or just to be pedantically absurd). with the former friend group, using more (forgive me) urbane language makes me feel self-conscious, and discussing heavier philosophical topics makes me feel like i am coming off as an offensively pedantic asshole if they can’t engage in the conversation on equal footing.

so, neither of these personalities that i present to those two friend groups (and there are more than just these two, as with most people) is more or less genuine than the other; they are simply designed to more smoothly mesh with each group by emphasizing our similarities rather than creating social tension by indiscriminately presenting aspects of myself that they might not be able to relate to. as long as i’m not portraying characteristics of myself that are intentionally false – with the possible exception of the occasional “white lie” in order to avoid unnecessary conflict or drama – then there is nothing immoral or deceitful about this process. rather, it is a useful and necessary part of everyday social interaction.

what online networks like facebook do is reduce the structure of our entire social sphere into a singularity. facebook does not simply flatten our friend groups into horizontal equality, it destroys the barriers between them entirely, shuffling up the entire deck, as it were. since we are no longer able to differentiate our various “selves” as they are presented to their respective friend groups, we must consolidate all these various personae into a single “this is my best side” snapshot that will be palatable to all our friends, irrespective of which social cluster you affiliate them with. it homogenizes our personalities by forcing us to de-emphasize (or hide entirely) the aspects of our personality which some of our friends might find to be, at best, in conflict with their existing notions of who we are, or, at worst, distasteful and offensive, potentially even to the point of causing the entire friendship to unravel. in the more extreme cases, it can push what was previously a minor “white lie” into a more prominent place in how we present ourselves (or force us to fabricate new lies entirely) in order to more effectively cover our bases. this is the reason, for example, that one of my best friends will often delete from his facebook wall many of the (funny but harmless, i think) links i share with him, because he knows that if his “church friends” were to see them then they would judge him harshly for even being passively associated with their content.

unfortunately, it is the more “extreme” elements of our personalities which make us who we are and distinguish us from those around us. if we were all to homogenize our personalities in order to appease the expectations of all our friends, then we would all become collectively homogenous. BORING.

ok, so here is where i jump the rails and veer off the academic-y analysis of grimmelmann’s research and talk about its personal significance for me. i’m kinda hoping that most people stopped reading a paragraph or two ago (because, let’s face it, i don’t think any of my friends are actually that interested in hearing me lecture on the large-scale sociological implications of the motherfucking facebook). in grimmelmann’s paper, he references a paragraph from a book called “the presentation of self in everyday life” by erving goffmann. so, on a whim, i went to borders and bought it. even though it’s from 1959 (and a lot of his statements concerning social acceptability – particular with regards to women – are telling of the era  in which it was published), goffmann’s book still contains a lot of valuable, insightful explanations of the ways in which we collaboratively construct our personalities. he goes into painstaking detail to describe and analyze every minor element of the social ritual and, as the title naturally suggests, the “presentation of self.” i felt validated and normalized and, most of all, relieved to learn about the extreme degree to which everyone crafts their social personae to accentuate certain elements and obfuscate others – whether because of their moral or aesthetic value, because they are or aren’t similar or complementary to the qualities of the people to whom they are being presented, or for a myriad of other reasons. however, not everyone is fully conscious of this process of cherry-picking the qualities they want to present, and even those who are conscious of it are only so to varying degrees.

as for myself (i know, right? finally i’m getting to the point of all this…), i am perpetually trying to direct my energies toward fine-tuning my “social performance” (as goffmann calls it). i have spent countless hours looking at myself in the mirror, trying to determine how best to position my eyebrows when my face is “neutral” or precisely the best position in which to hold my lower jaw when i smile (and, further, how much of my teeth and gums i ought to reveal, and how much i should allow my eyes to squint, and, again, exactly how i should shape my eyebrows). who knew one guy could spend so much time worrying about consciously directing what should otherwise be subconscious control of the details of one’s facial expressions? when i have seen videos of myself talking casually, i’ve noticed that i tend to gesticulate awkwardly, and so i’ve taken great pains to try and make my gestures more masculine and subtle (and less floppy and spastic). i’m not quite there yet, but i’m still working on it.

but it’s more than just the ridiculous degree to which i try to sculpt the physical aspects of my performance; the real absurdity here is that i spend even more time on practicing conversations i haven’t yet had. i dread having significant conversations when i am unprepared, so i try to anticipate those moments and plan out the different things i might say (depending on all the possible permutations the conversation could have). if i make statment (”a”), then the other person might respond in one of three ways (”1,” “2,” or “3″). so for each of those different branches, i’ll try to formulate how i should proceed with the conversation (responses “1b,” “2b,” or “3b”), and so on, ad nauseum. typically, i will try to refine my responses so that, regardless of what the other person says, i will still ultimately be able to steer the conversation back into the comfort zone of one of my practiced responses. this sounds so unnecessarily contrived, but it all comes from the fear that if there is not some element of rote familiarity in what i want to say, then i will stutter and mis-speak and then i will never be able to recover and convey what i want to express. and, obviously, this comes from a severe lack of self-confidence (both in my ability to speak coherently when i am unprepared and in myself in general).

for the past several months, i have been feeling much happier and more self-assured, which makes it a little easier to be less self-conscious about presenting a “perfect” performance. the flip side of this, though, is that when i can no longer hide behind the excuse of “i’m not really feeling up to being in a relationship right now,” it makes it harder to ignore how lonely i actually am. unfortunately, that loneliness often leads to all that self-confidence quickly unravelling like a Weezerian sweater. i really can’t wait for school to start, so that i have a productive vein in which to channel my time and energy. without anything to do – and “nothing to do” is the name of the game when i am at my parents’ house in the middle of nowhere – i can’t help but dwell on and obsess over the problems i’m facing. i become, as someone put it, a “me monster,” and that is not what i want to be.

i’m not going to check facebook or myspace or twitter or google reader until i am back in seattle, in the hopes that this will help me to not think so much about seattle and the issues that await me there when i get back. i’m not exactly sure yet how i’m going to fill all this free time i’m going to have between now and saturday morning, but i’ll have to figure something out. i will probably do a lot of work on investigating potential research opportunities with UW. i’m also going to try and finish reading the books i bought. i guess i will probably blog a lot, too, if for no other reason than to get back into the habit of writing regularly.

and that’s the story of how it took me almost 1800 words to explain how neurotic i can be. the good news, though, is that i’m constantly getting better.

my favorite songs of 2008

okay, so, in preparation for creating our “best songs of 2008″ list for our website (thesynesthesiac.com), i came up with forty songs that i feel were among the best from 2008. i feel like there were a lot of good albums this year, although the “great” albums were pretty sparse. i’ve enjoyed getting the music website started, although it’s been a slow start thus far. hopefully we are starting to pick up steam, though. i want to maintain this recent surge in momentum.

without further ado, here is my list. let me know what you think.

Annuals – Around Your Neck
Basia Bulat – In the Night
Beach House – Some Things Last a Long Time
Ben Folds – You Don’t Know Me (feat. Regina Spektor)
Black Kids – I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You
Bowerbirds – In Our Talons
Cocoon – On My Way
Cut Copy – Hearts on Fire
Emancipator – Shook
Fleet Foxes – Mykonos
Flight of the Conchords – The Most Beautiful Girl (In the Room)
Frightened Rabbit – The Twist
Girl Talk – Set it Off
Grand Archives – Miniature Birds
Hercules and Love Affair – Time Will
Islands – The Arm
Janet Jackson – Rock With U
Jenny Lewis – Acid Tongue
The Kooks – Sway
Land of Talk – It’s Okay
The Last Shadow Puppets – Calm Like You
Late of the Pier – The Bears are Coming
The Little Ones – New Branches
Lykke Li – Dance, Dance, Dance
Mariah Carey – Touch My Body
The Mars Volta – Cavalettas
MGMT – Electric Feel
Milburn – Genius and the Tramp
The Mountain Goats – Sax Rohmer #1
Nas – Black President
Pacific – Sunset Blvd
Ratatat – Shempi
The Republic Tigers – The Nerve
Shearwater – Rooks
Sigur Ros – Gobbledigook
Teitur – Catherine the Waitress
The Ting Tings – Shut Up and Let Me Go
Tokyo Police Club – The Harrowing Adventures Of…
Vampire Weekend – Oxford Comma
We Are Scientists – After Hours

whew.

i slept so well last night

i went with rob and weldon to our favorite bar last night, and it was a really great time. rob called me right after i finished writing my blog post yesterday and asked if i wanted to go hang out with them, and it felt like providence. i have been pretty antisocial and kinda depressed for several days now, so this was really what i needed. it was nice to go hang out for several hours and just drink beer and chat. i love those kids so much, and i greatly value their advice and their friendship. it was also nice to get out of the echo chamber of my own head and talk to someone who can give me positive and negative feedback on everything. sometimes i get that feedback whether i want it or not, but i always appreciate hearing it.

one of the things we talked about (aside from all the crap i wrote about yesterday) was getting older and the implications of that. weldon is turning 25 in about 3 weeks, and i asked her if she was starting to hear the whispers of her biological clock yet. her response was that she knew on an intellectual level that she wanted to have kids someday, but she hadn’t yet had an emotional response to that idea. she doesn’t get the warm fuzzies around babies, so for her the idea of having kids is a very distant notion. i told her, much to her amusement, that i have had that “emotional response” to the idea of having kids since i was about 17, and while i know i’m not ready to have kids right now – mostly because i’m not ready to give up being selfish yet – i am so excited about the idea of someday being a father. i’m pretty sure i squealed with excitement when i was telling her this. her only advice was, “dude, you seriously need to get a puppy.” so, the more we talked about it (and rob and weldon and i have talked a lot over the past several months about different possibilities for sharing the responsibilities of dog ownership), i think we finally worked out a way that we can make it work where we all get what we want. i want a puppy who will sleep with me and keep me company when i’m alone, and rob wants a dog that he can take with him to the office during the day, and weldon just wants a puppy she can play with from time to time. once i get my school schedule figured out, i’m going to start taking serious steps toward making this happen.

tonight we’re going to do karaoke, and rob called “that girl” to invite her to join us. weldon is also inviting her friend ali too, so it should be a fun time with no pressure. things are already looking better.

in through the nose, out through the mouth – this time with feeling

i have been listening to a lot of new (to me) music lately, primarily consisting of teitur, shearwater, land of talk, ratatat, and some etta james for good measure. also, for various reasons, i have been spending a lot of time reflecting on, well, everything. what i want out of (and in my) life, what i don’t want (anymore), and what changes i need to make to my behavior to achieve these goals. i have been pretty brutally honest with myself, and it has been very sobering for me. my dreams have also been particularly vivid and frequently nightmarish. more frequently than usual i mean. all of these things are related.

i was definitely manic for a couple days there after learning that i’d been accepted to UW, but since then i have been crashing pretty hard. i am trying really hard to remember that elation i was feeling just a few days ago, but it’s almost like it was just another crazy dream i had. i am already second-guessing myself on what i really want to study, whether i really want to be back in school, whether i’ll actually have the resolve to stick it out this time. but what is the alternative? continuing to be a virtual hermit? my life as it is now is unsatisfying in the extreme, and consists primarily of distracting myself with pointless shit like video games and drinking. the more i recognize how boring and meaningless my life is right now, the more enthusiastically i pursue distraction from the burden of cognisance.

music is the only thing that i gain any real satisfaction from these days, although listening to music for hours on end still affords me plenty of opportunity to retreat into my own head. i remember my mom telling me once that i “shouldn’t listen to such sad music all the time.” she is certainly right that melancholy music only reinforces my melancholy moods, but i don’t have much interest in listening to happy music when i am down in the doldrums. the sunlight doesn’t really reach to the bottom of the ocean.

i have somewhat reverted to my old ways of becoming very quickly smitten with a girl, angstily pining for her for a week or so, and then re-resigning myself to the idea that i will probably be alone for a long, long time. i only ever seem to want the girls i couldn’t possibly be with, usually either because i am probably not their type (which i think is typically code for “not attractive enough”), or because they are already in a relationship (or not interested in being in any relationship). i am continually reassuring myself that i am happy being single right now, but this is not actually the case. i’m not really looking for any sort of hardcore commitment at this point, but it would definitely be nice to have a companion, someone i can talk to and hang out with on a regular basis. maybe we could smooch from time to time? i dunno. mostly i just want to feel needed.

the latest girl i have become infatuated with recently got out of a fairly significant relationship, and is probably not very interested in dating anybody at the moment. even when she was still with that guy, i felt like maybe she was a little bit flirty with me? i am so horrible at judging that sort of stuff, though. when girls are interested in me, i am typically oblivious and assume they are just being friendly, but when girls i like (who don’t like me) are friendly to me, i (incorrectly) interpret their friendliness as romantic interest. anyway, i am trying to not be obnoxious with talking to her too much, especially while she is going through what appears to be a pretty rough break-up. we are supposedly going to go grab a beer sometime soon, but i’m not sure when (or if) that is going to happen. i recently came to the conclusion that i should be upfront about my intentions and tell her that i don’t really want to be “Just friends,” but that i find her to be very lovely and charming and interesting and i would hopefully like to date her sometime.

“i know it is probably way too soon to even consider it right now,” i’d say, “but if you don’t think we could ever be more than friends, then -” (here i would pause for just the right amount of time) “- i don’t know if we should hang out too much. i’m really not asking anything at this point -” (slight shrug with a half-apologetic smile) “- but i just wanted you to know how i felt?”

i don’t want to make it seem calculated, like i am trying to craft the most sincere/non-threatening/charming way of trying to get her to consider dating me. it’s just that i know that if i don’t practice it over and over in my head first, i’ll never be able to actually get it out.

i’m wondering if i really want (or could handle) a complicated relationship right now – and, guaranteed or your money back, this would definitely be a rocky way to begin a relationship. but i really need to stop avoiding situations which seem to be beyond my ability to predict how they will go. i am often not comfortable in unfamiliar, unpredictable situations, but i need to learn to be okay with going along for the ride even when i am not at the wheel.

ps – for about two seconds i was like, you know, i really shouldn’t post all this crap about that girl, because she would pretty quickly recognize i was talking about her. but then i remembered, oh yeah, i am probably wrong about her being interested in me, so i’m pretty sure she will never actually read this. although maybe i am wrong about being wrong? i guess that might be a positive thing in itself?

politics

i hate politics. i really do. but the more i read about the two tickets, the more i like barack obama, and the more certain i become that i do not want john mccain and sarah palin to win. the “mavericky mavericks from mavericksville” have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not anti-establishment freethinkers with a progressive agenda, so much as they are ultraconservative, cronyistic more-of-the-sames who are also not afraid to piss off people across the full range of the political spectrum. if john mccain can barely even get his own party to support him in his campaign, how effective could he possibly be as president? blaahhh… i don’t have the interest in writing up some big critique of why mccain and palin are assholes who would drive the final nails in the coffin that dubya built, because you can read that in about a thousand different places. fortunately, mccain’s odds of winning aren’t looking good these days. the latest polls put obama in a solid lead of between 4 to 14 percent nationally (so basically 9%, ±5%). another thing that thrills me is that mccain only has a 3% lead over obama in georgia (mccain 49% vs obama 46%). georgia voted republican in 2000 and 2004, so hopefully this is the start of a trend back toward democratic values. i know my dad is going to say that obama is only doing so well in georgia because of “all the black people,” and that’s really the inspiration for writing this post. i don’t think that the majority of black voters are so simplistic in their politics as to pick obama just because he has the same color skin as they do, just as i also hope that the majority of white voters do not pick mccain along the same principles (or the obverse: that they would vote for mccain because they are voting against the black guy – which is what i’m sure my grandmother will be doing). however, just as i don’t want obama to win just because black voters turned out en masse to support “one of their own,” (and i hope my dad wouldn’t want mccain to win just because america has a bunch of racist white people), i’ll basically take an obama victory by any means necessary.

come on, black people. don’t you wish the national bird was a chicken instead of an eagle? we all know you love chicken. church’s chicken could become part of the department of agriculture or some shit. i don’t know. CHARLES YOU KNOW YOU LOVE THIS IDEA.

short update (10/21): as much as i love the irony of being called a “racist faggot” (i’m talking to you, lawrenceville), i’d just like to note that the last paragraph was a joke with my friend charles, who is black. racial humor is not inherently racist. kthxbye

the science of living

it is 6am and i have been awake for over an hour already and i don’t feel like using commas or anything today. i fell asleep with the tv on south park then lewis black was yelling about something then maybe i dreamed the rest because i’m pretty sure they don’t show stuff that scary on tv anymore. i woke up dreaming about being in a ladies’ exercise video and then realized it was because of the infomercial playing on the tv.

i broke my finger and now it’s in a plastic splint for the next two months and it is hard to use the computer because i can’t really type with my left hand anymore and it’s sad because the computer is my Favorite Thing. i can only use three fingers on that hand now (c’est forchette du jacque but it’s sad because the only person who knows what that means is no longer part of my life but still affects it) because two of them are locked up in the splint and one of those screams when i touch it. my finger is broken my finger is broken my finger is broken IT IS ALL I CAN THINK ABOUT and it is ruining everything.

i went to the psychiatrist and he seems to think that i might have ocd and instead of thinking oh god a new craziness oh god oh god when will this stop all i can think about is how i hate the term ocd because everyone is like “oh my god i am SO ocd” and they’re not because they don’t even realize what that means. i might punch the next person who says it. ATTENTION ASSHOLES YOU ARE NOT OCD JUST BECAUSE YOU LIKE THINGS A CERTAIN WAY. now i guess i get to be extra indignant about the misuse of the term ocd since oh my god i am SO ocd guys.

i am worried that i’m losing my grip. if i were more awake and also less serious i might make a joke here about how i am losing my grip because my finger is broken DO YOU GET IT. i once read a short story about the most ethical place in the universe (charles you know what’s up). it was a planet of creatures (called gammas or something stupid) who all had a common belief in reincarnation and the result was that everyone was kind to each other because that person could be your reincarnated great grandfather or because what if that’s what’s in store for you in your next life wouldn’t you want people to be nice to you. i think this whole moralistic system breaks down in practice though. if your life sucks and your society has an absolute belief in reincarnation HEY GUESS WHAT KILL YOURSELF AND TRY AGAIN LOSER. suicide rates would be out of control on the most moral planet in the universe. also assuming that the belief in reincarnation is the only real difference between us and them the author (actually i think he was primarily a philosopher) fails to account for how self-centered and short-sighted people are. bad shit could happen to anyone at any time in their life and yet this knowledge does not generally encourage empathy for our fellow dudes and ladies. SORRY PHILOSOPHER DUDE. i guess you should kill yourself and try again?

other things are on my mind like katie derthick being in seattle (yay) charles moving to seattle soon (yay) and going to monolith this weekend (you know) but part of my problem is that i keep too many things on my mind at once and then i can’t see through all the clutter. i started reading this book by david allen (getting things done) which is all about clearing your mind to boost productivity. part of the key to doing this is writing everything down on paper instead of trying to keep track of it in your head but then when i tried to do it i just started writing pages and pages and pages and never got anything done. it is so much easier to just hide under my pillow and sleep and have nightmares and not have to deal with doing things but i am not going to do it that way. not this time. no, sir.

the omnivore’s dilemma

i hate when people are cute and smile at me because inevitably i think things that turn out to be wrong, wrong, wrong.

always, always, always i am wrong.

drinking in the fortress of solitude.

apartments, sleep, and sanity (or lack thereof)

I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately, and when I do finally fall asleep, I wake up like a hundred times during the night, usually the direct result of having crazy-ass nightmares all the damned time. So, come morning, I have a really hard time getting out of bed, which means I waste like half my day just lying there with a pillow over my head trying to block out the thought that I should be doing something productive. Like finding an apartment or finding a job or applying to school or cleaning my room, etc, etc, ad infinitum.

I have been in Seattle for almost a full year now, and I have still yet to find doctors here. That is something that is going to change and SOON. I need to find an internist, a dentist, and (perhaps most importantly) a psychiatrist. Being proactive about maintaining my mental health is the Most Important Thing, because that is the linchpin upon which everything else relies.  When I get this crippling anxiety about leaving my apartment or using the telephone, it kind of makes it hard to function in a reasonable way. I definitely also need to start going to the gym again (which, again, requires me to not freak out at the idea of leaving my apartment), because I have been eating SO MUCH (and moving SO LITTLE) that I am fatter than I have ever been in my life. Well, not counting when I was a baby, because holy CRAP I was like the fattest baby ever.

On a positive note (because I do not want to become a Dour Dora): one thing that I’ve been enjoying this summer is working on my website, The Synesthesiac. It’s a music blog where my friends and I share music and associated words and images. I just wish I could be more disciplined about updating regularly. I’ll never build a solid readership unless we can get to where we post at least once a week. I’m enjoying learning about PHP and CSS (as well as the maintenance of running my own WordPress install) on the backend, and it’s been a great motivator for seeking out new music that I can share with others. I hope you’ll check it out, give the songs a listen, and maybe spread the word about us to your friends.