Day 143

Listening to: Priscilla Ahn, "Lullaby." I have no idea how big she is but it's about time one of those tall, slim, cute, clear and pretty voiced Hapas hit it big. She seems like a good candidate.

I don't know how I'm so late on the last.fm wagon (i'm here). Ameer kept telling me it was better than Pandora, at least as far as their selection. I listened but didn't hear. While I can't say that I like last.fm better, the tracking and charting functions are awesome. It scrobbled my iTunes and came up with my recent top ten most popular artists.

Jason Mraz. Girl Talk. Adele. Jonathan Larson (Rent). Mariah Carey. Brandi Carlile. Feist. Andrew Bird. Lauryn Hill. Amy Winehouse.

Sitting just outside the top ten at number eleven? Yanni. That would be embarassing but I've never hid my Yanni love. Plus I'm always up late, what the hell else am I going to listen to in the middle of the night? Music is moods, you can't crank up rap at 3am when the rest of the world is mellow and asleep. But I'm surprised that hip hop has fallen by the wayside in my listening habits. Only Lauryn, The Roots, and Digable Planets are represented anywhere significantly. Everything else is singer songwriters (mostly female) and, well, white people.

I recently created a mixtape of stuff I've been listening to (track listing). I used my patented mixtape formula and I hate to boast but it's pretty damn good. The track I built it all around was Tegan and Sara's "I Was Married." It is the first definitive mixtape (as in the tracks and orders can not change) I've made that's not soul or hip hop though. I feel like this all means something but I'm not sure what it is. My musical tastes have been the same for so long that this swing toward guitar driven softy music must be significant. Actually I hope it's significant because like Obama said, we need change. Or at least I do. It occurred to me yesterday that Obama and Oprah now rule the world. Hypothetically a good thing?

A friend has been listening to a lot of Dashboard Confessional recently. It's been making him emotional. Or maybe the other way around. I'm not a Dashboard listener so I'm not sure if the music makes the mood or if it's something you seek out when you're down, like Portishead. When I'm down I seek out a bed. Nothing makes me forget my problems more than sleep. Of course, I also sleep a lot when I'm not down, so it's hard to tell the difference.

This same friend broached the idea of rating his daily moods, in the morning and the night, on a numerical scale. After a few weeks, you could then chart it out and start to look for trends and reasons. This is a great idea and one used in therapy and such I'd imagine. My problem is most of my days tend to be the same. I'm not a very emotionally up and down person. Six, six, seven, six, five, seven, seven. That's what my line would look like. There's no excitement there, no big thrills and spills.

Maybe I should be paying attention more to the nuances of my moods. I feel like life is more exciting when you can swing wildly from like a two to an eight. Then again, that might just be a bit too dramatic for my weak heart. In other news, I've been sucking down cigarettes this week. I have no idea what's going on but I'm going to run out of gloves at this rate.

"Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go I wanna be sedated
Nothin' to do and no where to go-o-oh I wanna be sedated
Just get me to the airport put me on a plane
Hurry hurry hurry before I go insane
I can't control my fingers I can't control my brain"
-Ramones, I Wanna Be Sedated-