it is always possible that if you have an easy time controlling your emotions, that means you don't have that many of them to begin with. the cool thing about that is no one will ever know one way or the other. what it feels like to be other people.

have you ever wondered if people have a certain background amount of pain? and if you suddenly ended up inside someone else, maybe it would be horrible and you couldn't stand it. or, maybe it would be blissful.

the lesson is, as it always should be, don't ever pat yourself on the back too much. whoever you are. most of all myself. and you, too. you there in the back, by the projector.

every day i go to the deli, and there by the cash register, in a sparkling, well-lit display case with tasteful blue trim, is: a file of german chocolate cupcakes. the front one has a little pitchfork stuck in it with a sign on the end, proclaiming german chocolate $1.75. every day i think, i'd like one of those.

so i went and got one tonight. that is what being a grown-up is all about, right? you want a fucking cupcake, you get a fucking cupcake. it was good.

you know what? i typed my website's address into this thing, which rates it like it's a movie, and my website was rated G. it said it could only find one bad word, which was suicide. you fucking cunt. you goddam fucking cunt. i can't believe that. jesus.

suddenly it's hot and hazy. it was just winter. in summer you see more people, and maybe that makes it feel lonely. the isolation of winter is quite cozy.

the past few days i have been at the synchrotron light source at brookhaven national lab, trying to work in some time to shoot x-rays through some osmium and see what happens. there's an osmium-nitrogen bond at about 2.something angstroms, which i know excites everybody.

more importantly, i am on the extremely shitty brookhaven NSLS wireless internet, and have i-tunes open as is usual. hark, just now i noticed i was seeing one shared library on this network, which also means that that guy is now seeing a library known only as josh, which he might choose to look at. back at work, i am familiar with the names of the usual i-tunes sharers, and sometimes i look at them. i tried a new madonna record on one of them and discovered that madonna is far less interesting than i found her twenty years ago.

so this one mysterious one i'm getting here is rtower's music, and let's check him out. first thing in alphabetical order is 2pac, which does not give confidence. then 3 doors down--i don't know what that is. then ac/dc--this is getting warmer, and i feel like i might be in the parking lot in high school. okay. then we've got alison krauss, we're not out of the a's, and we realize he/she puts all his/her records on the computer. the beatles, bela fleck, blink 182--i have no idea what age this person is. less than 75. more than like 10. how's that for some serious science? i can give you that estimate. here's ludwig van beethoven! like four pages worth!

i haven't slept for a while, you must understand. this is around the clock stuff, but i do crash on the floor for a couple hours each night.

but anyway, it's now the time when we discuss our favorites. the pachelbel cannon? no, but maybe he's a wedding dj on the side. how about the barking dogs christmas song? yeah, that's cool. the golden girls theme. hey, that's good--reminds me i heard an interview with rue mcclanahan last week sometime. going from there we have suicide is painless, undoubtedly the best television theme of all time, and written by robert altman's ten year old son, if i'm not mistaken.

but, there is one track better than that. it is nine seconds long, and simply titled meow. that's the best one. it edges out the eight-second duck, based on the title. duck might have won, had it only been titled quack.

tired.

a guy across from me on the subway had on a baseball shirt that said "atlanta crackers." i thought this was genius--certainly a wry commentary on the atlanta braves. if native americans are going to be treated as a mascot, and if that's harmless, then why not white people, too? braves and crackers might not have equivalency, slurs qua slurs, but i still thought it was good in its subversive way.

but hark. it's a real baseball team. my knowledge is woefully inadequate.

it's hard to pack clothes for what you'll want to wear three days later. i brought shorts, and it's like fifty-something degrees in boston. it's fifty-something. is that normal? it's june or july or something. i mean, really.

i'm in boston, sitting on a futon, watching a kitty, who's watching me. see, she wants to jump up on me. i would like her to jump up on me, but there's the whole cat allergy thing. i make it a point not to be high maintenance, and i petted her for like half an hour, but now she needs to understand that cat and human touching time is over. perhaps she gets it.

for work, i'm in boston. i'm working with joe, and it turns out that he's a total punk rocker. like, i'm a sometime slam dancing motherfucker, as i've pointed out before, but joe has misfits posters from twenty years ago all over his house, and he just played me punk songs for two hours. the cat is looking at me, and this may be a strange business trip, but--i think all hosts should feel compelled to play me their favorite punk songs from here on out.

my time at my job is coming to an end. i know it is. the other day, O and i had a conversation we'd had before. at the time i didn't realize it, but we did.

see, O likes underground hip hop and rap music; and i, as a wannabe renaissance man, like to think that i do sometimes too, even though it's more of a wish than a reality. a couple years ago, a new record by the streets (here's a song) had just come out, and i asked O what he thought. we were in the lab at work. i said, do you know the streets? do you like that record? and O said, i think the guy's a good lyricist, but i don't like the way he sings.

so it's three years later, and once again it's just me and O in our lab, and someone is playing music off in the distance, but i can't make it out. O says, did you hear someone playing the streets? hey, do you like them? and i said, i like the songs, but i don't like the way the guy sings.

that's bookends, that's what that is. that's like we're living in a paul simon song, and side one begins and ends the same way, with the same refrain that also sounds like the intro. time to go. O and i will have more conversations about music, but we probably won't hit the exact same one another time. if infinite monkeys were typing music questions, like an infinity of pitchforks riboning off rolls of infinite paper, would they predict the same conversation once every year? every two? every five? we've finally hit shakespeare's works by accident. there it is.

but this week, the conversation had an extra part about the streets. i said, when i ran the marathon this last year, the guy from the streets was supposed to run it, too, but he tore a muscle and didn't. O said, heh, isn't he like a big crackhead or something? ha ha ha!