I honestly don't think anyone reads this thing, but, I'm going to do an update anyway.

Exams are creeping up. ugh - next topic.

I've been having fun exploring new music lately. I go through such phases. In the fall, I was going through a folk/country phase. Emmylou Harris, Allison Kraus and Union Station, Lucinda Williams, and the like. Now, however, I'm going through an indy phase. A lot of the stuff I'm stumbling on is pretty down-tempo, very mellow. I'm putting a lot of it in my "reading" playlist on my iPod. I've found Cat Power, Belle and Sebastian, and Broadcast, to name a few. Others that led me to these discoveries were Bright Eyes and Belly.

I started on this venture of finding "new" music when I discovered an iTunes Alternative radio station i liked. they played a lot of stuff that really intrigued me, and then i did some Amazon searches.

My partner used to dj and he knows soooo much stuff! When I told him of some of the music I stumbled upon, he went to his collection of 1000's of disks, and pulled out about 6 different artists -- some were the independent ventures of the band members of the bands that I had stumbled upon. Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donnelly are two. They used to be Belly. I think they were better when they were together.

So I'm finding all this music, and loading it onto the iPod (i get teh disks from my library, which has EVERYTHING!! it's a great metro-area network of about 75 libraries, and i cannot believe the breadth of music they have possession of!), but I'm not really spending too much time listening once I decide I want to capture it.

B/c I am listening to books! I keep doing books on disk, and really, it's starting to hurt me. I can't stop. And I can't read law school books while listening to a story!! I can read cases while listening to Yo La Tengo, but I can't read a case while hearing whether or not the aliens in Dean Koontz's "The Taking" will in fact destroy earth.

Now I'm listening to Jodi Piccoult's "Vanishing Acts." I have read every single book of hers, *except* the one about a child who is molested, b/c if I read that one, I'll spend the whole time putting my kids' faces on the child victim in the book. But I am enjoying Vanishing Acts. My favorite of hers may have been her last one, Sister's Keeper. I highly recommend it.

The Dean Koontz is a guilty pleasure. Before that, I read Chris Bohjalain (?) "Before You Know Kindness" and I liked that a lot.

The only other one I have checked out right now is Michael Moore's "Dude, Where's My Country?!" but I think I'm going to try really hard to be self-disciplined, and stick to music. For the sake of exams. When I'm listening to a book, I don't study. I stay up until 2 a.m., listening and playing MahJongg simultaneously. Then I'm tired, and I can't read the next day, either.

My kitten is in heat. And I'm irritated. When she is in heat, she is very annoying. And I am PMSing, so I want to kill her. Truly, I do. She makes this NOISE. It's like a whining purr. It won't stop. And my cat is a 5 year old boy-cat, and he has been fixed since he was 8 weeks old, and he looks at this miserable rolling-around-on-the-floor she-cat like she's from antoher planet. Then he slowly blinks, and goes into the other room to escape the racket. She is so confused. She keeps sticking her butt in his face. Every now and then, he'll "dominate" her - kind of pin her on the ground, and bite her kind of hard to pin her down. Not in a mean way, I think it kind of helps her. But that's as far as he's willing to go. She better get this taken care of before next month.

And that is today's randomness. Perhaps some more focused posts will follow.

posted by Zuska @ 12:08 PM 2 comments

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