This post is more personal than most of the stuff I write here. It's an experiment. So skip it entirely, or bear with me for a couple of minutes.

Seriously, don't read any further until the song has started.

Shawn Rameshwar came up to Austin this weekend. I always enjoy his company. He should write music reviews for a magazine. His verbosity respects no syntactic or semantic boundaries. He rants about black helicopters, the "square worms" crawling in the fabric of his cubicle partition, and then compares the lack of dynamic variation in my recordings to ordering a Belgian waffle and scraping off all the toppings with a spoon before you eat it. All in the same breath.

Shawn and I sat down in the garage with a mic, no plan, a bass, no song ideas, and a guitar. I hit the "record" button and out popped the song you should be listening to right now. It's like a soundtrack to this post. If I were more ambitious I'd just make a powerpoint presentation out of it so I could get the timing just right. There should be a way to blog with sound, images and written word. I heard David Byrne does something like that with powerpoint.

But I'm not doing any powerpoint tonight; I'm not ambitious. Those words came out of my mouth yesterday. Probably not the best thing to say at the time, but hey.

I went back to the garage later that evening to record the synthesizer track. I think it completely changes the mood of the song. It goes from somber to sort of bittersweet, then light and energetic as the pace quickens. It's lost and lethargic. Then it's peppy and driven. It's not done yet either. Shawn and I started on a third chapter to the song, but couldn't get the transition worked out. It's certainly not a masterpiece or even complete, but I thought it would go really well with this post.

To me, the song feels like looking back on a really terrible part of my life for the umpteenth time, and all of a sudden realizing that I'm actually comfortable with what used to be unacceptable. I can drop the awful, dead emotional weight. Bad stuff happens for no reason, and trying to find a reason just drags the anxiety out even longer.

There's more about music and how it makes people feel further down this post. It's an idea Alex and I came up with the other night.

I'm guessing you're somewhere close to the middle of the song at this point. The phone ringing was completely accidental. It's my new camera phone. I took this picture of Alex with it later that night:

He's had a much worse year than I have, but he's consistently upbeat and never ceases to impress me with his creative abilities. He got back into painting recently. He's pretty good. His roommate found some paintings he'd started several years ago (she didn't know he painted them) and decorated the kitchen with them while he was at work. She unintentionally woke that back up, and it's all for the better. Little decisions that don't seem important at the time, like putting an ad in Craiglist for a roommate, can turn out to be major changes in your life. The frustrating part is that you'll only see it in hindsight. His roommate is moving to San Francisco, which will be sad. I agree with John: she doesn't belong in Austin. It's nice that she's here with us now though.

Oh yeah, the photo: the ice maker went crazy and filled up the freezer with ice. Every time someone would open it, an avalanche of ice would tumble out onto the floor. It happened so much I got used to the sound of it. I finally got sick of it that night and fixed it. All the extra ice still had to be disposed of though, so I tried to carry hand full after hand full over to the sink where it could melt without making a mess. I gave up on the sink idea after I dropped a lot the ice cubes, so I just started sloppily digging the ice directly out onto the kitchen floor. When it was all out of the freezer, I grabbed a broom and started sweeping the ice out the back door. It was just such a strange thing to be doing, me sweeping all this ice out of the kitchen into the back yard. In January. So we took pictures.

There was a lot more ice than what you see in these photos. I didn't think to take a picture until it was almost all gone.

After the ice was out the door, Alex and I jammed for about an hour and then listened to a mix CD he made. It's a masterpiece. We listened to it start to finish. His commentary would make a great addition to the CD, actually. Kind of like the director's commentary track on a DVD. Now that the song's probably over, here's the idea I mentioned previously: A mix CD called Guilty Pleasures. It's friends of ours discussing songs they would consider to be Guilty Pleaures- with the songs themselves in the background. I don't know who's going to go along with it but we're inviting a lot of people to pony up and talk about why they secretly like Justin Timberlake, with Justin Timberlake playing in the background.

While on the subject of music and how it affects people's emotions, I got to thinking about how I was feeling at this time last year. I was angry and frustrated about something, which isn't all that unusual I suppose. What was different was that I said some things that I really shouldn't have. Normally I don't express much emotion. I don't emote well.

My roommate took this photo. I asked her for a copy of it about a year ago, but never told her why. She was surprised when I told her I framed it. My dog bit her just days after she moved in. She was breaking up a fight between my dog and her dog, and my dog bit both of her hands in the process. Don't worry, I took her to the doctor and she recovered.

This situation has continued to be kind of tense for me, but we're getting along. I still feel horrible about the dog bite. I also felt like she might secretly resent me, but chose to live here just because she needed a place to stay. I happened to have a vacant room and I needed a roommate. As much as I wanted it to be one of those small choices that turns out to grow into major changes, on the surface it looked more like a simple matter of convenience.

Lately I've been feeling a lot of surface tension- not just with her but with other people I'm close to, both in my personal and professional life. It's a one-sided perception of conflict that I'm not sure exists for the other person. That in itself can create a real conflict just by my seemingly strange actions. I don't emote well, and that adds to the problem. It's not paranoia either; it's always fairly justified based on past events but my cynicism gets the best of me. I tend to go with the negative interpretation, but it's usually not the case in reality.

My new year's resolution last year was to be more positive and more deliberate whenever I speak or act. It's something I need to improve on. But you can't improve what you can't manage, and you can't manage what you can't measure, and you can't measure what you don't record.

This year's resolution is to hit the Record button more often.