10/20/01--Music's return

   After a decent but unspectacular few days, I decided to throw myself back into the music cataloguing project. A whopping 19 albums got added this time: every album that I own by the twin British "head" bands, Portis and Radio; a few noteworthy videogame soundtracks consisting of Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid, Gitaroo-Man, Dance Dance Revolution 3rd Mix, and Space Channel 5; and a few other random albums that have been in heavy rotation in my changer recently: Ben Folds Five, Gorillaz, Handsome Boy Modeling School, Moulin Rouge!, and Hysteric Blue. Enjoy! Next time I'll likely complete my They Might Be Giants lineup (which reminds me, I have a story to tell), and maybe add my 12-album R.E.M. collection.

   By the way, I know this index page is getting a little too long, but I don't really want to move things over to the archive for now because to do that would mean setting up some kind of monthly or quarterly division, and that would take more time than I'm ready to give at 1:20 a.m. Next time, probably. Maybe even tomorrow.

10/16/01--Anhedonia

   I wish I had friends. I wish I didn't owe it to the readers and staff of the GIA (literally owe it, after the $10000 donations) to pour every moment of my free time into the site, because no one else but Zak and Andrew will. I wish I had been able to do something more exciting on my birthday than laundry. As it stands, the only human contact I had today, on my 21st birthday, was asking two people I know over the phone if they wanted to do something and getting turned down both times.

   Sometimes I wonder if I'm somehow allergic to or just unable to really have fun. All the drunks screaming out in the dorm hallways, all the people who are involved in school activities, everyone I see walking across campus holding hands ... they know something I don't. I haven't enjoyed virtually any of my two-years-and-counting in college because the GIA eats up so much of my time ... and while it can, on occasion, be enjoyable, largely it's not either. It's just an obligation I can't shake. Every time I write a company soliciting ads to prolong the site is that much longer I'm dooming myself to work here. I want a life.

   Are you allowed to post things like this outside a LiveJournal? I hope I'm not breaking any angst rules here.

10/15/01--It's not my birthday

   It's not today. It's tomorrow!

09/15/01--Well ... how did I get here?

   I handed in an essay for my Japanese literature class a week ago today, which was in part written about Osamu Tezuka's World War II epic Adolf. It turns out I didn't have the slightest idea what the book was about until Tuesday, when it became blindingly clear.

   That other famed Japanese visualist Akira Kurosawa demolished the concept of absolute truth with his Rashomon, and Adolf is Tezuka's attempt to explode the concept of absolute justice. His central thesis is that justice, as commonly used, leads to the "egotism of the state," which is the true cause of global atrocities. His most potent example of the process comes near the end of the five-volume series, when the ex-SS officer Adolf Kaufmann joins the PLO and confronts Adolf Kaufmann, who has gone from a hero sheltering innocents in the war to a butcher murdering them in Lebanon. In his youth, Kaufmann killed Kamil's father; in the present day, Kamil wipes out Kaufmann's new Lebanese family. On the day when they meet one final time, each of them is fighting to bring the evil one to justice.

   Substitute America and the Middle East for Kaufmann and Kamil--put whoever you like in whichever position, the end result is the same--and you have the present day. Yes, what bin Laden did was inexcusable, yes, we have a legitimate grievance against him. But the situation is exactly the same from his point of view. We are both acting out of our own "egotism of the state," our own concepts of justice. Kamil and Kaufmann kept at each other until one of them was dead. Let's hope we don't make the same mistake.

   By the way, I was told to pass it on.