This is today.

It's raining outside. I've avoided getting caught in heavy rain twice today. I turn thirty in ten days. I played tennis with a friend today. I beat him in the first set. 6-4. It was the first time I beat him in a set. My serve was on. More on than usual, anyway. It's no longer raining. For the fiftieth time, I have resolved to listen to more music. I upgraded to Spotify premium, and made the extraordinary discovery that downloading playlists to play on my phone is the optimally efficient way (and legal to boot) to listen to pretty much whatever I want. So I went through my regular routine. Went to the billboard list. Noted all of the top-20 albums that are neither country nor metal, and downloaded them as playlists. So far I've listened to new albums by Cher, Avicii, and CHVRCHES. I looked up music podcasts, subscribed to two of them, and downloaded the albums that they're discussing this week. Subscribing to podcasts is an essential part of my process. Now I'm listening to Kanye. I downloaded Yeezus, as recommended by the internet, but my partner suggested that his 2010 My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was actually better. That was good enough reason to add it to my list. I have a list. It's very important to me to have a list. I don't have much trust in my first-order desires. They often lead me astray. My second-order desires are much more trustworthy, and they're equally intense. So my desire to listen to more music issued in my developing a strategy, a plan. That plan involves podcasts and playlists. Pretty soon it will probably involve a spreadsheet. I know how this goes, because it's what I did with movies. Three years ago I decided to see more movies. Now I've got a fairly elaborate system of spreadsheets that governs my movie going. I anticipate getting to the same place with music. I don't have an easy time forming opinions about music. I gather from listening to others that when they listen to music they experience a sort of perception, by which they are able to assess the goodness of what they're listening to. I rarely have any such experience when listening to music. That's been largely responsible for negligence in listening to new music for most of my life. For some reason this is not the experience I have when watching movies. I feel like it's more obvious that the movie I'm watching is good, or is not good. I could offer reasons, but where those reasons bottom out I am left with the persistent opinion that the movie is a good one. Not so with music. I think this might be a kind of sociopathy. I've been trying to figure out what's wrong with me. I'm cooking dinner for Emily tonight. I'm making mushroom stroganoff. It's vegan. Emily is vegan. Everything we make in this house is vegan. But sometimes I eat Dorritos. Or I order a pizza. Or I even will shamefully drive through a Wendy's. Because I am utterly disgusting. "The same people who try to blackball me forgot about two things: my black balls." Thus sayeth the Yeezus.