The accusation that people are now "unplugging from the world" with iPods is bullshit. So everyone JUST started ignoring everyone else on the street in the city and on the train now that they've gotten iPods? The idea is ridiculous. Big cities, especially in the fast-paced capitalist north, have be alienating and alienated for years. I for one never used to go around making conversation with people before and it is no different now. If it wasn't headphones, it was a book, or the window, or the floor.

iPods aren't supporting unplugging, but rather being selectively plugged in to what you wish. I in fact would be more apt to strike up a conversation either with someone else at a moment when I wasn't listening to my music as usual, because the contrast would make me feel much *more* plugged in when I had my headphones off. My iPod augments my mundane daily experience, elevating the routine to the extraordinary, oftentimes causing me even to smile out of enjoyment at those whose gaze I otherwise would be avoiding like the plague.

There is a curious dichotomy of the juxtaposition of time as linear and time as partitioned and chunked- i have lived continuously and changed gradually as me throughout life to who i am now, and yet i seem very dissimilar from portions of myself at previous snippets of my life, almost as if it wasnt me or didnt happen, even though i have those memories, and know that they are more than Matrix-esque conjure...ments of my brain. Those memories are part of me and have formed who I am, and yet I could not imagine myself who I am now living in the position of me in high school, grade school, or as a child. I dont feel like any of those former images of me and yet I do remember being that person. And even though I have changed so drastically over the course of the various chunks of my life, I can never remember a moment or even short period of my life where I really changed much. Yet here I am and in the future will be, never really changing but always ending up changed.

Its weird to think that, while college life seemed normal, it was anything but, and the close proximity I had with my friends then will never again be replicated. Friends that I lived across from the hall with, ate meals with, studied with, some I speak to once a month or barely at all. Interesting then that we still and may always feel like we know each other, because ten or twenty years down the road, our lives will be so different and we will have changed so drastically that you wonder if we really know each other at all, and yet in ways we have not changed at all and still know each other perfectly. Down the road, we are both a shadow of our former selves and yet still completely that person that once was. And that leads me to my next entry...

I can't explain why, but I think the moments I am most attracted to someone is when I really see their indivdual humanity and fallibility. Seeing their flaws, insecurities, weaknesses- a time when you see someone angry, frustrated, depressed, laughing, or crying, really makes apparent the common link between you and them as a human being, exposes ways that they are just like you in ways they may not have wanted to admit, and you may not have wanted to admit either.

why can you only get tuna in a can? is all other fish too good to be in a can? how about some delicious bass? and is anyone else disgusted by the tuna thats in oil? why the HELL would you want it in oil?? oil?!?

all this garbage about listening to your iPod all the time damaging your hearing- I don't hear anyone wondering if answering the phone all day working customer service damages your hearing.

You know when you think about it, there's not so much that separates us from animals, chimps for example. Raise a child in the wild, and once they pass that critical malleable brain age, they can no longer learn sophisticated spoken language or socio-cultural norms and behaviors. It is then only really the *potential* that humans possess to become something more than animal, that separates us from then. Would a child raised in the wild then still have a soul, though he may operate only on primitive instinctual *thought*, if it can be called that? It is said that language almost defines thought because it provides an avenue for expression of fundamental otherwise inexpressible feelings. Thus what thought does a child raised in the wild really even have? What in that child can said to be *human" that he still possesses and shares with us? Yes I like using *s on occasion.

The more you look at it, the more its hard to determine what really is the basis of your own personality. How can you really define yourself as a person unique from anyone else? When I sneeze like my dad, laugh like my grandfather and at least four of my friends, and use a conglomeration of phrases, sayings, facial expressions, and humor gleaned and gathered from a lifetime of social interactions with friends and family alike, where is all that is ME? I think the only thing I can claim as truly possibly unique is only my re-interpretation of things, my own personal spin, the way I collect all these things and rearrange them within my personality as I see fit and reflective of myself as a person. Its not any one or many of these things that are "me" but rather what I do with them- linguistically speaking then I suppose my personality is more manifested by verbs and adjectives really than nouns per se...