>> I have more money in my checking account than I'm carrying in credit card debt. I am about to write a rent check that, for the first time, will be drawing completely on my own money. And, as of this afternoon, I have health insurance.

There's no getting around it: In the wake of my twenty-third birthday, I am finally, officially, a grown-up.

(Gifts of action figures and comic books still gratefully accepted, of course.)

>> Forgot to mention that I'm ducking down to Florida for the weekend, as I have tomorrow (Friday) off and I dunno when the next chance to visit my parents / soak up some sun / eat at Carrabba's will be. So, most likely there'll be blog silence. Three days is not an uncommon amount of time for this blog to be quiet lately, but this time there'll be a good reason for it.

And by the way, thank you to everybody who sent birthday wishes, they're much appreciated! I had an extremely low-key birthday, but it definitely didn't take the "lamest birthday ever" crown. That's still awarded to my 21st, which fell on a Sunday while I was in London and so every single remotely entertaining place in the city -- stores, cinemas, etc. -- closed early and I had absolutely nothing to do. I wound up eating McDonald's on a bench on Oxford Street, shaking my fists with wrath at the images of Pierce Brosnan that surrounded me. Don't ask, it was poor. (Although my sister was in town for the first half of the day, and that was nice.)

>> Sigh. I had Big Plans for Things To Write here tonight, but after I came home, made some scrambled eggs, played some Crystal Quest, and imported & tagged the five (!) albums I bought today (totalling eight discs!), all the energy and fight went out of me. And I probably won't have much time at the computer tomorrow, since it's my birthday and I am (hopefully) going out to dinner with Josh.

Speaking of importing and tagging albums, a lot of people have asked me recently if the Heavy Rotation sidebar is automated (through Movable Type or some other app) or done manually. Well, the sad fact is, it's done manually. And it takes a while and is kind of a pain in the ass. One of my Big Plans involves automating it sometime soon, or at least simplifying the process, and if I manage to do it in some particularly clever way then I'll post a How-To. But no, at the moment, I manually track down the album art and Amazon link (which, it bears noting, is an Associates link, so feel free to buy things after clicking on them, as it nets me free Amazon credit, which allows me to buy and recommend more music, which you click on etc. etc.), then I manually make the 80px squares, and then I add each one to the blog template. It sucks, but it's sort of worth it. Kind of. There are actually no commentaries up at the moment, because I got sick of them being unviewable in Firefox due to its stupid character limit for title tags. But commentary will hopefully return soonish, when I update the sidebar with the truly moronic number of albums I've bought recently.

>> Ah. There's nothing more satisfying than a Saturday afternoon spent cleaning and reorganizing one's bedroom. With the possible exception of a Sunday afternoon spent doing the same thing. Anyway, I've got new bookshelves, so all my graphic novels are happy, and I managed to pitch some unsightly and space-hogging cardboard boxes, so my inner interior decorator is happy. The one dark spot is that I still have an ugly, useless filing cabinet in my room that I don't have the key for. If I had the key, it would be a very useful filing cabinet (though still ugly), but I don't have it, and so it is just a large, grey, vaguely rusty waste of valuable space. Ick.

The craziest thing I did today was to set up my sister's Macintosh SE, which I adopted several months ago and didn't quite know what to do with. It's sitting on my desk now, and while it looks outrageously bad there (Sorry, vintage-freaks, old Macs are ugly), it does allow me to play Crystal Quest and Megaroids+ any time I want to (Unfortunately, I can't find the Shufflepuck Cafe disk). Part of the entire purpose of cleaning my room was to make it more streamlined and pleasant, and this bad boy is really fucking up my feng shui. But Crystal Quest! Crystal Quest! There's no other place in the apartment to set it up, though, so I'm either going to have to deal with it, or toss the poor boy to the curb. Sigh.

>> I'm sorry I haven't updated the Flickr photo in such a long time. It turns out that there was an unfortunate incident involving my camera and a quantity of spilled Coca-Cola, and that's left my picture-taking situation less than optimal. Thankfully, it's my birthday next week, so I may be able to talk myself (or, ideally, my parents) into buying a new camera.

Anyway. I'm all alone this weekend. The boy has family in town and the roommate's on spring break. There's nobody here but me, my takeout menus, and an ever-mounting impulse to sleep through the next forty-eight hours.

>> I wish I had more exciting stuff to blog about, but sadly, I don't. I'm still trying to find the proper balance among work, play, and completely zoning out and disconnecting from the world that will allow me to be a healthy, decently-adjusted individual. At the moment, I only do the first and third of those things, though I did go to a sissy middle-school sleepover party at Josh's this weekend. I'm also feeling a weird financial crunch; ironically, I have more money at the moment than I have in a long time, but I feel like I can't spend any of it until I've paid my next month's rent, which doesn't come up until March 31st. I don't know, it's crazy and stupid. I've got a tax refund and, apparently, this free iPod mini (which I should be able to flog off for a pleasantly unexpected sum) and all kinds of other stuff coming at me, and I still feel poor. This is undoubtedly just what it feels like to be completely in charge of my own financial destiny for the first time in my life; up until now, obviously, I'd been sponging off of my parents pretty severely, but with the new job comes the termination of that cozy, if humiliating, arrangement. Plus, it's compounded by my looking back over the laundry list of tiny luxuries that I told myself I'd get when I finally landed a job, and naturally realizing that I can't even sort of afford those wonderful things. Sigh.

Anyway, I'd be lying if I said I was 100% happy with the way things are going at the moment, though the job is still pretty damn good. (Tomorrow I'll hit the one-month mark in the position, which is astonishing -- it went by very fast!) I'm just sliding into the initial "difficult adjustment" period, and since I hate both difficulty and making any kind of adjustments,I'm understandably out of sorts. My apologies for this and any other corny nonsense that comes out of my keyboard in the forthcoming days / weeks... plus, my mood may improve if I can successfully land U2 tickets tomorrow morning, though my expectations are not particularly high.

>> So tonight I got the following e-mail:

Congratulations CHRIS CONROY at CHRIS[at]DOYOUFEELLOVED[dot]COM. You have just won an iPod mini from the Pepsi iTunes iPod Mini Sweepstakes! You can expect to receive your prize in the next 6-8 weeks. We are sending it to the address you've provided in your iTunes account. Thank you for participating in the Sweepsatkes!

The Pepsi-Cola Company

PepsiItunes@young-america.com

(I added the redacted "at" and "dot," it was normal in the message.)

Now it's fairly obvious to me that this is spam. There's no website at that "young-america" URL, let alone one linked to Pepsi. "Sweepstakes" is mispelled. And no promotion co-branded with Apple would ever allow "iTunes" to be capitalized as "Itunes", even in an e-mail address. But what the hell is the point of this spam? There's no phishing link to click, there's not even any images to load that would report back to the sender that I've read the message. Is this just some kind of mean prank thing? If you've got ideas or info, leave it in the comments, please...

>> Today on Angstident Prone I found this LJ-style iTunes library meme that he'd done and which I have also opted to do, because I like meaningless facts and because I felt like it. Click the "read more" link if you're interested...

How many total songs? 9,808.

Sort by song name:
First: "?", Outkast, Stankonia
Last: "Zurich Is Stained," Pavement, Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe

Sort by time:
Shortest: "Interlude: Let's Dance," Janet Jackson, Rhythm Nation 1814 (0:03)
Longest: "Alive 1997 (Live)," Daft Punk, Alive 1997 (45:31)

Sort by album:
First: ...Ziggy Stardust..., David Bowie (Which is just how I shortened the title. Otherwise, my first is ( ) by Sigur Ros, an album I actually hate).
Last: Zoovenir: A Tribute To U2, Various Artists (I only have one song from this, Automobile's excellent bossanova cover of "Party Girl").

Top Ten Most-Played songs:

1. JC Chasez, "All Day Long I Dream About Sex" (22)
2. Passengers, "Your Blue Room" (21)
3. The Twilight Singers, "Teenage Wristband" (20)
4. Scissor Sisters, "Comfortably Numb" (19)
5. 2 Many DJs, "No Fun / Push It" (16)
6. The Buzzcocks, "Ever Fallen In Love?" (16)
7. Kylie Minogue, "Slow" (16)
8. Liam Lynch, "United States Of Whatever" (16)
9. U2, "Mysterious Ways" (16)
10. Beyonce, "Crazy In Love (w/ Jay-Z)" (15)

Ten most recently-played songs (newest to oldest):

1. Depeche Mode, "Route 66 (Single Version)"
2. Kylie Minogue, "Tightrope"
3. Echo & The Bunnymen, "Lips Like Sugar"
4. Amerie, "1 Thing"
5. Doves, "Black & White Town"
6. New Order, "Krafty"
7. Stereophonics, "Dakota"
8. Ramones, "I Remember You"
9. Doves, "Ambition"
10. Doves, "Sky Starts Falling"

Find "sex;" how many songs show up? 91.
Find "death;" how many songs show up? 17.
Find "love;" how many songs show up? 596.

>> Wilmington, Delaware has been the bane of my existence lately. Creepily/coincidentally, ever since I re-watched an episode of The X-Files set there, I've been deluged in credit card applications, all of them originating from that hated city (which, it bears mentioning, I've never visited). Tonight, however, I finally got around to opting out of such spam mail permanently (via Lifehacker), so hopefully that flood of crap will be stemmed soon. I've got enough debt with just one credit card, thank you very much!

False alarm re: work, by the way, but it does look like it'll be super-busy for the next week or two. Hmmm.