I'm feeling kind of melancholy and reflective.. just got back from nightmeal at India Garden.. I had another migraine today.. they are, fortunately, getting less frequent, I think, but they're still worth several hours of a painful cousin to sleep. My brain always feels kind of 'dry' before and after them, as it does now. Anyhow, back to the melancholy.. I decided to rotate my CD collection in my car, and pulled out an old CD by Don McLean that I have.. I got it ages ago because I liked the clever wordplay of the song "On the Amazon", which I heard on the radio in middle school. It turned out to be a good album -- far better than one would naturally expect from the author of "American Pie".. one of the songs, "Oh What a Shame" is a song that, like "Memory" from Cats, always puts me in a particular mood. It's about when the closest personal ties and promises in life end up breaking, and lonely reminiscence over that. It's strange.. all these things, these gardens of yesterday we wander through, the stubs of plants we loved that we can still touch.. How it feels to think of the people, the two chosen, the three lovers, the friends.. a beautiful web without spiders.. I miss them... quite seperately, I hope for something new, with the shattered bird perhaps, or someone I have not yet met. R had an insight yesterday evening that still strikes me, in response to a revelation I put to her that I had not told to another.. The things I want in a relationship are complex -- I need a warm person who is guarded to the world like I am. I need someone who has the fear and need for contact, the struggling urges.. to be happy. That's not common.

I also poked around, and found that TMBG has a new album coming out soon, and has some things I didn't know about available online-only. Some of it reminds me of the "old sound" of TMBG, and so I dropped some more money.. This is another bad month for money :) New DSL, the timing of auto insurance payments, and other fun.. still, it's really not that bad. I'm putting more time into researching ethical investing. After a brief look into Islamic investing, while I think the ethics involved in Islamic investing, from avoiding ethically problematic areas to avoiding interest, are quite good, perhaps better than those involved in more vanilla ethical investing, I'm not comfortable with the idea that they likely will prefer investment into companies that are religiously tied or populated by muslims. I requested information instead from a group called Domini, a nonreligious American ethical investment group.

I've decided to stop pining for a compatible iPod, and instead get a 2nd-gen Neuros. It plays ogg files, has a builtin recorder that can make MP3s, and in general seems cooler. I was thinking about the Neuros some time back, but forgot about it somehow. I think Apple captured my brain.. they do make cool, nice-looking stuff, but it's easy to forget that there are other people who make nice products. I kept on comparing the iPod to crappy products like the current-generation Rio, which was dumb. Anyhow, I don't know if I want to order the Neuros now (I have decided for certain I want one, and it's probably ok to go over how much I like to spend in a month to do so if I'm going to get it sooner or later anyhow) or wait for next month. It amuses me also that the highest capacity NeurosII has a bit more disk on it than my laptop does. It's certainly sufficient to hold my entire music collection and then some.