My fancy new headphones keep cutting in and out, exactly like the old style wired headphones would do when one of my many Walkman (Walkmen?) were on their last legs because the jack was wearing out.

This has me in such an agitated state that it makes me want to hit somebody, preferably someone responsible for this situation.

I mean, what the proverbial fuck? How can this be happening to me again? All I wanted was to be able to groove to my tunes while I get from Point A to Point B. Why is that such a hard thing for me to achieve?

I have an experiment I plan to do where I connect the headphones to my other tablet to see if it’s the originating station’s fault, or the receiving.

If it’s the originating, that’s bad but I can deal with it. I was thinking of getting a new tablet anywhere, or if not, at least a dedicated MP3 player.

One with a display, though. None of that iPod Nano bullshit.

But if it’s the receiving end, in other words my fancy schmancy new $70 headphones, heads are going to roll. The literature on the things says it has a range of 30 feet.

That should handle the distance between my ears and my pocket just fine.

I wouldn’t be nearly this upset if it didn’t involve my music. My tunes, man. I get really emotional about my music. Having something happen while I am listening to my music is extremely traumatic to me. Music is inherently based on maintaining flow, and to have that shattered not just once but over and over in a random way in the span of seconds is like torture to me and my poor nervous system.

The distress is heightened by what happened over the course of last week. I had been wanting to listen to music on the way to and from school all week. But either it would be raining, or the tablet I use for mp3’s wouldn’t be charged up, or the headphones themselves would have lost their charge, or I would be all set to do it then forget to take either tablet or headphones with me.

And that’s a kind of torture too.

But I figured I had it sussed today. Everything was charged, I had both halves of the equation with me, it wasn’t raining, and I was only going one block to my pharmacy to get my meds.

But no, the goddamned thing started to cut in and out, a little at first, and then more and more, exactly like what would happen in my Walkman days. So it’s not just torture, it’s progressive torture, as if it was designed specifically to break me.

This is the sort of thing that reinforces my impression that life is hard on us sensitive artistic types in ways regular people could not possibly understand. Normal people would not be nearly as upset by this situation as I am because they don’t connect with music on a deep emotional level like I do.

It’s the most right-brained thing I am into. And I need that kind of thing. Us overly cerebral types really need something that bypasses our overweaning superegos and connects with our emotions directly, and mess with them if it is needed.

We need something to run the icy blockade and bring badly needed supplies to our besieged hearts.

Plus, of course, I am still fretful and anxious about the whole new computer thing. That already has me on a state of heightened emotional amplitude. Plus I do have some caffeine in my veins.

If I am going to keep drinking Diet Coke, I am going to want to learn to keep the extra energy from turning into anxiety. I really want it to actually lift my mood. That would be way, way better.

But right now, my mood is still too damned heavy.

I have done some other online shopping lately too. I ordered some expensive fat-guy sneakers. $160, and that was on sale. But hopefully these will at least be able to bear my weight without flattening. They might even let me walk comfortably and without pain.

It’s a dream worth paying for.

I have also ordered two pairs of fat-guy pants from the Mr. Big And Tall website. That was not at all fun. It is incredibly depressing to find out that even in a store dedicated to serving the overweight, you are too fat for most of the clothing.

Most of their jeans only went up to 48 inch waists. That’s almost a foot too short for me. I am starting to think that my realistic weight loss goal should be less “fat” to “skinny” and more “gigantic freak of nature” to “regular sized freak of nature”.

Oh well. Two more pairs of jeans are wending their way to me. That’s the important part. I will then have four, and that will be more better than have two, like I do now.

Having only two means I do laundry every other day, sometimes more, and that makes me nervous that I will wear them out with overwashing and then have none.

It is a severe liability to be without pants in these modern times if you are a dude.

The last thing I am going to order (that I know of) is a wallet. Mine is slowly and gracefully falling apart, and seeing as I have had it for around twenty years, its retirement is long overdue.

I am bracing myself for option paralysis when I go to make the purchase though. There’s a lot of types of wallet out there and my needs are strictly functional. I am tempted to get one of those “magic wallets” I see on TV that say they can hold all your cash and change and cards and get no bigger than a deck of cards. I am dying to know if they can live up to that claim.

But it’s probably bullshit. I bet you can do that with any wallet if everything in it is super organized. And I ain’t got time for that shit.

Ain’t nobody got time for that shit.

Well that’s all my aggravation for today, folks. Thanks for reading.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just finished watching Avengers : Age of Ultron. It’s pretty good.

Had some real dramatic heft to it, which is good. A lot of modern superhero movies don’t move me, and if a movie doesn’t move me, the best it can hope for is to amuse or entertain me. And that means there is no chance of the movie being anything better than “okay” in my books.

But apart from all the bang clang boom business^[1], there were some very good performances and a script that made me feel for the heroes, and the villain as well.

Ah, the villain. Ultron. That’s my one and only major beef with the movie. Its version of Ultron was far, far too human. Comic Ultron is the ultimate inhuman adversary, brilliant and completely ruthless, not to mention nigh-indestructible due to being made of an adamantium/vibranium allow. All that made him absolutely terrifying. He’s like the Terminator crossed with Mister Freeze to the power of Brainiac. Like the Terminator, Ultron has no doubt, no hesitation, no pain, no weakness.

And every time you defeat him, he comes back stronger.

But movie Ultron, with the voice of James Spader, was just some guy, ya know? Some Hollywood guy who does stunts or owns a gym or is someone’s personal trainer. His motives are unclear and he is never given a real personality. He wants to slam a meteor into the world to force humanity to evolve (totally not how it works), or just to kill everybody, or maybe he just hates Tony Stark, but maybe he is Tony Stark in a sense. It’s all poorly defined.

And the Ultron of the comics is one of the top villains on planet Earth. And also, because of how perfectly scary he is, one of the coolest. The movie version didn’t frighten me at all.

He should have had a voice that sent chills up your spine because of how cold and devoid of emotion it was. It should have been the voice of a sociopathic serial killer, not some Southern Californian douche.

Ultron deserved better. He didn’t even get the Age promised him in the title.

Other than that, though, everyone was cool. Hawkeye was given a secret wife and kids, which is out of character, but his actual personality is an asshole^[2] , so I will let it slide. They did a good job with Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. They don’t look like they do in the comics, but they got their personalities and relationship right, and that’s more important.

The only way to get a superhero movie in which everyone looks like they do in the comic would be to make it fully animated, and while I am all for that, it’s probably not going to happen.

The CGI for the Hulk made him look a lot more like Mark Ruffalo than in the first flick. Black Widow is, well, Scarlett Johanson, a incredibly beautiful woman with enough talent that you can plausibly claim to have cast her on that basis. Captain America is done perfectly, except for maybe being a little too flippant. Robert Downey Junior continues to be a very good Tony Stark. Not exactly like the comic one, but close enough. They are both egotistical, highly driven, incredibly intelligent, inclined to take matters into their own hands, and somewhat obnoxious.

The comic version is just a little slicker and suaver about it.

My favorite, though, was The Vision. He was always a favorite of mine in the comics, and they got him right in the movie. Specifically, they got how The Vision, being an artificially intelligent robot but also a good guy, is incredibly noble and pure and good. You can totally see what the Scarlet Witch sees in him. He loves humanity in its totality and treasures our frailty and flaws as what makes us human.

How can you not love that? He’s the perfect humanist.

Still no sign of my new computer. Grr. Wannit. In order to contain my anxiety and neurosis, I sent them an email asking if there was any problem, even though they have one more day (Monday, sigh) on their projected lead time for assembling and testing my new PC.

I just had to do it. I was going nuts. The anticipation is driving me crazy. It’s like being a kid on Xmas Eve, except you don’t know when Santa will arrive.

“I guess he’s not coming tonight, Little Timmy. Maybe tomorrow night. Maybe not. ”

I’ve always been prone to over-excitement. I have mentioned before how when I was a kid, I would get so excited about something I was anticipating that I would get nauseous. I eventually learned not to let it get that bad, but I am still like that at heart.

And that would be fine if it wasn’t for the uncertainty. If I knew it would be ready on such and such a date, I would calm right down and wait. I am very good at waiting when the end point is known.

But when it isn’t, I have to constantly fight my anxieties and nervous temperament in order to maintain any semblance of emotional balance.

Maybe I should lay off the Diet Coke until it arrives.

Nah. I don’t want to end up sleepy and headachey. Damn you, caffeine addiction!

I feel stupid for having forgotten to stop and pick up my psych meds on the way home from school today. I am going to have to go get them filled at Shopper’s tomorrow.

Luckily, tomorrow night is the first meeting of the revive (by moi) FRED, so I will be out and about anyhow.

Feels weird to be unmedicated. Luckily, I usually have one day’s grace period before it starts having a noticeable effect, and I have only missed one day.

Well, that’s it from me tonight folks. Wish me luck on the computer thang.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.