It's really frustrating, especially b/c it'll play a few CDs, but I have no idea why it chooses some CDs and rejects most others.  Maybe it's tired of all the shit I've been putting into it over the years and has decided to tell me what it likes.  It doesn't seem to like black people at all; B.I.G., 2Pac, and Foxy Brown all get rejected.  It does seem to enjoy both Garbage CDs, as well as the new Kid Rock CD I got.  But forget Fiona Apple.  It doesn't like Sublime anymore, either.  It's a Sony boombox  that I got right before I started UCLA, and is a pretty common make from the number of them I saw in other dorm rooms. But that was six years ago.  Now it's time is at an end.  The radio still works, but the tape decks don't dub very well at all, either. 

What's just as frustrating is that it will play some CDs, so when I go to Tower or Best Buy, I completely forget the problems I have with it and automatically assume that it'll play whatever I buy.  Then I get home and stick the CD in, and anxiously keep pressing the ">" button as I quietly say a prayer to a god that I don't believe in.  "Please work. Please God, play.  Please please...FUCK!" 

So I guess it's time for a new stereo, on top of a car and a computer.  Actually, the computer's CD-ROM drive could double for a stereo for the short term.  Then I'd be like all the cool computer geeks who have $500 speakers for their PC and insist on blasting Metallica or NWA out of it, as if a $2000 Dell was the medium James Hetfield or Dr. Dre envisioned their music to emanate from.  For that matter,  I doubt it was what Michael Dell intended when he was putting PCs together in his UT dorm room. 

(Y'know, somehow I get the feeling that the whole Dell/dorm room thing is just something that he exaggerates to impress gullible media types and clients.  Sorta like former Blue Jays' manager  Tim Johnson telling his players that he was some kind of Vietnam war hero, whereas the most action he actually did see was sticking his finger up ass and smelling it.)

I have a lot of bad habits.  One of them is my single-mindedness about certain things, where I'll delve into doing some esoteric and pointless project for hours.  Naturally, it mustn't turn out to prove useful in anyway.  Another, more commonly displayed habit, is my inability to say "No" to people.  That's both a blessing and a curse at my job -- a blessing b/c everyone except the rest of the library staff seems to believe I'm a great worker, and a curse b/c I inevitably end up taking on too much work so that my other duties suffer.  (OK, maybe "duties" is too strong of a word for what I do.  It conveys some sense of importance. "Tasks" is more appropriate.) 

Anyhow, yesterday I offered to help Akiyo out with some work, b/c she was dead tired from getting no sleep and she got bum rushed with requests at the end of the day.  So she passes along some request from a paralegal that she had no idea how to handle, and neither did I, as it turns out.  Rather than bore myself recounting the details of what the paralegal wanted, I'll just tell you that I stayed late, missed my appointment with my psychiatrist, missed the last train to get me to the bus in time, and produced absolutely nothing helpful for the paralegal.  I was on the phone with customer support for a legal database for forty minutes (they didn't have any idea, either), and Akiyo was e-mailing me to tell me to drop it and go home.  But I felt bad for the paralegal after I said I'd do it, so I kept at it long enough to miss the above appointment and bus.  I was too depressed to even file overtime, so I just sat around and cranked out the largest e-mail I've ever written to someone. It was so fucking enormous that it exhausted Yahoo! Mail's maximum character length, and I had to finish it in a second e-mail.  I didn't even bother to file for overtime.

Hey, come to think of it, that e-mail is s further evidence of my single-mindedness. Damn!  Such reinforcing behavior, what a revelation. 

Anyhow, I paid $20 and took a taxi home from Norwalk.  I am a fucking moron.