The little iPod auto kit I have for my car busted last week (the plastic casing on the end of the cable split open and the wires started fraying, thus leaving the iPod unable to connect with the auxiliary audio input in my car - the aux input being a nice feature on the Mazda3). I ordered another auto kit - the exact same thing - from J&R Music World via Amazon. It arrived today, but what was in the package was NOT what I received last time. It lacks the second cable that leads into the AUX jack, so someone somewhere screwed up. Either at Belkin or at J&R.

So that sucks. I’ve already spent over a week without good music in my car, and I’m not about to spend hours burning CDs. I sent a detailed email to the folks at J&R and asked them how to resolve this, going so far as to provide them with the order information from the last time I ordered this exact item… a mere four months ago in May. We shall see. It was packaged in one of those impossible to open blister packs and I had to essentially destroy the package to get inside and find out the cable wasn’t there. Ugh.

What also sucks is how busy I was today and how busy I’ll be tomorrow. I don’t want to dwell on it. I ate lunch at my desk in under 5 minutes. It was that kind of day. That’s something I can normally handle, but my emotional immune system is down already from feeling stressed over the upset in my home life, over finances and thinking about impending apartment-hunting, impending responsibility for being at my friends’ side during the birth of their child (which is not bad stress, but I feel the pressure now - she could go at any moment!), and feeling generally lost in terms of some large scale changes that have been taking place lately and how those have affected my life. Sigh.

When I get on this roll, the negative thoughts just start going and building on each other to almost laughable proportions. I’m unable to laugh at them for a long time, but for the present I have to take myself aside and say, “All right. STOP IT. Just STOP IT. RIGHT NOW. Today was a good Flickr day. 54 views, bitch!”

I do that. Except for the last part about Flickr. I was just throwing that in for lame comic effect. The rest of it - the “STOP IT” part? I do that.

Today’s negative thoughts included one particularly lengthy and insane meditation (I have to note that it’s insane before I start typing it) on how/why it is that so many of my acquaintances and friends are attractive, wondering if it’s possible that they’re my friends and keep me around because having me around heightens their attractiveness even more… for the contrast I provide. I proceeded to decide (here’s where I get really horrible and insane) that liking me or enjoying my company has nothing to do with it because I tend to be a miserable wretch about 56% of the time (down from 78% this time last year and 100% the year before) so it must be because I serve some purpose or provide some purely utilitarian function, whether it’s my plainness and non-threatening nature, my random knowledge, my general reliability or the fact that I’m not pure evil.

Ah, well. Re-hashing this is fruitless and quite silly. But the good thing is that it’s out of my head. I can read it and recognize just how redonkulous it is, then pick up a book and let it all go… with a big old sigh and an “ADIOS!”