if it makes me happy

Music. Give me feelings of quality, and I think it’s good. It's of my taste. My taste gives my ego something to identify with. When somebody else happens to independently derive a sense of uniqueness from shared taste in the same things as me, there’s a sense of kinship. But my taste isn't fixed, it's subject to my past, and I've seen it change as my circumstances change. Perhaps it was once less refined, but it was never better or worse. Things that once generated feelings of quality in me no longer do, they now seem shallow and juvenile, but the actual feelings of quality never changed. So if my taste isn’t fixed, what am I identifying with? Is the sense of kinship that comes from shared taste really that shallow?

Quality. If I get the perception of quality through the taste, even despite the taste, the sense of kinship remains and deepens. See the taste and notice that it does not accompany a genuine and independent appreciation of quality, and the sense of kinship evaporates. I’ve noticed that taste is where I see this pre-intellectual feeling that we sometimes call quality, that we sometimes call beauty, but that my taste is independent of quality itself.

And I’ve noticed that I often sound like a dork.

Anyway, I have a new hobby. Sina noticed that we shared a liking of Antony & the Johnsons, so he introduced me to a whole bunch of new bands that he thought I might like. Headphones have been wrapped around my ears since then, and now I’m all excited and enthusiastic and I’ve been compiling songs in ways that I think work really well and that help bring about this sense of quality/beauty/whatever you want to call it. It was all so cool that I decided to go and burn the music compilations on CD and make CD covers so I’m reminded of how nice the music is when I look at the covers and fun and yay.

Here’s one of my CD covers. I did the pictures at life drawing.


Here’s another one. The drawings are of a rabbit skull and the lotus carving that my grandma gave me. I thought they worked well with the folksy theme of the music.


The CD case that I used for that folk compilation was transparent, so I put lavender inside the edge of the case as added decoration. When I look at it I feel all nice and it reminds me of my grandma’s place and birds and trees and herbs and soil.