My iPod has completely changed the way I listen to music. I love music, but I've never been a huge consumer of it. I have a small collection of CDs and I listen to the radio a lot. Before I purchased the iPod, I would pick a CD or two and listen to it/them until I got tired of it and then would listen to another one -- CDs would sit in the CD player sometimes for days, weeks.

But now that I have my entire collection on mypod, I often listen to it on shuffle. If I'm running, I listen to one of my playlists with fast, loud music on it, and if I'm in a particular mood, I listen to a particular album, but usually it's on shuffle. At first I loved it -- hearing songs I'd forgotten about or didn't even know I had. But a few months of that and I was bored with my collection. Sometimes I purposely don't use the iPod so that I can still be able to listen to it again.

So I've begun to consume a lot more music. Used CDs (because new CDs are horrendously expensive) when I'm not sure what I want and need to browse, but mostly using iTunes -- where music is often cheaper than buying new CDs and you get it immediately (well, almost immediately -- you still have to wait for all of it to download).

But I've also been thinking about how tied I am to iTunes. Which, of course, is exactly what Apple wants, right? I can't create a new playlist without iTunes, I can't add new music without iTunes. What good is my iPod when I don't have my mac near me? My mac is no longer my work computer so I don't have it with me at work on a daily basis so I've really begun to notice how useless the iPod is if I want to customize my music without iTunes. I could use it as a harddrive and muck with the files on there, but I can't play any of the music that's on there that's not in my iTunes library without having mypod attached to a computer. Clever, those Apple folks. And selfish, too.

Men love to call women evil. Treacherous vipers; evil snakes in the grass. And it used to really bother me; I dated a couple of guys in succession that used to say such things and I used to take it personally. A few years older, and I'm less sensitive about it. Why do they do it? From my own personal experience I can only conclude that deep seeded misogyny grows from betrayal, from having your heart maliciously torn apart, and your faith and trust in someone irrevocably and unequivocably destroyed. So much of ourselves are determined by the results of our relationships. How our parents treated us, how our boyfriends treated us, how strangers treat us. And how we interpret all those events.

I think misogyny grows from lack of good relationships with women even if your heart hasn't been torn asunder. Me? I used to think I had misogynistic tendencies. I thought women were vapid and shallow, concerned only with superficial things -- the status of the men they dated, clothes, shoes, makeup, perfect nails, perfect hair. Spending too much money and not thinking enough. I overheard a conversation in the bathroom today:

I just bought these pants a little while ago, but I already feel like they're going out of style!.

Oh no, I think those pants look great!

I used to despise it, but I never had a great relationship with my mother, wasn't close to my sister when I was younger, didn't ever really have many girlfriends -- all my friends were guys. And it wasn't until college that I started to meet women that I could even begin to respect. But they were very different from me, so it wasn't really until I moved to San Francisco four years ago that I began to make meaningful connections with women who were more like me, and to meet so many more women who I respect and admire greatly.

And it hasn't been until the last couple of years that I've gotten really comfortable about having feminine traits. Know what? I care about my clothes sometimes. I buy nice things, and sometimes spend too much money. I get my haircut with a stylist, I get pms and am cranky and emotional when I have my period. I wear high heels sometimes. All the girly things I used to hate being associated with, but now am mature enough to accept. I know the power of being a reasonably attractive woman, and I like it.

But I never use it to my advantage. I think little of women that do. And women can be vapid and shallow. Men can be, too. I've been listening to D12 lately, and I love it and I've been wondering why -- I should hate this shit. They called women bitches, they treat them like dirt, act like they're all stupid sluts. But I love it. And I think it's because I agree with them. There are women like that. But you can say the same about men. Women tend to sing about them differently -- aren't usually so crass and blatant about it.

I'm realizing that I'm not a misogynist and never was; I just really dislike certain types of people: closed and narrow minded, materialistic, selfish and superficial people who care about their own good and never mind anyone else's. The type of person that'll fuck you and leave you as soon as someone better comes along no matter how many times she said she loved you, would backstab you in a heartbeat to get what she wanted, sell her friends bad shit for profit, and use you for money, drugs, or prestige. Men or women; it's not the gender that matters.