Temps Perdu.

On a recent night drive along Highway 101 in San Francisco, the scent of skunk entered the car. I found myself actually breathing it in with some enjoyment, suddenly taken back in my mind to car rides with a childhood friend to the ski resort Wintergreen in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. That was probably the first time I learned about that phantom animal smell, weaving through unfamiliar woods in another family's car.

I had almost forgotten about Elizabeth Sharp. The brief tenure of our friendship, which began at Seven Locks Elementary School, ended when we went to different junior highs. But even though we never spoke after Seven Locks, she was one of my best friends when I was there.

We were 9 and then 10 years old. I don't remember a lot from this period, but here's what I do remember.

I remember using jars to catch fireflies in her yard. I remember stealing pennies from the wishing fountain at Wintergreen and thinking we were getting away with something big. I remember that she was a tomboy who wore a big watch and that her mom once said to me when Elizabeth wasn't around, "You're so graceful. I always wanted Elizabeth to be more graceful."

It turns out that am not graceful (even though I believed I was for many years because of that one comment), and Elizabeth wasn't either. She was gentle and loyal and had a broad, kind face. When my school friends decided that we each had to have a nickname that ended in the "ee" sound (Chrissie, Steffie, Bethie -- give me a break, it was fifth grade), we ended up calling her Lizard, because she just wasn't a Lizzie. She was Lizard, who always wore pants and never any makeup or girly things.

To address the obvious question: I have no idea whether she was inchoately gay. She could have been, but she could have just as easily been an inchoate nerd. Nobody's sexuality was in play here.

Here's the main thing: At one harrowing point around fifth grade, most of my friends turned on me. I forget why, and it doesn't matter, because you could find yourself the target of a "fight" as a girl in elementary school whether you were looking for one or not. In that milieu, any detail one collected about a classmate had a dual bonus: It could be counted toward intimacy, or toward a reserve of ammunition to be fired later.

For my friends at the time, Bloomingdale's was the only place to shop. Gloria Vanderbilt, Sassoon or Jordache jeans were all desirable, as were collared Polo tees and Izod. When I let slip that my mom bought my clothes at Marshalls, it was a critical error.

This error came back to haunt me one day at recess during The Walk. At some point my friends and I inaugurated the marginally rebellious practice of walking the perimeter of the sports field. This was a departure from the usual activities of playing on the jungle gym, kickball, jacks, clapsies, hopscotch, soccer, races, or any other sanctioned playground activity. We simply walked around the field, in groups of three to five, talking. In retrospect, it was haughty and exclusive. At the time, we thought it rather progressive.

When I ran afoul of my cool elementary friends, they decided the best way to torture me would be to shadow me on the playground walk with a chant: "LET'S go to MARSHALLS where THEY have gay CLOOOTHES," they sang in unison, skipping behind me. A good walk spoiled.

I tolerated this for a time (it felt like a week, but it was probably two days) before finally confronting my tormentors and telling them that if they only cared about what I wore, I didn't want them as my friends. That's what my mom had counselled me to say, and to my astonishment, it actually worked: the chanting stopped and my "friends" were restored, at least until we got into junior high.

Usually when I think of this story, the focus is on the chant and the unlikely triumph of my mom's wisdom. What gets short shrift is that there was someone walking with me on the playground while I was being tormented: Elizabeth. We pretended to walk as if it were a normal recess, as if there was not a group of girls skipping behind us singing derisively. "Just ignore them," Elizabeth said. She walked alongside me until it was over, and that mattered a lot. I wasn't alone.

I don't think the real force of that gesture hit me until some 27 years later in a San Francisco taxicab, when the random skunk scent brought back that memory of childhood loyalty. I don't see her on Google, so all I can do is send this shout-out. Thanks, Lizard.

Bodywork.

"I'm going to get a massage tonight with that guy at [redacted] Spa," someone in the office said last week.

I'm new there and didn't have any background on this comment, but I had been to this spa, and something about the way she said "that guy" triggered a memory.

"Which guy?" I said. "What's his name?"

After saying his name, her eyelids fluttered. "He gives the most sensual massage ever," she said.

I remembered coming home from my own experience with this same person a few months ago and feeling mostly relieved that we had been in a professional establishment and not, say, a dorm room. "It was fine... a little weird," I said afterward. "I got, I don't know, a vibe."

If I had to appear in court and testify against this man for giving an inappropriately sexual massage, I would undoubtedly lose, and therein lay his genius. "Most cues are nonverbal," someone said as I was describing it, and this guy was indeed a master at body language, from the sly way he smiled and made eye contact when he greeted me (he was extremely easy on the eyes) to the unconventional music he played in the massage room (Iron and Wine or Feist, instead of the usual canned, new-agey stuff) to the way he paused a little too long in front of me when we said goodbye at the end (the way I remember it, he said in a low voice, "Is there anything else I can do for you?" but that's just too porno-perfect to be accurate). In terms of the massage itself, he somehow managed to cling to the edge of actionable without going over it.

I think for many women (my office mate, for example), Mr. Lube represents a real find: a cute guy who spends an hour lavishing sensual attention on you, no strings attached. But for me, of course, it was too confusing to be purely pleasurable. I'm someone who gets significantly stressed out about whether to hug or kiss someone hello and/or goodbye, so this massage brought up a whole decision tree that I really have no business contemplating as a married person.

To be frank, it's not an interaction I'd have been any more at ease with as a single person. In terms of body language in a rubdown with a complete stranger, how could I ever manage to communicate over the din of whatever my outspoken veins, fat cells and clogged pores might have to share? That's why a straight, good-looking male is about the last person I want to see when I arrive for a massage. It's like trying to curl up for a nap with a can of Red Bull.

I had gotten the impression that Mr. Lube was willing to provide a lot more than Swedish massage, but for all I knew at the time, it was just item no. 5,236 in my log of drastically misread situations. Now here was my coworker, validating my impression! Everybody knows that if you have a vaguely formed notion and at least one person agrees with you, it is absolutely true!

I won't be going back to Mr. Lube anytime soon, but I'm not above extreme curiosity about my coworker's next encounter. Secretly, I want her to live the story of At First Sight, where Mira Sorvino goes to a resort and she's all overworked and stressed and then she gets Val Kilmer for a massage therapist, and he delivers this whole transcendent-yet-entirely-professional physical experience for her, which of course means that they have to have a relationship, and then she gets to have a massage therapist for a boyfriend, which means that not only do you get kick-ass massages like, all the time, but the sex is amazing, because what massage therapist is bad in bed? (There's also a whole plot about him being blind and regaining his sight and stuff, but that's sort of ancillary.)

Ah, sweet dreams, ladies everywhere, and good night.

Staged.

A few weeks ago, I sat behind a drum kit on the stage at the Blue Bear School of Music, which is housed in a stuffy enclave of San Francisco's Fort Mason. My audience was the school's director, who was evaluating my candidacy for the drummer slot in their Wednesday night Basic Rock and Blues band workshop.

He called me a few days later. "It looks like our Wednesday band is shaping up to be more.... intermediate," he told me on the phone a few days later. "We do have a band on Saturday afternoons at your skill level, if that would work for you." I was too beginner for a beginner class, it turns out.

"Do you need any singers for the Wednesday class?" I said.

That's how I came to be a lead singer in a temporary band that will have only one concert on Dec. 12, at a place called the Red Devil Lounge. Our drummer, who is 11 years old, exceeds my playing experience by four years. His dad, a talented musician named Aric who also happens to vaguely resemble Eric Clapton, is our lead guitarist.

Our bassist is a quiet high-school sophomore whose face is curtained by straight blond hair and typically teenaged skin, while our rhythm guitarist is a pale-denimed man in his early 40s, I'm guessing. Then there's me -- and our other singer, a buff, twentysomething showboat named Reuben.

Reuben actually swivels his hips when he sings "Use Me" by Bill Withers, one of his appointed song choices. He doesn't seem to get nervous about impromptu performing, really. "It's all stage time," he said in our first rehearsal. "I love that." He clearly loves to be up in front of people.

Reuben provides a nice counterpoint to my performance style, which is to hunch my shoulders as much as possible while looking at the floor and trying to steady the tremors -- hand, voice, whatever -- that plague me while I try to project my voice beyond the microphone stand.

It's a natural and logical assumption that most people who go out for a band or a singing group or any other kind of stage act actually enjoy putting themselves on display. I'm a serious approval addict, so I can't pretend that getting applause from people doesn't gratify me, but I really do not relish being on stage.

Whatever the opposite of "stage presence" is, I have it. In one college video, which my friends once replayed and mocked with gusto, I swiftly and ungracefully retreat from the microphone before the last syllable of my solo number is even out of my mouth. I always preferred the idea of being the backup singer, the ensemble player, the drummer -- someone who is part of the show, but not in the spotlight.

It all started with auditioning. In high school, I loved memorizing a monologue, learning a dance routine or practicing a song for the purpose of performing it exactly one time, as a test. I liked the camaraderie and nervousness and competition: Are you ready, how do you feel, how did you do, who made it? I liked seeing if my name was on the list or not, and usually managed not to stake much emotion on the results. After all, it was just a play or a show chorus or a pom squad -- and what would I have done with myself if I'd actually been talented enough to win a key role?

I went into the audition for my college a capella group with the same attitude, until I got in the room and the people there actually dared to suppose that I could be better than I believed I was. They challenged me, encouraged me, put me through the wringer and then, instead of putting me on a list, arrived at my dorm room en masse with booze and singing and hugs and raucousness.

Yes, it is dorky. It was still awesome and one of the best things that ever happened in my life. I don't think that anyone has had the luck and/or talent to be in University of Pennsylvania's Off the Beat (laugh it up) and managed to graduate without, for a moment, wishing that they could just be in that group for the rest of their lives. Some of us (Gabriel Mann, Goldspot, Vaeda, Larry Kraut) are honest-to-God serious, bitchin' musical commodities now. The rest of us live in professional shells while still craving that experience of making music, rehearsing, performing and touring with a family just as loving, maddening and dysfunctional as our blood relations.

I won't ever have my college experience again, and I know that. It's OK. You can be an 11-year-old son, a fortysomething dad, a sad-sack, a freak, a diamond-industry scion, a working-class butch lesbian, a grandmother from New Jersey, a bo-hunk, a nerd or milquetoast, and I will know you in a very specific way, which is that we once stood anxiously together in the wing of a dingy stage somewhere, we tested ourselves and briefly delighted peoople and ended the evening triumphant and best friends.

Christina 2.0

That was the subject line of the e-mail that my boss sent out last week, announcing that I had found a new job in a new field and was leaving in two weeks.

A few days before that, I'd had to interview someone who wanted to work for my future former employer. She was bright-eyed and eager and seemed impressed with everything about my job -- even my colorless, impersonal desk -- because it sat under the glow of the three letters printed on posterboard and attached to a concrete column in my office.

A few weeks before that, a guy wrote to me on my personal e-mail to say that he had found my address on the Web and wanted my advice because he wanted to find a job just like mine. I did the best I could to help him and the interviewee, not only because of their earnestness but because they represented the hopes I used to have. I remember being like them, wanting to work for a major news organization or media outlet and thinking it would be the greatest.

Now I've worked for at least three major media outlets, in a capacity I never could have forseen when I was in college. When I went from undergraduate school to the job market, the Web as we know it didn't even exist. How odd to find oneself earning a living from a word that had no meaning for you as a child. Even for me, a kid who got some tutoring in BASIC at 8 years old and grew up with video games, the evolution of the InterWebs was unforseeable and blindsiding in a way that was simultaneously exhilarating, perplexing and depressing.

The exhilarating and perplexing aspect of the World Wide Web Revolution was that it seemed as if our generation was being handed the chance to define something, to shape not only our individual jobs, but an entire medium. We were doing something unprecedented, or at least it seemed that way.

The depressing aspect came with the realization that the thing you built today might well be obsolete next year; that other generations often saw your work as either confusing, or unimportant, or both; and that when it came to content, much of what was being created actually was not unprecedented but rather quite similar, and often inferior, to its "old media" counterpart.

Still, getting into Web work put me in a relatively Good Position, as good as could be expected for a girl with nothing but an undergrad English degree and an average work ethic. I had some very cool experiences and got to work for at least one journalistically respectable outlet. So why wasn't I happier? Why was I always nosing around on job and career sites, looking for more?

It was a bit like dating: I'd have a shot with some guy, a good guy that many women would love to have, and I'd be sitting there trying to twist my mind around being particularly glad about it.

Most normal people in this situation think, "Oh well, I tried this [job, man, whatever] out and it wasn't for me. Time to move on." In self-esteem-challenged people such as myself, it evokes the response, "There must be something wrong with me if I'm not into this. After all, [company, man, whatever] was nice enough to like me -- I owe them something. Maybe I'll keep trying for a few months longer and see if I can become the right person to match this situation. Or better yet, why don't I find something that's slightly different but more or less the same, and torture myself with that for awhile?"

Ultimately, I never became that sought-after version of myself, the one who wanted to advance up the Web media ladder and have the company-issued Blackberry or "director" in my title. Instead, I got comfortable in my discomfort. For awhile, I stopped trying to imagine something else for myself. Whatever ambitions I had within my field atrophied completely. I was stuck.

Now I'm taking a pay cut (something, I feel compelled to say, that would be infinitely harder without being married to someone who is supportive and makes enough to float the difference) to go work for a tiny company that throws cooking parties. It has the potential to be fun, challenging, yummy, busy, social, frustrating, boring, disappointing, tiring. But the point is, it has potential. I've been separated from my own career for a long time now. It feels bittersweet, but I'm finally completing the divorce.

Views.

Two months ago, we left the Haight (the Hate) and moved into a new place at the very top of the Potrero Hill neighborhood, a strange confluence of the industrial (Anchor Brewing is down the street), the yuppie and the disadvantaged.

Not long after we moved in, I was sitting at a place nearby called the Thinker's Cafe (yeah, they sold me a beverage anyway) and overheard a middle-aged guy with a sweatered little dog and tinted shades approach two cops who were on their break at the next table.

"Hey, guys, I'm sorry to bother you, but I live over on 23rd and Missouri? And I was just wondering, those gunshots I hear? Where are they coming from?" The cops pointed toward the projects that are just down the hill from my place. "Oh! Okay, and should I bother calling the police?" the guy asked. Oh yes, the cops said politely, feel free to call us. Everyone went back to their lattes.

I didn't experience what the man was talking about until a weekend afternoon about a month later, when gunshots sounded outside our window. They were loud enough that I actually dove from the couch to the floor. A police car sped by shortly afterward, but nothing else came of it, that we know of. Pretty soon, it was back to joggers and couples on walks.

The first word that comes to mind describing this new setting is "bizarre," and our many windows offer ample opportunity to contemplate it. Directly behind us is a fire station, where we can hear the three-tone signal before a truck goes out and see them grilling dinner in the back. My husband likes to wave to the truck through our living room window as it leaves on its assignment. (We can't tell whether or not the firemen can see him, but it's comedy gold for me.)

Off to the northeast (top photo), we can glimpse the Bay and AT&T Stadium -- we had a nice view of the fireworks when Bonds hit his record-breaking homer this week. On the south side of the house is a concrete water treatment plant surrounded by a wall of lumpy, netting-covered earth. On the west side, there is a brand new modern home going up and another glimpse of a view (bottom photo) of the city. And to the north, right next door? You're looking at it, at left. That's the view of our next-door neighbor's yard.

The people who live there have been quite friendly, on the few occasions we've crossed paths. One afternoon, as we were standing at our door watching the cat explore his new outside territory, an elderly woman with missing teeth emerged from the screened-in porch. "You have a cat?" she said. "I wouldn't want the dog to get at him... I came here to give my grandson money to clean this mess up." She waved her hand across the yard, and we nodded vigorously. "It's especially not good for me. It's hard for me to get around," she said. We introduced ourselves and she went back inside the porch.

Later, we found out that the dog she mentioned had killed the previous tenant's cat. It was, we were told by our downstairs neighbor, "an ugly scene."

Despite the grandmother's intentions, the place remains as hazardous-looking as ever. I get a perverse pleasure from staring out the window at it, imagining what the inside must be like and projecting the reaction of the city officials who surely one day will have to inspect and condemn it. They'll walk through with flashlights and face masks, making world-weary jokes a la Law and Order: "Hey Murphy, got a trashcan?" or "Sheez, maybe the maid quit."

The older man who lives there kindly directed us to our place on Carolina Street when we went to see it for the first time. "Sorry to be blocking the sidewalk!" he and his pal said cheerfully, presiding over a pile of junk that perhaps had tried to escape from his house.

Our future home didn't look much better than his, at first: It was under renovation and completely in shambles, full of the tenant's poorly chosen stuff. The exterior remains nothing to write home about, the bathroom looks like it belongs in an elementary school and the kitchen counter is topped with a marbled perwinkle blue plastic that looks like it was installed at least 40 years ago.

Still, inexplicably, I became obsessed with getting in here. I had dreams about it, lost sleep waking up at 4:30 in the morning thinking about it. I drove by during the day, stalking it, both before and after we signed the lease. (Incidentally, have you ever had a song creep in on you and haunt you along with an idea, absolutely defining a moment in your life? For me, the song here was "Tel Que Tu Es".) The three weeks between seeing it and moving in seemed interminable.

We danced around after moving in, feeling like kings: a washing machine with no coin slot! A little office! A yard with a grill! "It's a real place," we said, perhaps overly grateful after years of living in cramped urban apartments with almost no amenities. I found it remarkable that most people you pass on the street in this part of town actually smile and say "hello," instead of "Spare any change for a beer?"

We're settled in, but living here still feels simultaneously like being on vacation and being in exile on a foreign planet. A whistling wind, along with views (just squint!) of the water and fog over the city, are punctuated by noise from the 53 bus line, the fire station, kids on their way to the neighborhood center down the street, hip-hop booming from beat-up cars, dressed-up old people on their way to Sunday church and white thirtysomethings walking their babies and dogs. It feels isolated, yet highly trafficked by a dozen intersecting microcosms.

The fact that one of those microcosms is a fire station led our renter's insurance company to bump the premium down. Fortunately for us, gunshots and killer dogs probably don't merit an adjustment.

The Anti-Blog.

Not too long ago, I was out to dinner with some friends and the subject of blogs came up. "Why would anybody have a blog? I mean, who has time for a blog? I would rather do other things," my friend said.

"Yeah, I don't get it. Does anyone read them?" the other person at the table said. They seemed genuinely mystified.

Somehow, this provoked very little embarassment or defensiveness on my part, maybe because I don't actively court an audience for this blog and thus do not get much of one. "I have a blog," I said, "But I can see what you're saying." We talked about the surfeit, surplus and superfluousness of all the bloggity-blogging out there.

Yes, I'm part of the problem. But even before that conversation occurred, I had been feeling less inspired to post here. Whether it's a temporary bout of ennui or something more lasting, I haven't felt a major urge to "share" anything lately. The other day I found myself searching my memory for some recent instance of entertainingly painful humanity, nagged by the fact that the blog slate was blank. I used to have a little list of topics in the hopper that I was excited to write about, but that had dried up.

"If you don't catalog yet another one of your crazy neurotic moments for public consumption, it's really no one's loss," I told myself. "Let it go..." And so I have. (That's the trouble with those Buddhist philosophy books I've been reading lately: Sometimes they can be a handy way to buttress one's own laziness.)

It seems I'm not alone in this blogging fatigue. The pbdotc says he "is tired of his own cringe-worthy insights about world affairs." And a top food blogger in San Francisco just wrote that she has lost her appetite for the pastime.

My appetite for reading blogs, on the other hand, has not diminished. I still faithfully visit my favorites, and still find new ones to appreciate. But between blogs, the rest of the Internets, magazines, books, regular radio, XM radio, Netflix, downloaded shows, streamed shows and -- oh yeah -- actual daily human interaction, sometimes the last thing I want to do is add another voice to the mix, especially when it's the internal one I listen to all damn day.

So is blogging fatigue really about getting tired of listening to oneself, or is it also a need to trim the fat from an overloaded media diet? Are you blogging? Is your head still in the game, are you focused? Or are you drifting away from the chatter?

Friends with Money.

Back in 2001, my News Corporation subsidiary employer collapsed our office and laid off a large percentage of the staff, including myself. (That was in January. Boy, what a great New York year lay ahead!)

I got decent severance and set out to support myself in Manhattan for the first time since acquiring my sturdy Murdoch paycheck four years previously. It wasn't pretty: My rent got jacked up, so I had to leave my Upper Upper West Side apartment and move into one half the size down in Murray Hill. Then I proceeded to face a string of either freelance or staff jobs that paid just barely enough and, frankly, sucked. Unable to pay for my nights out anymore, but unwilling to give them up, I started to carry a credit-card balance for the first time.

During this time, I would hear about fellow ex-employees. One was spotted lounging at a Greenwich Village cafe with friends. Did he have a job yet? A year later, no. Another one was splitting his time between New York and Florida, where he had just bought a house. Then there was the Fabulous Couple: Friends of my cousin and just over 30, like me, they owned a gorgeous loft apartment and eventually moved to Australia to attend cooking school together, despite the fact that they seemed to be available at all hours of the day and spoke of no employment.

Having been brought up to believe that there are no free lunches, and as a corollary, that you should never order the most expensive thing on the menu, I was flummoxed by these people, and secretly fascinated by them. It drove me crazy that their financial status went unexplained, and that no one in the vicinity saw fit to broach the topic. How, how, how did they do it? Trust funds? Savings? Drug-dealing? A clandestine business? A sugar daddy (I grew up reading Cosmopolitan, I know about these things)?

Now, in San Francisco, I'm facing an even more financially mysterious breed: the culinary career-changer. Unlike my New York friends of leisure, these people are not dot-commers, so far as I know. They talk of previous careers in marketing, recruiting and biochem. Somehow, they have escaped these careers, attended culinary school, and are now volunteering on farms, teaching cooking classes and demonstrating recipes. And, just as in New York, I am too afraid to ask: How are you paying your bills?

The cost of culinary school, as compared to the income you make when you get out, has been well documented in the press lately: One six-month program I am interested in costs close to $20K, yet most cooking jobs I see advertised top out at $14 an hour. What am I missing?

Right now I am fortunate to have a partner who a) makes more than I do and b) is generously letting me explore my options right now. But I still feel like shit about it, and wonder how I could pay for some kind of education without coming out in the red and screwing both of us over. It makes me skeptical that I can withstand one more sunny kitchen conversation without finally buttonholing someone and asking the offensive questions.

Have you ever known someone who mystified you financially?

Hospital.

My father-in-law had a stroke on Tuesday. It apparently turned out to be a "minor stroke," which is simultaneously a relief and an oxymoron. We visited him at the hospital last night.

So far, I have been fortunate enough to experience hospital rooms mostly from the vantage point of a visitor. Every time, I feel empathy to the point of nausea for the person in the bed -- not only for the physical ailment, but for having to face a circus of people at precisely the time socializing is the least desirable thing. It seems almost cruel until you consider the alternative of having no one there at all.

Even worse, the bed occupant is often completely out of it, so he is forced to witness everyone standing around and talking about him as if he isn't in the room. How bizarre, to have people talking about what you've been up to in the last 12 hours right in front of you, as if you're not there. Odder still, you're generating a fairly substantial activity report, given the fact that you're just lying there: Did you eat? Have you spoken? Have you slept? Have you walked? Have you taken any medicines, and which ones? Are you taking fluids? Are you in pain? Who has visited you? Who has treated you? What happens next? A lot is going on.

One of the immediate effects for my father-in-law, a very pensive and witty guy, was that he had trouble coming up with certain nouns and pronouns. When they asked him if he knew where he was, he resourcefully answered, "The place where babies are born." The wing where he ended up staying happened to be labeled "Intensive Care Nursery," which was both poor signage and a bad joke. From babies to the sick to the broken, consider how many people wake up in hospitals and find that the word for where they are, along with their own bodies, fall outside their command.

This week in The New Yorker, Oliver Sacks tells the story of a man who was struck by lightning and suddenly became obsessed with hearing and playing piano music. Sacks specializes in these stories of neurological mystery, which are irresistible not only because they involve unexpected twists in a brain's fate (the blind person sees, the catatonic patient awakens), but because the events often precipitate a personal transformation.

The most marvelous Sacks accounts, this recent one included, tend to follow a similar arc where something terrible, such as contracting a tumor or being struck by lightning, becomes the catalyst for some wonderful new capacity. It seems like the stuff of comic books, hardly real. In the hospital it becomes plain that such reconfigurations happen, on a smaller scale, all the damn time. Then we have to cling to the hope that the hero comes out on the other side, if not with a special new power, then at least with newfound strength.

Not an Early Adopter.

A wise Buddhist once said, "We hate suffering, but we love its causes." The most recent manifestation of this truth, for me, is the iPod's shuffle function.

The fact that I'm blogging about this and not the iPhone should illustrate how many years I am behind in caring about new technologies.

I don't like the iPod's song shuffle function very much, but it continues to mystify and intrigue me enough that I can't turn away from it. When it does something goofy such as play a song titled "Strollin'" after a song called "Jammin'," or it relentlessly ushers in depressing ballads even though my selections make it clear that I'm working out and looking for upbeat songs, or it keeps playing interludes from rap CDs while completely skipping over other artists, I wonder if the Shuffle HAL was actually designed with my irritation in mind.

Part of the problem is that my own bad taste comes back to haunt me. I mean, I never really should have loaded in the entirety of Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam's greatest hits, so I can't very well blame Shuffle when I find myself tortured by an extended mix of "If I Take You Home." And how can I expect Shuffle to know that a piano rendition of "Karma Police" is not going to jump-start my gym session?

I had hoped that Shuffle would help me discover the albums in my collection ("Hey! I had never really listened to this song by Ryan Adams until my iPod dug it up for me!"), but actually it's the opposite: I realize how many of the songs are just painfully skippable at worst, or background music at best.

I used to invest a lot of time in an album: If I liked it enough to buy it, that meant I really listened to every song and knew each one, front to back. Now golden albums such as Who Is Jill Scott? commingle with the Zero 7s and Thievery Corporations of my collection. Depressive meditations contaminate exuberant pop classics, mediocrity intrudes on greatness, Linkin Park gets in my Prince. And it's all a monster of my own making.

On the other hand, the iPod can reveal aspects of your music collection that you never knew existed. For example, it turns out that my song collection could count to 10 were it not for the absence of a song starting with eight:

1-900 L.L. Cool J
2 Many Hoes (Jay -Z)
3 Chains O' Gold (Prince)
4 Leaf Clover (Erykah Badu)
5:55 (Charlotte Gainsbourg)
6 Minutes of Pleasure (L.L. again, with one of the best choruses ever: "Hey yo baby, I know you don't love me, I know why you're here, but I ain't sayin' nothing")
7 (Prince)
99 (Toto)
10 Dollar (M.I.A.)

Anybody got a shuffle-worthy eight?

Accidental Criminals.

So, a person I know did something bad.

"Really bad," the person told me. "I walked up to the ATM machine to get some cash, and the screen said, 'Do you want another transaction?' And I hit 'yes.'"

"No!" I said. "You didn't."

"I did. And then? I hit Fast Cash? And I got $100. And the person's card."

The perpetrator felt very, very bad afterward and was not sure what to do. The owner of the ATM card was nowhere to be seen. A range of options were considered: turning in the card and cash to the bank (too risky), cutting up the card and giving the money to charity (too lame), or considering it a lucky day and moving on (too unscrupulous).

"This doesn't excuse anything... I know it was bad... but I do feel a little less bad because the balance on the account was more than $20,000. I mean, I didn't take food off of anyone's table or anything."

Rationalizations aside, the thief said a feeling of nausea followed the act. I know that feeling -- it's a pit in your gut that tells you you just did something really crappy to somebody, and you have absolutely no excuse for it.

I thought about times I had experienced that feeling myself. The first thing that came to mind was an incident in fourth grade, during an indoor recess in the lunchroom. We had a supervisor named Ms. Dustin, a woman in her thirties with a large posterior, an extremely slow gait and not a shred of the authoritarian quality necessary to make us take her seriously.

I had gone to get a sponge out of a bucket on the stage of the "all-purpose room." (Remember all-purpose rooms?) I had the sponge in my hand, and saw Ms. Dustin's puffy jacket right next to me, on the floor of the stage. I slowly squeezed the sponge, with its dirty all-purpose water, over Ms. Dustin's jacket. I did it because a) I could, b) my friends were watching and thought it was highly entertaining and c) I am a terrible person.

An upset and incredulous Ms. Dustin, who had caught me in the act, brought me to the principal. With wide eyes and the pained look of an innocent accused, I swore up and down that it had been an accident. I got off the hook (apparently Ms. Dustin didn't have much clout with the principal, either), but I knew it was awful, and began the same internal self-justifications that everyone else uses to move on with their lives after doing something crummy. To this day, just thinking about the story conjures the same rush of guilty, excited nausea that comes from doing something bad and getting away with it.

The person who confessed the theft to me noted that there are cameras on ATM machines. "But, they couldn't catch me just from that, right? I mean, I wasn't stupid enough to use my own card right afterward."

I am the wrong person to turn to for any kind of comfort or reassurance in this sort of situation. Though not necessarily super-moral (as evidenced above), I am extremely paranoid. I have never smoked a cigarette or used an illegal drug, half out of a certainty that the minute I did so, a SWAT team -- together with my parents -- would immediately converge upon the scene.

"I... I don't know," I stammered. "I mean, yeah, they probably won't go after you." I was sure that just uttering the prediction had already tilted the odds toward formal charges.

A few days later, I still couldn't get the conversation out of my head. It had the potential to become a minor curse (as in the Haruki Murakami story "The Second Bakery Attack,"), and I felt that by just knowing about it and not doing anything, I was guilty too. I pushed a solution: Google the victim, find the address, and send the money back, with the card cut in half. It worked, I think... here's hoping.