The metaphor is getting out of hand, and Brighton doesn't like where it's going. I can't say as I blame her. If I had repeated and passionate Relations with a girl who then told me that she was a lesbian, I'd be a little underwhelmed, to say the absolute least.

I wish I could take credit for the above mazelike metaphor and its Brighton-baffling dead-ends, offshoots, and sundry other complexities, but it all belongs to Sarah. She's like a shark. That's really all I can say on the matter. When it comes to figurative constructs, she tends to focus on the confusing masquerading as the simplistic, whereas I favor clawing away at the scabrous surface of a usually loathsome conceptual rendering until it begins to bleed meaning, then continuing on until it dies from massive haemorrhaging and unspeakable literary pain. Thusly rendered are the differences in our styles. I suspect that Sarah's metaphors are easier for most people to take.

You may remember that extras page that I promised many, many moons ago would be up by the following weekend. Obviously, that didn't pan out as I thought it would. But what with my day off from work and everything, I was able to get the bare bones of the extras section up and running. As of now it only has one wallpaper to offer to you, but hopefully there will be many more shiny things to be had from its promising empty spaces in future.

I sometimes wonder if music is a strange thing or if my taste in music is the source of strangeness. You see, I am amused by broad, bizarre varieties of music--something that I've only begun to discover in the past year and a half. Take, for instance, my affection for The Veronicas--girl punk/rock to the core and proud of it--and set it alongside my equally fervent love of DragonForce, my introduction to fantasy-based power metal and lightning-fast guitar solos. Then allow those to coexist on an iPod that also plays host to any number of musicals, the soundtrack to Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, both moody, blue-toned CDs released by Evanescence, and the second and last album ever put out by Irish girl pop group B*Witched. That's just a sample of the bizarre amalgam of music that I own and enjoy on a regular basis.

So you can see why I think music a strange thing, sometimes. I am full aware that it's probably mostly my own personal weirdness that dictates my enjoyment of this staggeringly broad spectrum of melodic aural stimuli, but I can't help but think that maybe there is some intrinsic oddity in music itself as well. It is just, when you get right down to it, noise that has had science done to it, organized and categorized and set to specific beats and laid out in regular measures so it can be duplicated at will by others who had nothing to do with its assembly. Even the most chaotic DragonForce song has a kind of fractal logic to it, an order in the midst of the storm of synth and drums and rock tenor vocalizations that it shares on a very basic level with, say, Vanessa Carlton.

Music is what computer scientists would think of as an elegant system, if they stopped long enough to do so. A simple set of rules that gives rise to layered, myriad behavior. That, I think, is both the oddity and the awesomeness of music.