Don’t know where to start this one. It’s been a swirl since my last post.

First, check out emusic.com if you haven’t already. I signed up for their trial and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the simplicity of their service. It’s what I’ve been hoping for: an easy, reasonably priced way to download mp3s. Their selection could stand to expand, but they did have three Rainer Maria albums, which scored major points in my book. (Their musical mixes are better than my metaphors, too…)

At work today, I pulled off a small success with Lucene, an open source search engine. It’s indexing database-stored content within the context of our application server. Pretty cool, a simple but flexible API and really fun. The afternoon blew by as I was enthralled in the work.

I had lunch with Melissa and Anthony and Liz at Spice. Melissa and I have made it a regular weekly occasion, which is wonderful. It’s a weekly reminder to me that she’s leaving New York, though. I’m going to miss her.

After work, I had a nice cross-town walk (NYC cooled off today) and drinks with some friends. A close friend of a close friend was recently diagnosed with a disease. It’s an unusual one. We don’t know what causes it or how to cure it. He’s young. My age.

Somewhere else in the world, another 25-year-old took his own life recently. Gene Kan had a lot going for him. I don’t understand young suicides. Seems to me that no matter how bad things get, the worst-case scenario is that that you start over with nothing in a locale of your choice. Compassion is the order of the day, though, because if I don’t understand it, I don’t understand what it was like inside his heart and mind.

A few time zones away, another friend has the love of her life break up with her out of the blue, without warning.

I ate my first marshmallow tonight.

(I don’t mean to suggest in anyway that the marshmallow is on par with the other news I’ve shared. Like I said, it’s a swirl.)

It was at the tail end of the most delicious and decadent and pricey meal I’ve had in quite a while. It was Mary’s idea, and a good one. We went to Blue Water Grill and sat outside looking out to Union Square. We drank white wine and ate sushi and Bluepoint oysters and lobster and yellowfin tuna and, later, chocolate fondue. It was almost a four-hour affair. I savored each amazing mouthful. At the end I felt high.

This blog comments thing is really interesting. It’s changing the way I think about the site. Thanks to those of you participating thus far. It’s fun to close the feedback loop online (even if I do see most of you on a regular basis).

So there. A life is an odd experience, huh?