as for your CD question

is it a computer or a stereo CD drive? The only way I know of cleaning a CD drive is to buy one of those CD player cleaning discs. You might also try getting a can of compressed air and zapping the inside of the compartment.

My stereo CD burner kept giving me fatal errors when I tried to finalize recording. I wasted like 8 blank CDs before I gave up.

I'll prolly buy another burner because there are so many cassettes worth of songs that I'd like to get on the iPod. There's a $35 device you can get that will record stuff from your stereo directly on to your hard drive, but apparently it's hard to divide tracks using it. On the other hand, burning songs from cassettes to a stereo burner is pretty easy.

Actually, I don't have time to do any of that stuff. I'll just have hundreds of cassettes that I will never listen to.

I'm at Haight St. McDonalds right now. I don't know why I like it here, except that it's the antidote to home (noisy and bright instead of quiet and dark). It's a beautiful crisp sunny day today and I'm fighting the urge to ride my bike. My paper and class presentation is due Tuesday and I really need to finish it.

My new favorite place to hang out is the cafe at the LGBT center (named "The 3 Dollar Bill" --get it? as in "gay as a 3 dollar bill.") The ambience is really good there and they have free wifi and cheap delicious smoothies and vegan cookies. I was there for like 4 hours yesterday. The last hour I stayed for "Translate," the monthly open mic for trans youth (which they define as under 25 years old). By friend Crystal from the Anthro class I took this past summer showed up to perform with her friend Butch, who is a trans dude (Crystal's teetering on the edge of transiness, she cut off her cool braids and now looks even more andro than before). They do this acoustic guital duo thing they call "Transmission." The tranny youth there seemed so happy and well adjusted, it made me want to cry. It's a big trans week in SF for some reason, it was Transgender Awareness Day at City College on Wednesday, Thursday there was a Transgender music fest at SF State, and today there's "Genderblast" going on somewhere down in the Mission.

Still waiting to hear from med schools. This is driving me nuts. My mood swings are really out of control.