i just can't see either of you

(Scott or ABM) as Jay's Witnesses. Still, it's easy to get sucked in to someone's religious mania when you're trying to make new friends. It's hard to say to people with strong beliefs "I don't believe" when the subject of god comes up, cuz you're afraid it will kill the relationship, but when you don't say anything, they assume you're on board, and therefore ripe for conversion. Better to just be upfront about, well, everything.

I think I might have said it, but I just chose the junkie-religion topic because I'm lazy; I didn't want to have to actually do any book research for a topic, and here I was finding myself in the presence of all these junkies on a regular basis through bfc and needle exchange and the goofy clients at Davies, so I thought, gee, I'll do an actual field research paper, which will really impress my prof, and won't require much effort! Boy was I mistaken. A book research paper would have been way less time consuming, I ended up having to do a little book research anyway, and getting people to answer the questionnaire was maddening! But then my prof said it was a "model of how to do social research on a modest scale," so I guess it was worth it.
I'm actually really good at this stuff. Man, I really shoulda stayed in school.

As for CD players, they all work well and are ridiculously cheap, thanks to Chinese labor. Winston bought one that he used in his car for a coupla years until it got stolen for like $15. I remember bying one from radio shack in 1996 for $99! It's the classic consumer electronics paradigm. Quality goes up as price comes down. I like the ones that are perfectly round, like skeets. But portable CD players are so not worth it compared to mp3 players.