warning, blog veers dangerously into per-zine land:

Until very recently, I had prided myself on being a relatively jealousy-free human. Jealousy seems to be the most poisonous relational emotion. There is always a triangle, and the anxiety is so often misdirected on the 'other,' when it is clearly primarily residing in the jealous one and in some way related to the one-in-the-middle. I thought I'd slayed my own jealousy beast but friends, it has reared its head recently in this ugly way that's got me feeling all down the line of bad.

Now here I am at 2:20 in the morning listening to The Veronicas "Everything I'm Not," so nearly a total ripoff pre-stage of 'Since U Been Gone,' and feeling that there is nothing more perfect than 20-year-old hot Australian identical twin pop genius girls lamenting that the dude they love just likes someone else better no matter what they do. Yeah, I'm still together enough to have an ego, and clearly so in the lady's song, which isn't disingenuous so much as just past the point of caring. It is a song of good bye, and in repeated listens I've come to think that the girl who's 'everything i'm not' is, as in all perfect pop, the unobtainable ideal. She's not there, the she he isn't getting, the one our faithful protagonist can't pretend to be any longer. And so the triangle of jealous collapses down to what it is - the feeling of envy and anxiety which manifests as feeling subpar in a way that stereopan new wave guitars building to noisewall jangle pop somehow makes feel universal and okay. Heh.

And here I was all day listening to Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, the Verve, even Carol King trying to get just that right feeling, just the right words.