I have been living in my headphones for the past few weeks.

I think it is interesting that when I make new friends they always seem to want to impart on me something significant but small in the first few weeks to solidify my interest in them and their tastes. Gifting me new music is usually a convenient way of doing this.

I've been feeling very 1980s lately, exchanging mixed tapes and cds and borrowing iPods and loaning mine out. I've fallen in love with Damien Rice, and more in love with his backup singer, and I like Asian-Irish Gaelic-fusion, and as I walk with ears music-muted to the coffee shop, or as I drive tapping my steering wheel to the park, these things make me think of the people who have brought me to a whole new musical understanding.

Choosing music to share with someone else is an intimate process. You first bare your own soul in divulging your musical forays, be they traditional and conservative or freakishly ecclectic. And anticipating the choices of others - in an attempt to weave their independent musical taste into your own collection - is a risky task. I think deeply about the significance of the songs given to me to test out, to sound against - I think deeply about the thought that this certain person took in selecting the song, selecting the sequence of songs, the genre and type, the style and musical syntax. Like writing, composing and compilating a mixed tape is deviant and dangerous - it reveals perhaps what you do not want others to see; it reveals both conscious and subconscious desires, desires to send messages, to connect emotionally, to stimulate another's mind.